On a damp late August morning, a friend and I planned a hike back in a place we’d scouted around the month before. Topo maps marked a mine we had noticed after already exploring along the lower trails, and bush-waking there had become impossible from where we had found ourselves in the terrain last trip. This time, our aim was another trail further up the draw that led strait to it, and the upper climbing rout to Mt Phelps. Below is our planned hike in black, and the mountain trail in yellow.
This part of Federal Forest land has been logged twice, mined, and cut with endless miles of road now eroding away with harder rains and more to come. Right now, federal pressures to cut more forests makes areas like this a prime target for future harvests, so I’ve been coming up here to document the plants and animal activity to better know where things are now, before the culling. Luckily, so far, Washington State has been more active in protecting our public lands, letting further afield areas remain in recovery. This forest is trying to grow. There are still some old growth nurse logs around, and a few of the trees are looking so big and healthy, perfect for the timber industry to cut and send abroad to Asia. Our tax dollars will subsidize it too. Making a windfall for foreign investment at the expense of our ecology. The stock market will go up, and money will funnel into very few hands, while the landscape we all rely on for our survival continues to be dismantled.
If we take a moment to trace back our Colonial roots to Europe, we can see what was done there first by wealth and power, a few families stripping the land across countries that are the size of American States, and had natural resources in abundance, many hundreds of years ago. At that time, there were already countless man made polluted sites all over the world, but on such a small scale, without industry, just slave labor, to peck away at the crust for every last drop of profitable return. But no one was giving anything back, and so, the land turned on us. Famine stalked towns and villages. Cities still grew up on the backs of extorted labor in many forms. Before the advent of African chattel slavery, people would war with other people over resources, conquer them, and take the defeated as property. This system of hierarchical ownership built the societal structure we’re still leaning into today. But it’s been cracking for a long time.
With my limited 15 years of direct land contact and reciprocal engagement of tending, harvesting, and returning to the soil through every season with intention to grow food and restore a forest, I have learned a lot about how not returning something gets you less the next year, and the next after that. In places I’ve been neglecting, invasives come in, livestock eats the plantings and I loose a lot of time and effort. Last night, a newly hatched chick was taken from it’s brooder setup in the garage, a place I thought was safe and secure. A hard lesson, reminders all the time that this work never ends, things evolve and change, and one moment I’m not looking, something collapses into something else. Where a void is made, new opportunities arise. It’s more exciting and rewarding than not, but the losses can be hard.
There are always losses for every gain, and we the people are having a hard time learning this lesson in life- balance. Our very economic system fights the reality of balance all the time- from our nation debt, to the ever expected to ride stock market. Such madness in numbers running across screens, it means nothing when you look at the living world. I was looking, on this hike today, taking in the standing stumps, wondering at the old growth stump being gone all together. People were desperate to turn nothing into something, so old growth stumps were scavenged by shinglers. The cut landscape was also set on fire to clear the slash, which often also killed off any future seeds of some species. Under the canopy of this young forest, I saw many species of understory not seen in timber plantations where logging continues on industrial scale.
A lot of our plantation forests are dominated by sword fern, but in more intact forest floors, deer fern and club mosses abound. We saw the usual Oregon grape and salal, but also wild ginger and hookers faerie bells. There were a couple of plants I was not familiar with, and had to take pictures to look them up- what do you think? I think at least one is introduced, another challenge in reading heavily alter by human landscapes.
Red Baneberry Actaea rubra, is one I don’t see a lot, but it’s extensively found throughout most of North America. Something I hope is evergreen huckleberry was on the road up near the mine. I’m not sure it’s huckleberry because I’ve never seen it at this elevation. The third find is water parsley. It’s carrot family for sure, and the size, location, and leaf shape signals this great wetland indicator. All three plants named are native, and remind us of the legacy plants which have survived human impact with logging, road building, and mining.
The mountains we’re hiking in for this adventure are called, The Cascades. They received this name because of all the water cascading down out of them everywhere. The whole of Western Washington is all about water, at least it was, but industries built dams for cheap power, ditches to drain the water off good farm land, and have removed the majority of the temperate rainforest, it’s understory, and most of the topsoil. Now, flooding happens as heavy rains pour down with climate change, yet we keep draining, cutting, and celebrating our engineering, which has destroyed salmon runs across the west. You can find a lot of information about this at The Governor’s Salmon Recovery website:
When we take the dams down, these problems that may seem so complex, are gone, and the fish thrive, plus, the landscape is also better for it. If we gave back the wetlands to nature again, fire risk would drop, a never ending supply of seasonal food would return, and the true cost of our electricity would be paid. We have been living a lie in believing electricity is cheap and endless. We’ve convinced ourselves on finite, outsmarted ourselves with convenience, and deafen towards cries to protect what’s left of our ecosystem. Where are we giving back in equal amounts to what we’re taking? How can we even comprehend now? I don’t think most of us try.
When nature stops trying… but it doesn’t. This forest, nationally labeled, could see logging again, which would set back the forest regeneration for another generation or two of human detriment. It’s becoming hard not to stand in wonder at all we’ve done here. The miles of gravel road, washed out in storms, regraded, rocked- rock hauled from nearby mountainsides by large trucks burning more fuel. The argument is fire protection, but the access maintenance costs millions over time, and remains a going expense that only encourages more extraction and compaction over time. Thus furthering the draining and drying out of the landscape to further fire vulnerability. When are forests resilient? When they are allowed to reach maturity and be left alone. Not all landscapes stripped by people can regenerate on their own, but coastal temperate rainforests are amazing at recovery, they have evolved with strata volcanoes and major tectonic uplift for millions of years.
That same dynamic geology is why there is so much mining in them there hills. Copper and gold are the main minerals prospected for here, and it’s lucky there were not larger seams discovered, or the whole watershed would be contaminated by mine tailing by now. Instead, the black hawk mine and others like it are dormant claims, still paid on every year as place markers to make sure access would still be granted if operations became affordable in future. More misuse of our finite minerals will ensure this down the road. For now, a lack of profitability keeps mining at bay. Legacies of this practice still about throughout The Cascade Mountains. A legacy of digging is less known in this state, but was a main stay of what built Seattle. At the height of mining in Western Washington, it was coal lighting all the train boilers and burning in every home for warmth and cooking. Industry spilled out of the mountains and down into easier to reach seams of coal in the hills around the export ports of Tacoma and Seattle.
The modest trail we’re on now, was built originally in the early 1900s as a rail line to access trees. Then it became a road, and now, it’s a wide trail that ATVs and other motorized vehicles can still climb to with the right gear. We noted tire tracks as we climbed, and at the opening where “Black Hawk Mine” is marked, we found typical “back woods” detritus. An abused burn pit full of trash and spent cartridges stood with dry brush piled up over it for future bonfires. There were parts of metal machines and cars piled at one end for target practice- without any proper backstops. In the brush and trees against the mountain, we saw lots of hanging white granite stone and large second growth logs piled in a scree slide. The area is quite overgrown, and we had no high hopes of finding much evidence, but the collapsed hillside looked like it had once been a mine.
The actual shaft would have been well above the rail grade, so ore could be dumped down into train buckets for hauling out. Huge boulders sat in situ, with evidence of blasting, most likely to close the shaft for liability. Now, over 100 years later, the stakes of a mine remain, and future extraction could happen, along with logging. It would be so costly to repair the road and rebuild the mine, not to mention all the hauling in and out that trucks would do to keep things profitable. In this age of mega mining, small claims are low risk, but our maddening economy and current federal administration are known for impulsive whims of destruction if there’s anything to get out of it. I think there are bigger fish to fry, for now.
The protection of these finite resources is up to we the people. I’ve turned my head to some of the public’s behavior back here, because they would fight to protect their access with me, though we certainly have different opinions on what’s appropriate in our federal forests- not target shooting, ATV off-roading, and massive fire pits full of trash. I’ll be bringing a large trash bag with me next time I’m here, to carry out the small plastic casings and other little litter. Maybe I’ll plan to come camp up here for a night or two to explore more and hike to the peaks above. For now, small steps in getting to know the land, it’s forest friends, and appreciating the beauty that still shines through these sacred places. Gratitude to access, wilderness, recovery, patience, and renewal.
EEC Forest Stewardship 