Time will heal new forest

Though it will be decades before the new Gilchrist State Forest can support itself, the wait will be worth it. Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Forestry’s management of the land is the best hope Oregonians have of honoring a family that was recognized for its forest practices.

The Gilchrist family, which owned the land that is now the state’s newest forest, learned the hard way what overharvesting can do. It owned sawmills on the East Coast, then the Upper Midwest and finally Mississippi and was forced to move each time because the timber supply ran out. When it got to Oregon in the mid-1930s, the family decided there had to be a better way than the clear-cutting it had practiced before.

The result was a model forest, guided for the last 30 years of Gilchrist ownership by Bill Steers, who sought to re-create the multi-aged forest that would be there if nature were left to her own devices. The result was a forest of differing sized healthy trees with plenty of wildlife.

That all ended when the Gilchrist family sold out to Crown Pacific in the 1990s. Its management practices were driven in part by the need to pay off a huge debt, and it logged far more aggressively than Gilchrist ever had. The result was a forest that was a shadow of its former self, with the vast majority of its trees all of comparable age.

The state acquired the Gilchrist property from Cascade Timberlands, owned largely by Fidelity National Timber Resources. The company also owns the Skyline Forest property north and west of Bend and purchased both pieces in the wake of Crown Pacific’s bankruptcy in 2006. To its credit, Fidelity has worked with both the state and the Deschutes Basin Land Trust, which is interested in establishing the Skyline Forest as Oregon’s first community forest.

State officials say they want to restore the Gilchrist property to its former good health, though that will take as many as 50 years. We hope they do. It will take time, true, but the wait will be worth it.