Crabtree Valley

by Tom Bode

Idrove all morning, watching the fall weather worsen. When I parked, it was snowing. The unexpected flakes were a visual delight, turning white the browns and greens of the dark forest. They also melted onto my jeans, telling me that my visit would have to be brief. I was headed to Crabtree Valley, deep in the foothills of the Cascades, where winding logging roads stitch together patches of clear-cut forest. I parked where the road simply ended at a concrete barrier, the sort of place where seeing another car would be surprising. I was here to look for evidence of an old political fight. Oregonians felled just about every tree they could find in the twentieth century, but forty years ago, a young woman fought to save a grove of ancient trees here at Crabtree. I had come to see what she had fought for, and if she had won.

I knew better than to wear jeans this late in the season— “cotton kills,” they say, because it won’t keep you warm when wet—but I had done so anyway. My nylon rain pants would only delay being cold and wet. My dog Luna was with me, but the snow in the empty forest made me feel alone. Although I had just started hiking, I was already three hours into this trip, and the ridiculousness of driving so far just to see Douglas Fir trees—which grow in my backyard—crossed my mind. But, not all trees are the same.

My fascination was not unusual; reverence is an ordinary human perspective towards tall and serious trees. People probably had been gaping in this grove for a thousand years. But in 1952, Crabtree Valley became the property of a logging company called Willamette Industries. It aimed to make a lot of two-by-fours out of these trees, some of the oldest and biggest Doug Firs in the state, and in the 1970s began logging the area. Willamette Industries measured the value of the valley in dollars and wanted to cash in.

Cameron La Follette tried to stop them. In 1977, she was a student at Reed College, fresh from Phoenix, whose young eyes saw what others’ did not. During a school break, she hitchhiked to the Olympic Peninsula. The profusion of greenery and the unreal dampness of the massive trees changed her. Olympic National Park had been spared from logging by motivated and farsighted individuals, and they inspired La Follette. Back in Oregon, she learned of Crabtree, and the magnificence of the trees moved her to fight for them.

Today, Luna and I were just reaching the shore of Crabtree Lake. With no big trees yet in sight, the view was already idyllic: fresh snow outlined dark firs, big leaf maples glowed yellow, and the still water inverted the world and sky. The biggest trees at Crabtree are named after ancient Egyptian royalty. The tree King Tut, like the boy king himself, is not fully intact, having lost its crown years ago. But Nefertiti still has her top and is one of the tallest trees in the valley, although at 270 feet tall she would tuck easily inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. She was my destination today. The guidebook map showed an informal path leading to Nefertiti. And, we did find a faint trail leading away from the lake, into the forest. Luna ran up it, and I followed.

The trail went nearly straight up the steep valley wall. A constructed trail is easy to follow—it is shaped by shovels, so that even when overgrown, the grade of the ground reveals the path. But this informal trail was the work of boots: we followed the signs of disturbed groundcover or trampled rotten logs. I categorized the growth as we walked: mountain hemlock saplings growing on a fallen cedar tree, dark-leaved huckleberry, sword ferns.

When La Follette first visited this place, she felt the sharp threat of logging. An earlier effort to protect Crabtree had

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I would have to rely instead on dead reckoning—navigating by gut instinct. The lake was downhill, but following the fall failed, and chainsaws roared at the edges of the valley, turning line might take me past the small lake to some lower canyon or trees into lumber and putting money in the pockets of loggers. cliff, like a cue ball overshooting its target on a billiards table. Newspaper clippings tell how young La Follette took up the cause I stood in the snow, indecisive and cold, pushing down panic, and with others formed the Crabtree Valley Protection Association looking through the trees for anything. Visibility was only a few to lobby the Oregon Legislature. She proposed trading state-owned hundred yards in any direction, but I saw a distant irregularity. forest land to Willamette Industries in exchange for Crabtree An unexpected change in the pattern of the forest—the lake?—a Valley, which would become a state park. La Follette became the quarter mile away, downhill. It was our best option. scrappy association’s chief lobbyist and spokesperson. Opposing The undergrowth was so thick I could not see the clearing her was Linn County, which would lose tax revenue if until we emerged from the forest. We were not at the lake but at productive timberland became a preserve. County officials told legislators that local schools needed money and local loggers needed jobs. La Follette left Reed for the cause, a twenty-one-year-old woman spending her days testifying in smokey rooms of old men. She faced an uphill path: logging had powered the Beaver State’s economy for a century. But by 1979, the political tide was turning towards environmentalism. The Legislature passed a compromise bill punting the final decision on Crabtree to 1981. La Follette was nearing the summit of success.

Luna and I also continued up our steep hill, breathing the clean damp air, until the trail apparently ended. We stood on a hillside amidst undergrowth of tall rhododendrons, the unseen lake far below us. It was a beautiful forest, dense with wet life, growing and rotting, but there were no giants here. The snow silenced everything. I was unsure of where to go. Luna sat down and looked at me. “When you figure it out, let me know.”

Fair enough. I sat down under a tree to make a plan. My guidebook said, in text I had not read earlier, that Tom Bode and Luna in Crabtree Valley. Photo by Tom Bode.Nefertiti was a few hundred yards off the lakeside trail, through open forest of gigantic trees—“easy” travel, it said. I looked at the GPS map on my phone. I used this GPS feature often, but a campsite on top of a cliff. Swirling snow and fog obscured the now there was something wrong with it. Then I saw: the GPS icon bottom. But this campsite was on my guidebook map. We were was red. The dense forest canopy must have blocked the signal. found. I was off the map and had no idea where I was. A small swell of La Follette was not so fortunate. When the Legislature returned panic rose. in 1981 to decide the fate of Crabtree, Willamette Industries

I turned to backtrack down the faint path. Luna perked up. She pledged to log the valley if the deal did not go through. “We’re in had been following me through dense brush for hours and was the business of making lumber and plywood,” a spokeswoman told done with our slow pace. As soon as we started back, she sprinted a journalist. Dell Isham, chairman of the crucial committee, held down the hill. I ran after her. When we stopped again, the trail was meetings for months. La Follette was there too, nearly every day, gone. Anyway, now I doubted that I’d been following anything more researching even the smallest issue, desperate for the passage of than my own naive optimism. We were lost among trees I didn’t the final Crabtree bill. But Isham couldn’t see past the money. In know. My skin prickled under my damp clothes and my mind a state built by timber, who was he to stop the saws? He delayed raced. intentionally, and on the last day of the legislative session, the bill

Lost has shades. In terms of distance, I was only a half hour was still in his committee, where it died. Loggers celebrated. La from my last known location, which was manageable. In terms of Follette felt the defeat like a wound. trouble, the wet snow had my mind flashing red. The worst-case Luna and I tracked around the lake again, not giving up on scenario in summer might be an uncomfortable night in the forest. finding Nefertiti. I saw the same faint trail leading into the forest But summer was months gone. Was the snow a light prelude to that we’d followed earlier. Luna ran up it again. Not this time, winter or the opening salvo of a late fall storm? dog. A few moments past it we stumbled into an open forest of

Surviving in the wilderness, like politics, is a mental challenge. huge cedars, hemlocks, and firs, escorting us down an easy path. I Knowing this, I sat down again, my back against a tree. The puzzle laughed at my earlier self. Of course the big tree is going to be in a was which way to walk. The guidebook gave coordinates for lakeside grove of giants, rather than on a dense slope. Huge nurse Nefertiti: N44° 36.208’ W122° 27.059’. The GPS was working now logs supported new growth that was itself hundreds of years old. and could take me straight there. Alone, I could do it. But Luna This was the gateway to the ancient part of the forest. struggled to move through the tangled undergrowth and together After the 1981 bill failed, La Follette left the effort to recover, we could not follow a precise heading. having worked herself to the point of collapse. Crabtree was a

painful early lesson in her lifetime of environmental activism. But the movement she started had not died with the bill. She had pushed the pendulum of history and it was swinging. Although Willamette Industries was free to begin the long-planned cutting, it did not. State officials and even Isham’s office continued to advocate for the trees, and in 1985, Willamette Industries completed a trade for federal forest land elsewhere, exchanging celebrity trees for nameless tracts. The Crabtree giants were subsumed into the vast federal lands, blandly designated as an area of “extreme environmental concern.” With the trees saved, anonymity again descended like fog.

I appreciated that obscurity, now that Luna and I had reached the heart of Crabtree. We strolled through the open old-growth forest, the trees grandly spaced and undergrowth scarce. I no longer cared to find Nefertiti exactly. Luna may live 10 years. I may live 100 years. These trees may have seen 1000 years. I thought of all the magical places in this world consumed by progress and gave thanks that La Follette had saved this oasis. Later, I told her that. But to my surprise, La Follette does not celebrate Crabtree as a victory. To her, it is a mere remnant, a reminder that the surrounding hills were once also full of majesty that is now gone forever. To me, the loss of those forested hills seems inevitable, just another part of the world that I was born into. What to me is the background shape of history, is to her a scar of defeat.

After her loss in the Legislature, she never returned to Crabtree, unable to see past what could have been. Only others can appreciate Crabtree for what it is. And so, that is what we did, Luna and I. With a log as my pew, I rested in the grove. Luna was nervous and wouldn’t eat from her bowl. Under the tall trees, I fed her like a puppy from my hand.