Storms aid Oregon tree-thinning job

WARRENTON, Ore. – For state parks manager Mike Stein, the big winter storms that hit Oregon’s north coast last year had a benefit: helping him take care of a job he’d meant to do over several years.

The twin storms cut off the coast in early December. Several towns flooded, and thousands of trees snapped.

Among them were many shore pines at Sunset Beach State Recreation Site, at the southern end of the Fort-to-Sea Trail. It’s a route from Fort Clatsop to the Pacific Ocean that members of the Lewis and Clark expedition may have used.

After the storms, the 6.5-mile trail was impassable.

Stein is the district manager of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. He hopes the trail will be reopened by Memorial Day, marked by completion of a shore-pine thinning project the storm started.

He says the pines are a transplanted forest meant to stabilize the dune, but it had not been properly thinned and was “well past maturity” when the storm hit.

“For a while I was afraid all the trees were going to die at once and we were going to have to call it Woodpecker State Park,” Stein said. “But, now, I think we’ll see more deer and elk, and we do see a lot of water fowl – ducks and geese.”

About 50 acres of the 120-acre stand was heavily damaged.

A cleanup is in its third week. Loggers are cutting trees that are snapped off, split along the trunk, have less than 50 percent canopy or are leaning dangerously toward established trails.

Stein said the cleanup is being done for “all the right reasons,” including keeping out disease, insect infestation and invasive species. He said the thinning and salvage operations also will guard against fire.

“Where there are trees down, you can see that there’s no understory,” said Stein. “So, we’re getting some sun where none was before.”

Stein said he believed the new exposure to sunlight would allow for volunteer growths of hemlock and spruce, as well as other plant species, to establish themselves over the next few years.