As a tree planter working in Northwest timberlands in the 1970s, I thought I had seen the worst of the region’s logging abuses. My company contracted with corporate, state and federal land managers, and our work gave us ground-level views of some of the region’s most plundered landscapes. But nothing I saw prepared me for the destruction I encountered on the Shelton Ranger District of the Olympic National Forest.

The Shelton district lies astride the steep, southern slope of Washington’s rugged Olympic Mountains just south of Olympic National Park. Washed by more than ten feet of Pacific rain each year and drained by hundreds of miles of streams, the area once harbored some of the most impressive old-growth forests in the Northwest.

By the mid-seventies, when I first caught sight of its sheared slopes, it was already the poster child for ravaged landscapes.

Last summer, Simpson Timber Company and the Olympic National Forest quietly announced the termination of the Shelton Cooperative Sustained Yield Unit Agreement. The announcement marked the premature end of a 100-year agreement that granted Simpson exclusive timber rights to the Shelton Ranger District.

“The agreement served the Forest Service, the American taxpayers and Simpson for many years, but it has outlived its usefulness,” Colin Moseley, the company’s chairman. U.S. Forest Service management has changed radically. No more benefit to either party. End of story.

The agreement, forged under a 1944 act of Congress, was the only one of its kind ever signed.

A half-century later, as the Bush administration promotes its Charter Forest Initiative, a pilot program that promises to give greater control of forests to local communities, I hear the ghost of Shelton stirring in the woods. A paranoid vision? Perhaps. But the Shelton agreement—and its tragic aftermath—is a story that merits another look.

Signed in 1946, the cooperative agreement promised “a continuous and ample supply of forest products” to Simpson’s mills in nearby communities of McCleary and Shelton. It was visionary for its time, the ultimate in public-private partnerships. It combined Simpson’s significant holdings adjoining the national forest with more than 111,000 acres of uncut old growth in federal ownership. Simpson would cut at a sustainable rate calculated by combining both ownerships. Eighty percent of the volume would be earmarked for company mills. The agreement would ensure timber and jobs to the region for the next century.

Like the Charter Forest Initiative, the Shelton agreement incorporated local control. It provided for community economic stability, and it cut through cumbersome regulations. But in just over half its promised lifespan, it was scrapped like yesterday’s news.

By the mid-1940s, when Simpson signed the agreement, the company had cut more than 80 percent of its forest holdings and was in need of timber for its mills. The agreement combined Simpson’s largely cutover lands with uncut federal forest to form a cooperative sustained-yield unit. Simpson was given exclusive purchase of federal timber at government-assessed cost.

The company hit the ground running. In the first decade of the agreement, 180 miles of logging roads were constructed. By the mid-1970s, the company was cutting more than 100 million board feet a year on the district. For the ten-year period ending in 1976, the cut was more than a billion board feet. That’s enough to fill end-to-end logging trucks on Interstate 5 from the Canadian border to Mexico.

The Forest Service was burning between 2,000 and 2,500 clear-cut acres and planting a million trees a year at that time. Forest Service employees agreed that the pace of cutting and density of road construction on the unit (up to eight miles per square mile in places) exceeded that of any national forest in the region.

One short decade later, only 400 million board feet of suitable timber remained on the district. In the words of a Forest Service timber sale planner, “We were running out of wood.” The Northwest’s timber-based economy was in a prolonged downturn. Simpson refused its first sale offer in 1984. By 1986, having cut a total of 3.5 billion board feet from the Shelton unit, the company was done purchasing timber from the Olympic.

That year, Simpson shut down its mountain logging operation, closed its two logging camps and large-log mill and laid off 600 workers.

It is worth noting that this occurred four years before the spotted owl was listed as threatened, six years before Judge William Dwyer’s injunction halting old-growth logging on federal forests and eight years before the Clinton administration released its Northwest Forest Plan. Simpson filed suit under the plan, challenging the agency’s commitment to the 1946 agreement. The termination followed.

Downstream, the cumulative impacts of overcutting steep, unstable slopes were flowing to the small Skokomish Indian Reservation at the mouth of the Skokomish River.

“The Cooperative Sustained Yield Unit Agreement was neither cooperative nor sustainable from the tribe’s point of view,” says Keith Dublanica, the Skokomish Tribe’s natural resources director. He says the tribe’s economic and cultural resources have been seriously compromised and that timber jobs have disappeared.

With the original forest mostly gone and more than 1,000 miles of logging roads riddling the mountainsides, Dublanica says 100-year floods have become common. The tribe experienced four floods one year in the mid-1990s. The Skokomish is inevitably the first river to flood on the Olympic Peninsula and the last to subside.

Fisheries have suffered from sedimentation due to slope failures in the upper watershed. Three fish stocks in the Skokomish River are listed under the Endangered Species Act from this and other causes (an upstream hydroelectric dam for the city of Tacoma restricts water flows and compounds the problem). Fine sediments flushed into nearby Hood Canal take a toll on tribal shellfish resources. Unemployment on the reservation runs close to 30 percent.

“Simpson has taken a great amount of value from the forest resource,” says Dublanica, “but they haven’t ponied up what the tribe feels is their fair share to repair the damage.”

The tribe and a local environmental group brought suit against the Forest Service in 1980, charging that unsustainable cutting levels on the Shelton unit were not only violating federal laws (the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 and the National Forest Management Act of 1976), they were also destroying the tribe’s treaty-guaranteed fish and wildlife resources. The tribe was outgunned legally, and an unsympathetic judge dismissed the suit.

Marty Ereth, the Skokomish Tribe’s habitat biologist, points to the Skokomish tributary Vance Creek as an example of the resource challenges facing the tribe in the wake of the agreement. Three tiers of roads carve portions of the watershed, from valley bottom to ridge top. Slope failures and resulting slides from upper roads have washed out middle and lower road sections and dumped tons of debris into the stream. Ereth says, “Debris flows have swept downstream, taking out riparian forests that were left as buffers,” leaving rocks and gravel perched fifteen feet deep in places, all waiting to move downstream.

“That legacy is now part of the watershed,” he says. “It will continue to daunt salmon recovery efforts for decades. It won’t heal in our lifetimes.”

Ereth adds that these kinds of failures are prevalent throughout the watershed.

David Craig, a ranger on the Hood Canal Ranger District, which now includes what was the Shelton district, says there is “as much [restoration work] as anybody would want to fund” to correct problems and stabilize slopes in the area. “It would be huge.”

The Forest Service began serious recovery work in the Skokomish watershed in 1993. Filled stream drainages were cleared and culverts removed, unstable road berms were pulled back and roads decommissioned. A little more than 100 miles of roads were repaired, but many more were closed without restoration. Some stream stabilization work was done, and in-stream salmon habitat enhancement took place. In recent years, budget restraints have slowed progress considerably.

In its Access and Travel Management Plan released last fall, the Olympic National Forest identified more than 800 miles of roads in need of decommissioning. Many of them are on the former Shelton district.

That comes as no surprise to Dick Carlson, who worked as a silviculturalist on the district in the 1980s. “Look at a road map of the district,” he says. “It looks like a plate of spaghetti.”

Carlson estimates some 1,200 miles of roads were carved into the mountains during the four decades of harvest. Early roads were built using sidecast construction, he says. Cut material was pushed over road shoulders, and lots of old wood, rootwads and logs were buried in road fills. Much of that is decomposing and impacting watersheds.

There are upward of 300 miles of roads in need of repair at costs ranging from $10,000 to $80,000 (and up) per mile. “We’re looking at twenty to thirty years of work,” Carlson says. “It’s doable, but the real issue for us is getting the funds to accomplish it. Unfortunately, there’s a potential for more roads to fail during that time.”

At a conservative estimate of $25,000 per mile, that amounts to $7.5 million. So far, money for such projects has been slow in coming.

Patricia Case, a spokeswoman for Simpson, says Simpson is actively decommissioning problem roads on its lands and has cooperated with the Forest Service on road repairs in the past. “But far less is being done now,” she says. When asked if Simpson had an obligation to help with massive road repairs, Case referred to the terms of the agreement: ongoing road maintenance was the responsibility of the Forest Service.

This was confirmed by Craig, who negotiated the termination agreement. Simpson paid the appraised rate for the timber, he says, and that included a cost for road building and maintenance. The termination agreement excused the company from further obligations.

Case says her company empathizes with the Forest Service and would consider requests for assistance. “I don’t know what they would ask for, but we’d certainly take a look at it.”

Meanwhile, the Forest Service and the Skokomish Tribe pursue various publicly funded sources for dollars to address the most pressing problems. And Simpson, operating under a federally approved habitat management plan, continues to work on road problems on its lands.

Craig points out that the agreement did have some positive outcomes. It maintained community stability and kept Simpson’s mills operating during the time of the agreement. He credits the company with modernizing their operations and adapting to changes in forest management. Simpson’s mills currently employ about 700 people.

But if a similar proposal came before him, he would argue against it.

“I hope by now that Forest Service people realize we don’t have all the answers,” he says. “We’d be naive to set a course for fifty years and not expect people to see things differently by then.”

Craig takes a long view of ecological recovery. He sees a thirty-year phase of repairing and decommissioning roads, stabilizing slopes and restoring salmon habitat. Then a 300-year phase, when young stands will develop the old-growth characteristics needed to sustain the forest ecosystem. “We’ll do as much as we can possibly do now,” he says, “and Mother Nature will have to do the rest.”

The Shelton Ranger District is closed now. When I visit sites where I worked during logging’s heyday, many of the worst roads are gone, closed through erosion or slides. Most of the steep, rocky units we planted are growing up with Douglas-fir. The scars are beginning to heal. The long-term costs are less visible. As the people of the Skokomish Tribe know, they are being borne most acutely downstream.

In the meantime, the Shelton district stands as a stark example of how a reasonable idea, community-based forestry, can go terribly wrong.