PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Mar/Apr 2019

2 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 42, No. 2 From the Editor Greg Crites, PLS Editor MESSAGE EDITOR FROM THE ...if you get the chance to visit an old-growth forest, by all means take it, especially with your kids. The experience is truly spiritual and likely to be your one and only chance! A rticles in this issue have caused me to digress a bit from my usual content relating to membership, our professional community and getting involved. Pat Gaylord’s article, “The Lost Surveyor” piqued my interest immediate- ly due to my employment history! Some of you know that I graduated from Oregon State where one of my degrees was in Forest Engineering. A logical out- come for the use of that education was to find work in some forestry related en- terprise, either in the private or public sectors. During college, my summers were spent working for the U.S. Forest Service on the Siskiyou, Mt. Hood and Gifford Pinchot national forests, with brief for- ays into firefighting in Northern California, Eastern Oregon and a great deal of time in the North Cascades. Upon graduation I took a job with Crown Zellerbach Cor- poration on their Tillamook Tree Farm. If you know anything about geography of the Oregon coast, it’s easy to figure out that Tillamook, though on the coast, lies inland from the Pacific Ocean. To see the surf, you need to drive west, starting with the town of Netarts. Driving north from Netarts over a very windy and narrow road, you’ll end up in Oceanside. My first two years living in Tillamook County were spent in Oceanside. That town so remind- edme of thewritings of Ernest Hemingway that getting the chance to live there was, for me, like a dream come true. Oceans- ide retains much of the old charm many of us retirees associate with the way Or- egon coastal communities looked like in the 1950’s. There was one tavern (the An- chor) and one grocery store/post office. I lived in a converted garage just a few steps from the tavern. Though I’m not much of a drinker, having the center of community life lying roughly 100 yards frommy door- stepwas pretty convenient, not tomention a great way to drown the blues that come along with surviving dreary winters on the coast. I have many fond memories of liv- ing there and whenever I get the chance, I like to return to refresh my memories of the place, but I’m digressing. When I went to work for Crown Zellerbach in June of 1974, their logging operations were in full swing, with much of their har- vest consisting of efforts to wipe out the last, privately held stands of old-growth Sitka Spruce in Oregon. Part of my job as a forest engineer included timber cruis- ing (I had done a fair amount of that with the Forest Service during college), which for the uninformed among our readers meant measuring and evaluating stands of timber for the purpose of inventory, both volume and grade. I spent the better part of my first 4 years cruising among old- growth Sitka Spruce. While living through this period of my career, I learned to hate both theweather and the brush associated with coastal forests, but I gained incredible experience regarding what an old-growth Spruce forest looked like, which I have to say was nothing short of “once-in-a-life- time.” I watched Crown Zellerbach harvest operations mow through those beautiful giant trees in only a few years. I can re- member measuring trees over 10-feet in diameter on many occasions, standing in absolute awe at the base of those giants, not realizing how quickly such an experi- ence would be gone. Sadly, I came to see the harvest of old-growth trees as timber mining. Most of the large industrial forest- ry operations in our region have done it, though they characterize tree-farm oper- ations as utilizing a “renewable” resource. Technically, that may be true as trees do