Wild times

Editor’s note

The U.S. Forest Service is 100 years old this year, and to help celebrate its centennial, you’ll find in the Handle Extra throughout 2005 a series of reminiscences by men who joined the agency in its youth and served it and the people of the United States through its early years.

Their memories, captured in loose-leaf booklets compiled by the agency’s Northern Region, recount how backwoods bureaucrats managed the North Idaho lands under their charge from wilderness cabins and traveled to their work sites on foot, horseback, snowshoes and at the wheels of Model T Fords.

You’ll also read stories of ordinary workers who fought fires, stacked bales, cleared trails, planted seedlings and built cabins. They, too, played vital roles in the restoration and management of North Idaho’s public lands.Throughout this series, you’ll encounter names of long-gone forests, ranger districts and stations, equipment and administrative sites. Like those who tell these stories, they exist now only in memory.

Today’s installment is drawn from the reminiscences of Joseph B. Halm, a 1909 graduate of the Washington State College (now WSU) forestry school who worked for the Forest Service until he retired as a cadastral survey engineer in 1945. He wrote this account in Volume 1 of the “Early Days in the Forest Service,” printed in October 1944 by the agency’s Northern Region, Missoula.

No trace of the town of Grand Forks remains. Its site is a meadow at the confluence of Cliff Creek and Loop Creek, near the Route of the Hiawatha bicycle trail in Shoshone County.