A logging protest in the treetops ends in terror, activists say

PORT ANGELES, Wash. – On the 40th night of the protest, a black Jeep drove up a logging road and stopped near the base of a towering grand fir.

For more than a month, environmental activists had been living on a platform some 80 feet up the trunk of that tree in an attempt to stop logging in the emerald foothills of the Olympic Peninsula. They had rigged a dunk-tank platform to cables that connected to a jumble of logs and brush strung across a dirt road on state land.

If anyone tried to break through the blockade, the platform could fall.

Now someone arrived who was ready to try.

The confrontation that night involved death threats, shots fired in the air and the destruction of the blockade, activists said, prompting them to abandon their protest. It showed the hostility that remains between logging supporters and conservationists, even as the industry has waned and the movement to protect older forests has gained ground in Washington state.

The activists had sought to prevent logging on what environmentalists call “legacy forests”: not quite old-growth, but trees that have grown in areas generally logged before 1945. These recovered stands provide habitat, hold water and store carbon critical to slowing the rate of climate change.

Even as authorities criticized the monkey-wrench tactics involved, many supported the ultimate goal. Officials in Port Angeles – a city of 20,000 once home to the country’s largest sawmill – opposed cutting this timber two miles from a river that supplies their drinking water. Washington’s newly elected commissioner of public lands, Dave Upthegrove, had campaigned on protecting the types of stands the protesters were occupying.

The protest ended earlier this month when the passengers in the Jeep – including a man and a woman – attached a winch to the blockade and dismantled parts of it, protesters said, which jostled the platform but didn’t cause it to fall. One activist present said the driver of the Jeep screamed death threats at him, including vowing to gut him like an animal. He and another activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid legal consequences, said they did not know who the people were in the Jeep.

“They were really scared,” one activist involved in the protest said of the tree sitter who was on the platform at the time. “They weren’t prepared for that type of confrontation.”

The protest had started tense on May 7 – with an around-the-clock police presence at the tree, spotlights and threats of arrest – but when the Washington Post visited three weeks later, it had evolved into what one activist present described as its “most-relaxed state.” The police had left, and donations to the protesters had flowed in. The person on the platform – who identifies as transgender and would not provide their name to the Post – was spending their time reading Ursula K. Le Guin and doing calisthenics.

When Upthegrove took office in January, he initiated a six-month pause on timber sales for these types of forests. But he has chosen so far not to cancel the controversial sales outside of Port Angeles that his predecessor approved, despite the rallying cry from protesters: “Upthegrove, don’t cut the grove.”

Upthegrove said in an interview that trying to overturn legally binding contracts would probably be challenged in court and hurt his ability to create policies to protect older forests.

“I don’t think I’d be successful, and there would be a large cost to that, and it would likely impact my ability to be successful moving forward,” he said.

The state has been studying forests to find a way to preserve the most important ones for biodiversity and climate change while not undermining the timber industry. Even with this year’s pause on logging older forests, he said, the state is on track to sell more board feet of timber than last year.

“There are other places for us to harvest trees,” Upthegrove said.

The logging rights for two parcels near Port Angeles, called Parched and Tree Well, were sold by the state last year to the Murphy Company, a family-owned logging company based in Oregon, and total about 400 acres. In court filings as part of lawsuits over the sales brought in December by environmental groups, Murphy Company officials said they have already spent $1.3 million in preparation and that operations at its plywood mill with some 90 employees could be at risk if the company can’t start logging.

Company officials did not respond to requests for comment on the protests.

Revenue from timber sales on these lands helps fund schools, hospitals and libraries through a state trust.

A judge earlier this month denied the request for a preliminary injunction to halt logging activity until the case plays out.

The Murphy Company has said in court filings it planned to do road work this year and begin harvesting next year.

The timber sales here have attracted significant opposition in part because they are in the watershed of the Elwha River, which runs mostly through Olympic National Park. More than a decade ago, the federal government removed two hydropower dams that had blocked the river and choked off what had once been a prolific salmon run.

The more than $300 million federal restoration of the Elwha River “is one of the best things that has happened to this community,” said LaTrisha Suggs, a Port Angeles city council member who has worked for years on that effort with local tribal offices. Salmon have recovered to the point that the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has begun harvests of coho salmon on the river for food and ceremonies.

Although Suggs said she didn’t agree with the tree-sitting tactic, she and other city council members have opposed the timber sales in the Elwha watershed out of concern about the city’s water supply. The city is not a party to the litigation.

The snowpack that feeds the Elwha River has been declining as temperatures increase. The roughly 200 glaciers in the Olympic Mountains are projected to largely disappear by 2070, according to one study.

Port Angeles has issued critical water shortage notices in recent summers.

“Historically, we’ve assumed there will be water in the river because there’s snowpack in the mountains. We can’t make that assumption anymore,” said Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a Port Angeles city council member. “So forest soil is the place to store it.”

In a letter to the state last year, a Port Angeles official wrote that harvesting timber in the Elwha watershed “poses a direct threat to our only water source, putting the health and safety of thousands of residents at risk.”

Upthegrove said the department’s scientists have seen no evidence that the planned logging will hurt the city’s water supply.

Forests help filter water and regulate stream flow, as well as prevent erosion and keep rivers cooler. Local environmentalists, who successfully pushed to cancel an earlier timber sale near the river, said the parcels up for logging now represent about half of the older forests left unprotected in the watershed.

Across the state, environmental groups estimate that about 100,000 acres of legacy forests remain, about 3% of the total state-managed land. They have filed more than 30 lawsuits to try to block timber sales on these types of forests, which absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide, act as reservoirs of biodiversity and are more fire-resistant than younger plantation forests.

The goal is “creating an ecological reserve that would elevate the ability of these forests to continue to live and thrive and evolve,” said Elizabeth Dunne, a lawyer with the Earth Law Center, one of the organizations suing to stop the timber sales in the Elwha watershed. “If you look at what’s actually left compared to what’s been logged since the 1990s, it’s incredibly small. The area has really been decimated in a short amount of time, and these last forests are absolutely critical.”

The movement to identify and protect these kinds of older forests that don’t meet the definition of old-growth has accelerated over the past five years. One of the leaders has been Stephen Kropp, a former Bureau of Land Management official who founded the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, which tries to fight logging projects that threaten them.

“They are truly native forests in the sense that they were often selectively logged in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and allowed to grow back on their own,” he said.

Kropp and other environmentalists involved in litigation say they are not a part of the tree sit, which is organized by a new group called the Olympic Forest Defenders.

“It’s a last-resort tactic,” said the activist supporting the tree sit.

In those first days, police from the Department of Natural Resources set up generators and floodlights below the tree. Upthegrove issued a statement blasting the action as a “stunt” that was “dangerous, reckless and counterproductive.”

Upthegrove said earlier this month that he had participated in peaceful civil disobedience in the past, and was primarily concerned about the dangers posed by cables strung across an active logging road and razor wire that could have harmed his employees or others.

Over time, the police shifted to periodic wellness checks, and then disappeared.

“The smartest thing for safety was just to back off,” Upthegrove said.

There were still tense moments. The activist said that Mitch Zenobi, a local logger with a large social media following, visited the tree multiple times and pulled on the cables attached to the platform.

Zenobi said he had visited the tree sit on a couple of occasions but denied touching the cables.

“Never touched it,” he said. “I videoed my entire interaction walking up there.”

Zenobi said he grew up in Port Angeles, and his family’s ties to logging go back generations. The city was once a major hub for processing old-growth timber from the Olympic Peninsula, with multiple mills and a rail line for transporting logs. The environmental push in the 1980s and 1990s to halt such logging and save the northern spotted owl led to protections for old-growth forests and hastened the industry’s decline. Mills closed in Port Angeles and across the Northwest.

What logging is left, Zenobi said, is on land that the state has determined would not cause undue environmental harm. Although he supports protecting old growth, he disputes how environmentalists define the contested timber sales.

“They’re saying the legacy forest is naturally regenerated, naturally biodiverse,” he said. “They are sitting in a planted forest. It’s been planted.”

He also fears the loss of revenue over these sales will mean higher taxes and fewer jobs for his colleagues.

“I am 100% up for the right to protest, the right for free speech, as long as it’s not ruining livelihoods,” he said. “I don’t believe that hiding behind different names every day, face masks and signs, and promoting violence and vandalism should be acceptable.”

On the evening of June 15, according to a statement from Olympic Forest Defenders, the people in the black Jeep arrived at the protest site. Someone attached the winch to an anchor line running to the platform and began pulling it off the road, the group said.

“This was immensely dangerous to the treesitter, and could have been fatal,” the group said in a statement. “The sitter’s platform fell multiple inches.”

During the confrontation, the statement said, a man fired a gun into the air, pointed it at activists on-site, and threatened to shoot them.

The tree sitter came down and left the area, ending the protest.

A DNR spokesman said he had no information about the incident. Clallam County Sheriff Brian King said he had no record that his deputies responded that night.

The activist said that despite the setback, the movement to protect older forests would continue.

“I don’t see it as being over,” she said.