B
Saturday, October 24, 2020
The Observer & Baker City Herald
R EST
OF THE
S TORY
■ Ken Emerson of Cove fills in some
of the missing details about the history of
the dismantled Porcupine Guard Station
K
en Emerson’s family
might have been the last
people to spend the night
in the Porcupine Guard Station,
and it all happened because he
was a bit too confi dent in his Ford
Bronco’s off-road prowess.
The thunderstorm was also a
factor.
And the travel trailer hitched to
the four-wheel drive Bronco played
a role.
But mainly, Emerson concedes
after the passage of half a century,
it was his hubris that led to the
predicament.
It was the Fourth of July week-
end, 1970.
Emerson had moved his family
from Sandy, east of Portland, to La
Grande the previous year.
But he was no newcomer to either
Porcupine Guard Station in particu-
lar, or to the Beatty Creek drainage
where it stood.
Emerson, who’s 80 and lives in
Cove, said he started hunting deer
in that area, on the east side of the
La Grande Watershed, in 1955.
“We didn’t hunt elk at that time
— we got into that later,” he said
with a chuckle.
Emerson’s destination on that
holiday weekend in 1970 was Three
Bucket Spring.
That’s just across the meadow
from the guard station, and it had
been the Emersons’ favorite hunting
camp for many years.
The spring’s name, though un-
usual, is also descriptive.
“There were three wooden
buckets about 2 feet in diameter
set into the ground, the fi rst one at
the spring and two others below the
fi rst,” Emerson wrote in an email of
his recollections that he sent to me.
“This was on a slight slope so each
bucket was at a lower elevation just
below the one above, making the
third bucket good, clean, cold water.”
Emerson surmises that the spring
supplied water to the guard station,
which was closed at that time.
In fact he doesn’t recall ever see-
ing any Forest Service employees
at the guard station while camping
nearby during the 1960s.
Emerson planned to spend In-
dependence Day with his family in
their 16-foot travel trailer.
To get to the campsite near Three
Bucket Spring he had to drive
across the meadow through which
Beatty Creek fl ows.
Emerson stopped for a moment to
survey the scene.
“It was pouring rain and there
was lightning,” he said.
Emerson noticed vehicle tracks
leading into the meadow.
But not out of the meadow.
These tracks — ruts, really —
suggested that the summer down-
pour had made the meadow even
softer than usual.
Emerson’s wife at the time, Rox-
Lisa Britton/For EO Media Group
This sign, and a concrete foundation, are the only remnants of the Porcupine Guard Station.
How The Story
Happened
ON THE TRAIL
JAYSON JACOBY
ann, offered her opinion.
“I don’t think you ought to try
that,” is the phrase Emerson re-
members.
But he was convinced his Bronco,
despite being saddled with the
trailer, could make it across the
meadow.
The Bronco alone probably would
have.
But the trailer got high-centered
as the rain sluiced down.
Evening was falling.
The trailer was mired. Staying
overnight in the two-door Bronco
wasn’t an option — the Emerson
family included his 6-month-old
daughter, Lanae, and her older
siblings, Michelle and Doug.
But a savior was at hand.
Emerson had recently started
what would turn into a 30-year
career with the Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife. Because his
territory included the La Grande
Watershed, he had a Forest Service
master key that would open, among
other locks, the one at the Porcupine
Guard Station.
He led his family back across the
soggy meadow to the snug wooden
cabin.
Emerson kindled a fi re in the
stove and soon the guard station
was warm and cozy.
Also dry.
The next morning he used the
Bronco’s winch for the fi rst time,
yanking the trailer free.
Less than a year later Emerson
was back at the guard station, again
driving the Bronco.
But his purpose this time was
quite different.
Emerson was there not to stay in
the cabin, but to tear it apart.
Carefully.
Emerson actually missed the For-
est Service’s initial attempt to sell
the guard station at auction.
Fortunately for him, nobody bid.
This is perhaps not surprising
since the deal required the buyer
to remove the structure. And it,
unlike, say, a travel trailer, couldn’t
be hitched to a Bronco and driven
away intact.
When a friend told Emerson that
the guard station was for sale, he
called the Forest Service ranger and
offered a single dollar.
The ranger guffawed.
He couldn’t accept a $1 bid. Fed-
eral regulations or something.
Emerson reconsidered.
He proposed a dollar and a
quarter.
Deal.
And with that Emerson owned
the Porcupine Guard Station.
Except now he had to dismantle a
240-square-foot structure.
The story on this page, fea-
turing Ken Emerson’s recollec-
tions, came about after Emer-
son read the story published in
this space on Aug. 8. That story
dealt with my curiosity regard-
ing the erstwhile Porcupine
Guard Station in the La Grande
Watershed, and in particular
what had become of it.
The only remnant of the
structure is a concrete founda-
tion. A Forest Service sign at
the site states that the guard
station was removed in June
1971. The Aug. 8 article drew
Emerson’s attention for a very
good reason: he’s the one who
removed it.
I was able to complete the
tale because Emerson, in ad-
dition to sending me an email
recounting his experience with
the guard station, was gracious
enough to tell me that story —
and quite a few others — in a
recent phone interview.
I greatly enjoyed the conver-
sation.
I hadn’t talked with Emerson
for many years — so far as I
can recall not since he retired
in 1999 as manager of the Elk-
horn Wildlife Area, a state-run
winter elk-feeding operation in
Baker and Union counties that
I’ve been writing about since I
started at the Baker City Herald
in November 1992.
— Jayson Jacoby
In his email, Emerson described
the guard station, still intact, and
the task that confronted him during
that summer of 1971.
“The front room large enough for
a desk and a bed. The outer room
was the kitchen and wash up room.
There was a work shop adjacent
to the guard station it was almost
as large as the guard station with
no foundation, and of course there
was a well built outhouse. I had just
purchased 4 acres of land north of
La Grande and set up a double wide
trailer and needed to build a garage
and barn so now I had the lumber
but it was almost 40 miles away in
the mountains. I had a Ford Bronco
and a fl atbed trailer to haul the
lumber.”
Emerson also had a regular job
with ODFW, so he could work on the
guard station only on weekends.
Although the sign at the site
today claims that the guard station
was removed in June 1971, Emer-
son said that’s not quite historically
accurate.
“It took me all summer,” he said.
Emerson continues the story in
his email.
“I would dismantle in the morn-
Lisa Britton/For EO Media Group
The meadow along Beatty Creek, in the La Grande Watershed. This
is where Ken Emerson’s travel trailer got stuck on a stormy evening
in July 1970.
ings and load the trailer and head
home. After several weeks I realized
I wasn’t hauling as much lumber as
I was dismantling so I borrowed a
truck with a steel box on it from a
friend. I fi nally fi nished the job the
fi rst of October and piled all of the
refuse in the foundation confi nes
and the Forest Service burned it
that winter.”
Emerson took the outhouse, too.
He moved that to another of his
favorite hunting camps, on Beaver
Creek below the La Grande Water-
shed.
It stood there for several years, he
said, until someone burned it down.
Pulling the guard station apart
was only the fi rst part of the job,
Emerson said.
After devoting the summer to
that task, he said he spent much of
the following winter pulling nails
from the boards. He ended up fi lling
two 5-gallon buckets.
Among the remaining mysteries
is when the guard station was built.
The Forest Service couldn’t an-
swer the question when I asked.
Emerson said the interior walls
were insulated with sheets of
newspaper, all bearing dates from
1919. Whether those papers were
contemporary with the construction,
Emerson can’t say.
He said the lumber, a mixture of
fi r and pine, was of high quality and
quite sound.
From his email: “The rafters were
rough 2x6 and siding and inside
planed 1x4s and 1x6. The exterior
was 1X4 drop. The shop was of the
same lumber. All of the lumber
would be classifi ed as grade 1.”
Emerson refashioned that good
wood into a 2-car garage and a
small barn on his property north of
La Grande.
He sold that property in 1981
when, as the fi rst resident manager
of the Elkhorn Wildlife Area, the
ODFW’s winter elk-feeding opera-
tion near North Powder, he moved
into the home at the area’s head-
quarters.
Emerson said he drove by his old
property recently and the garage
and barn — the legacy of the Por-
cupine Guard Station — were still
standing, their boards still sound
more than a century after they were
sawed.
Changes over the decades
Emerson’s descriptions of the La
Grande Watershed and its environs
during the 1960s and early 1970s
portray a place quite different from
what you see there today.
The reason, mainly, is fi re.
One fi re in particular.
The lightning-sparked Anthony
fi re burned about 20,000 acres
during the summer of 1960. One
of the larger blazes in Northeast
Oregon during the 20th century, it
covered much of the land north of
the Anthony Lakes Highway from
around Gorham Butte west to the
Ladd Canyon Road.
Today much of the burned area
is covered by a dense forest of
lodgepole pine trees 20 or more feet
tall — a dog’s hair thicket, in the
piquant term favored by foresters.
Some of these stands are all but
impenetrable, and if you do manage
to make it into the forest you can’t
see far.
But Emerson said that in the
decade or so after the fi re, the
fl edgling lodgepoles were less than
knee-high.
“Out in the burn you could see
miles in any direction,” he said.
The Anthony fi re stopped not far
from the Porcupine Guard Station,
Emerson said.
He also remembers the forests
that existed in that area before a
pine beetle infestation.
“In those days, all of that coun-
try was like being out in a park,”
Emerson said.