Outdoors
Rec
B
Saturday, March 26, 2022
The Observer & Baker City Herald
The story of the
STUMPS
JAYSON
JACOBY
ON THE TRAIL
he story of the stumps is
mainly a tale of mystery.
It can hardly be otherwise.
The passage of time — at least a
century, and perhaps another couple
decades on top of that prodigious
period — accounts for only part of
the murky nature of the matter.
But my curiosity about these
woody artifacts must also remain
unsatisfi ed because no one, I sus-
pect, would have thought it worth-
while, all those decades ago, to
record the events so that we can
relive them, after a fashion, today.
This is not surprising.
The stumps are not the products
of dramatic, historic happenings of
the sort that generations of histo-
rians plumb for the most minute of
details.
They are, rather, what’s left
from the prosaic, workaday task of
logging.
The men who wielded the saws
that felled the trees are all of them
long in their graves.
And although their general story
has been told, it is something else
altogether, something much more
specifi c, that intrigues me when I
come across one of these rotting
mementoes.
Stumps are not rare, of course,
across the forested slopes of the
Blue Mountains in Northeastern
Oregon.
Lumbering started almost imme-
diately after miners discovered gold
in October 1861 in a gulch near
what would become Baker City sev-
eral years later. It was the begin-
ning of the region’s fi rst gold rush.
Within a few decades, the initial
round of cutting, largely to supply
logs for cabins, support beams for
lode mines and fuel for stoves, was
expanded to include commercial
logging to feed sawmills.
T
Jayson Jacoby/EO Media Group
No trace of bark remains on this heavily
weathered stump, which is conspicuous
among the young, healthy ponderosa pines
north of the Powder River near Phillips
Reservoir, southwest of Baker City.
Jayson Jacoby/EO Media Group
One of the centers for this fi rst
generation of logging was the
Sumpter Valley, about 20 miles
southwest of Baker City.
Starting in 1890 under the
leadership of David Eccles, the
Sumpter Valley Railway Com-
pany laid a railroad up the Powder
River from Baker City to access
the great stands of old-growth
ponderosa pine and tamarack that
mantled the slopes rising on both
sides of the river.
This was the famous “Stump
Dodger,” and by 1910 the railroad,
which hauled passengers, gold-
bearing ore and much else as well
as the massive logs that prompted
its construction, had reached its ter-
minus in Prairie City.
Almost none of the trees
standing when the wood-burning
locomotives were clattering
nearby on their winding way
through the mountains are still
upright.
Although I like to imagine —
and I don’t think it’s implausible
— that some of them still stand, in
a manner of speaking, as the bones
of fi ne old homes in Baker City
and elsewhere.
But for me the far more compel-
ling evidence of this era, so distant
and so diffi cult to grasp in a tan-
gible way, are the stumps.
Though not common, they
are conspicuous among the hale
young ponderosas that dominate
today’s forest.
You needn’t be a dendrologist
— I struggle to count the rings on
the juvenile fi rs that serve as our
Christmas trees — to distinguish
between these ancient remnants and
the stumps left by later generations
of loggers.
The old stumps — I think of
them as the original stumps — bear
no trace of bark, little variation in
color besides the bleached gray of
wood subjected to many decades of
weather in a harsh climate.
See, Stumps/Page B2
Decades of weathering have bit deeply
into this stump in the forests near Phillips
Reservoir, southwest of Baker City.
Savoring the beauty of a hidden beach
LUKE
OVGARD
CAUGHT OVGARD
P
RINCEVILLE, Hawaii
— It is increasingly
diffi cult to be awe-
struck these days. Once upon
a time, seeing the beauty of
a watercolor sunset, a cas-
cading waterfall, the ocean’s
surge on a seaside cliff , a
spring-fed creek, a snow-
dusted evergreen forest, a
blackwater river, immense
rock formations rising from
the desert or morning dew on
a tender fl ower would evoke
a sense of awe at our fi rst
experience with each partic-
ular fragment of God.
No longer is that the case.
Thanks to Instagram and
its spiritual predecessors, wit-
nessing unbelievable beauty
is no longer a special occur-
rence; it’s everywhere. From
world-class beaches to the
world-class bodies peopling
them, those alive today get a
chance to glimpse the best the
world has to off er on a daily
basis. So much beauty all of
the time was at fi rst magical.
I remember watching a par-
ticular screensaver shift on
the television in a conference
room from one fantastical
location to the next, fondly
remembering the ones I’d
been to like Lake Bled, Slo-
venia and Hallstatt, Austria,
and dreamily imaging the
others like Fiji and the statue
of Cristo Redentor in Brazil.
These curated images of the
most beautiful places on earth
captivated me at fi rst, but
with time, eventually became
just another screensaver. We
drink all this beauty with our
eyes and imagine being there
and experiencing it ourselves
in fi rst-person until one day,
numb to its majesty, we don’t.
Hidden
Though these images are
in such high defi nition that
they peer into the uncanny
valley, they are still just a
simulacrum, a cheap substi-
tute for the real thing. Despite
being overwhelmed by
beauty to the point of desensi-
tization, every now and then,
I’ll fi nd something so beau-
tiful that it speaks to me.
While in Kauai last year,
one beach gave me pause.
Like much of the
Hawaiian Islands, wealthy
outsiders have come in and
corrupted the natural essence
of the island of Kauai. It’s
still a vibrant greenspace,
but condos, golf courses
and fences have carved up
the ancestral home of native
Hawaiians and destroyed
much of this spiritual para-
dise. Yet, wildness persists.
A friend had recom-
mended a remote beach with
a steep grade to the sand,
rocky cliff s, reefs and sub-
merged outcroppings shel-
tering the area from the
severe winds that relentlessly
pummel Kauai’s west side.
He told me it was a long hike,
but he failed to mention it
was downright treacherous. I
arrived during the heavy rains
of winter and found myself
walking fi ve or 10 minutes
before coming to a gate across
the trail with the sign “Road
Closed — Trail Unsafe.”
So naturally, I pressed on.
I fi gured it would keep the
tourists away and give me
privacy.
Well, it did keep a lot of
tourists away, and I can see
why. The extremely steep
trail was snot-slick with mud,
and I was laden with fi shing
gear, so I was forced to shed
my fl ip-fl ops and go bare-
foot. Roots vein the mud but
without the long, fi lthy ropes
that line the half-mile trail
as it drops hundreds of feet
from the pavement above to
the water below, I certainly
wouldn’t have made it down
with any semblance of my
pride intact.
When my feet traded mud
for sand, I found a family of
four lounging on the beach. I
nodded and made my way to
the opposite end of the beach
to fi sh.
The fi shing wasn’t great
by Hawaiian standards;
I caught few species and
nothing large. I did, however,
catch and release half a dozen
of Hawaii’s state fi sh, the
Humuhumunukunukuapua’a
or wedgetail triggerfi sh. I’d
caught this fi sh plenty of
times before, but something
about catching the essence
of Hawaii in a place that (I’d
imagine) is the unspoiled
essence of Hawaii took me
back to the days before solid
state graphics and digital
cameras and Instagram to a
time when the sublimity of
nature was still something
capable of dropping your jaw
in humbled appreciation. It
was the most beautiful beach
I’ve ever seen, and I made
sure to appreciate the scenery
even as I appreciated the
fi shing.
You might be able to
fi gure it out on your own,
but I won’t outright tell you
where this beach is because
these last vestiges of the
unspoiled deserve to remain
that way. Some secrets
deserve to remain hidden.
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Luke Ovgard/Contributed Photo
The most beautiful beach the author has ever seen is one that
is small, remote and still just a bit wild.