Didn’t the 1978 [Endangered American Wilderness] Act sort of set that precedent, that areas didn’t have to be glaciated?
Right. Certainly the French Pete was probably the first big piece of older forest that was [consciously] added to the wilderness system. It became part of the Three Sisters Wilderness, which was initially designated in 1964. Even French Pete, when compared to the areas in the Santiam drainage, didn’t have as much biodiversity. Jerry Franklin once said that we saved the wrong area. French Pete has a lot of very big trees, but most of them are at the bottom of canyons. When you go up on the forest edges, there’s still mature forest but it’s not mega old growth that you have at the bottom of the creeks. The Santiam had big trees everywhere you went. What made French Pete work was that it was in proximity to Eugene. It was a place where you could take people from Eugene and so it became an issue. In Oregon’s history it was one of the first areas that people organized around, especially where big trees were to be saved for their own sake.
What explains the Wild Rogue and Kalmiopsis?
I’m not sure, but there were additions to the Kalmiopsis in the 1984 wilderness bill. We wanted to broaden the protection of the Kalmiopsis and didn’t want pieces of it that were serpentine and Jeffrey pine at the expense of the bigger trees. I remember Greg Skillman, Weaver’s aide, had some little place in the Kalmiopsis that he liked and put that piece in and we said, “No, Greg, no.” That is the kind of thing that makes it so difficult with coalitions. You build a coalition around saving wilderness areas, but when the deal gets cut everyone whose area is in is really happy and they want that bill no matter what. Everybody whose area is not included sees the bill as selling them out. Later the story got circulated, as much as we cared deeply about the Kalmiopsis, that we didn’t do anything to save it. Again, I would say that the reality was that we were trying to get the biggest trees we could, but were going to have to take a number of scenic mountain areas. The Sky Lakes, for example, was recommended by the Forest Service as wilderness years before and became part of the 1984 bill. For the most part, we saw the big trees as being the most threatened.
I don’t know of a big proponent for the Wild Rogue Wilderness [in 19781. It could have been that politicians wanted to capitalize on name familiarity. I remember Andy Kerr joking about how many times we’ve saved the Rogue River (laughs). Not to imply that it was ever disingenuous, but the fact that it had national name recognition helped carry the [I978] bill.
