If we could back up just a little bit…You’ve had a number of ideas that sometimes get published. I’m particularly interested in the one about public heritage trees.
It was sort of a fun idea, [but] I don’t know whether it’s gone anywhere. Actually, [the originator was] Ginny Jayne, who is [the] daughter of Dayton Hyde of Yamsi book notoriety … she and Sally Wells started this several years ago. I think you saw the article in Wild Oregon. I was simply picking up on their idea because they were noticing how you were seeing fewer and fewer of those bigger trees. They were talking about a kind of hierarchy of matriarch trees, or heritage trees, of all different diameter sizes. It was simply a way of trying to develop some public identity for this resource and how special it is. I’ve heard the Klamath tribe talk about six and eight foot diameter ponderosa pines. The same thing, I guess, with John Wesley Powell, who was certain when the railroad came in that all those big ponderosas on the east side of Crater Lake would be gone and, for the most part, they are.
His idea, I know, was for the park to be much larger than it is.
Exactly. I put the Desert Creek area in the old growth guide, though I don’t think a lot of people go there. That area, I guess, is a RNA [Research Natural Area]. You can walk from the Chemult Ranger District and by stepping across that line [the national park boundary] walk into a real forest versus a managed one. I don’t know of any other place this far west or on the east slope of the Cascades where you can see a better example of what a real ponderosa pine forest looks like than on the northeast side of Crater Lake National Park. The early explorers talked about how those kind of trees dominated this area. It’s always amazing to me when the Forest Service says here’s this one 24 inch tree growing to this other 24 inch tree and we’ve got to cut one of them down because one is going to take the water and nutrients from the other. What if they cut all the little trees around it and left the two big ones? The big ones we want to leave aren’t really the biggest. You’ve done research on some of the articles we’ve written in Wild Oregon, and when you say we have these things published, we publish our own stuff. The problem is how we get out to the broader public. In expanding beyond the wilderness issue and beyond the ancient forest issue, and here are some trees of this [large] diameter, then let’s protect them.
