Service is a common thread
for local quilt group page 12
BLM manager to tell story
of public lands page 25
Local girl wins
contest page 9
The Nugget
Vol. XLI No. 9
News and Opinion
from Sisters, Oregon
www.NuggetNews.com
“Outdoor Science” is the
theme for this year’s Sisters
Science Fair to be held at
Sisters High School March
17 from noon until 4 p.m.
Community involvement is
the key, organizers say.
A Chinese proverb says,
“Tell me and I forget. Show
me and I remember. Involve
me and I understand.” The
goal of the Sisters Science
Fair is to involve everyone in
the area from grandparents,
parents, children, and teachers
to business owners.
Learning about and taking
care of our outdoor native spe-
cies is a priority for many of us
in this area. Jim Anderson will
Eli Pyke captured a moment of frigid beauty
atop Black Butte as winter made a belated but emphatic
appearance across Sisters Country this month. Storms have dropped
several inches of snow and low temperatures dipped into the single digits.
PHOTO BY ELI PYKE
Tree project underway
near Crossroads
Residents of the
Crossroads subdivision
west of Sisters should see
evidence of forest thinning
operations nearby in March.
Over the next couple
months, the Deschutes
National Forest’s Sisters
Ranger District will be doing
thinning operations near the
Crossroads subdivision to
create a more fire-resilient
ecosystem adjacent to the
neighborhood.
Fires like the Milli Fire
last summer, as well as
the Black Crater Fire in
2006, were close calls for
Crossroads homeowners.
Forest Service officials say
thinning of the area will cre-
ate a more fire-resilient and
healthier forest.
Decision
postponed
on art for
roundabout
magnificence...
See SCIENCE FAIR on page 13
The Forest Service
reports that, due to a vari-
ety of factors, the number
of trees per acre across the
Deschutes National Forest
is well above historic lev-
els. This heavy fuel load has
caused fires over the last two
decades to generally burn
at a higher intensity and at
a larger scale, encompass-
ing tens of thousands of
acres at a time, unlike the
smaller, less-intense fires
that occurred historically
in Central Oregon’s fire-
adapted ecosystems.
The thinning work is a
part of the broader Sisters
Area Fuel Reduction (SAFR)
project and will leave the
See THINNING on page 30
PRE-SORTED STANDARD
ECRWSS
U.S. POSTAGE PAID
Sisters, OR
Permit No. 15
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
WINTER
Science
fair to
focus on
outdoors
Inside...
P OSTAL CUSTOMER
With well over 600 com-
ments weighing in on the
three finalists to create art for
the Barclay Dr./Highway 20
roundabout, the Sisters City
Council has pushed back its
decision timeline to its March
14 meeting.
Public Works Coordinator
Nicole Abbenhuis told The
Nugget that the Art Selection
Committee is sorting through
about 650 public comments
dropped off at the City Hall
lobby, where models of the
proposed art are on display.
“They were just not ready
to take it to council yet,” she
said. “We got so much public
input — which is great.”
See ROUNDABOUT on page 22
Fire destroys family home near Sisters
A fire destroyed a home
near Sisters and displaced
a family of four in winter
conditions on Sunday night,
February 25.
The Deschutes County
Sheriff’s Office reports that
deputies and firefighters from
the Cloverdale Rural Fire
Protection District were dis-
patched at about 11 p.m. to a
report of a structure fire in the
69000 block of Hinkle Butte
Dr. in the Sisters subdivision
of Panoramic View Estates.
The homeowners report-
edly heard noises in the
bedroom area of the home
before finding smoke and
flames inside their children’s
bedrooms. The homeown-
ers pulled their children to
safety before attempting to
extinguish the fire with a
household fire extinguisher.
The homeowners’ attempts
PHOTO COURTESY DESCHUTES COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE
Cloverdale firefighters battled a house fire in Panoramic View Estates on
Sunday night.
to extinguish the fire did not
work and the family fled the
home wearing only pajamas.
One of the homeowners
was treated and released at the
scene for non-life-threatening
See FIRE on page 30
Letters/Weather ................ 2 Bunkhouse Chronicle ......... 7 Movies & Entertainment ....11 Crossword ....................... 25 Real Estate .................28-32
Meetings ........................... 3 Announcements ............... 10 Obituaries ....................... 18 Classifieds ..................26-28 Sisters Naturalist ............. 29