Crews harvest timber from Mount St. Helens blast zone
LONGVIEW, Wash. – Weyerhaeuser Co. has begun harvesting trees that were planted 25 years ago in the ashes of the Mount St. Helens blast zone.
In January, contract loggers began thinning stands of Douglas fir from land that once looked like it might never produce another tree.
In the Green River Valley, near the outer fringe of the blast zone, there are now no obvious signs of the volcano’s May 18, 1980, catastrophic eruption.
The forest floor is shaded under a canopy of green. Ash that once blanketed the ground has long since mixed into the soil.
“It’s a time of immense pride for all of us at Weyerhaeuser,” spokeswoman Jackie Lang said.
“By all definitions (the blast zone) was a wasteland 25 years ago. It’s a complex and healthy forest today because of our active forest management.”
Logging trucks are scheduled to transport timber to lumber and pulp mills three times this year, thinning out the new forest to give the remaining trees more room to grow and thrive, so they can be harvested in another 15 years or so.
“This is a pretty exciting time to be a forester,” said Dick Ford, who in 1980 was in charge of Weyerhaeuser’s large Camp Baker District, which contained all 68,000 acres of company timberland within the blast zone. Ford was charged with leading the return of Weyerhaeuser’s timberlands.
His work started just 30 days after the eruption, when Ford and other Weyerhaeuser employees dug through a thick layer of ash to plant the first trees inside the blast zone.
Foresters quickly learned how to replant more than 45,000 acres that Weyerhaeuser retained within the blast zone. Contractors eventually replanted 18.4 million trees over seven years, beginning in early 1981.
The rest of the company’s blast zone timber land was traded with the U.S. Forest Service to be preserved as part of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. The Coldwater and Johnston Ridge visitors centers are now located on land formerly owned by Weyerhaeuser.
During the next several years, Weyerhaeuser plans to thin Douglas fir forests on about half of the replanted blast zone, said Bob Keller, harvest manager for the company’s St. Helens Tree Farm.
The rest of the replanted land won’t be commercially thinned due to steep terrain or the type of tree species.
Inside the national monument, where logging is prohibited, the landscape remains starker as nature is allowed to take its slower road toward recovery.
Today Ford, 57, is director of the nearby Forest Learning Center along Spirit Lake Memorial Highway, a visitor center that Weyerhaeuser and the state Department of Transportation opened 10 years ago to help tell the story of how forests are recovering from the devastation.