Merry Christmas
The
Blue Mountain
EAGLE
Grant County’s newspaper since 1868
LETTERS TO SANTA | INSIDE
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
151st Year • No. 52 • 18 Pages • $1.50
MyEagleNews.com
EO Media Group/Mateusz Perkowski
Garrett Huggins and his wife, Ash-
ley, prepare mistletoe for sale.
MISTLETOE SEASON
Entrepreneurs profit from parasitic plant
monly infects oak trees. They see it as a fun yet fran-
tic way to earn extra money in the weeks leading up to
the holidays.
“The season is really short,” Ashley said.
Genuine Oregon Mistletoe is run as a wholesale
operation, selling about 10,000 bundles of mistletoe a
year to nurseries, Christmas tree lots, Boy Scout troops
and other holiday retailers around the U.S.
The company has grown more sophisticated over
time.
Ashley’s uncle built a website that’s made Genu-
ine Oregon Mistletoe more prominent than in the early
days, when it was dependent mostly on word-of-mouth.
Meanwhile, Garrett’s uncle lends him a truck
equipped with a boom crane so he no longer has to
endanger life and limb climbing ladders to the upper
reaches of oak trees on a family member’s farm in
Southern Oregon.
“I don’t want to risk it, because if I were to get hurt,
that would affect my full-time job,” he said.
By Mateusz Perkowski
EO Media Group
A
fter more than a decade in business, Garrett Hug-
gins doesn’t aspire to become a mistletoe magnate.
Huggins is content to earn most of his income
as a union carpenter while selling the wild-harvested holi-
day crop through his family’s company, Genuine Oregon
Mistletoe, as a sideline.
“We don’t expect it to become a million-dollar com-
pany, but it does make Christmas happen for us, you
know?” he said.
Though they get plenty of help from friends and fam-
ily, Genuine Oregon Mistletoe is basically a two-person
operation: Garrett collects the mistletoe from oak trees in
Southern Oregon while his wife, Ashley, handles the mar-
keting. Both help tie strands of the leafy perennial into
bundles wth ribbon and package them for shipping.
“When people call, they talk to me,” Ashley said.
“He didn’t want to deal with the customer service side of
things.”
Shotgun harvest
Wholesale parasite
The Hugginses are similar to other mistletoe entre-
preneurs in Oregon, where the parasitic plant com-
EO Media Group/Mateusz Perkowski
For smaller-scale mistletoe sellers, blasting the plant
Ashley Huggins holds a bundle of female mistletoe
that contains berries of the parasitic plant.
See Mistletoe , Page A18
Forest Service forms council to address Blue Mountains Forest Plan
the communities could support.”
By George Plaven
EO Media Group
Counties object
The U.S. Forest Service spent the
last 15 years working to update land
management plans for three national
forests in Eastern Oregon and south-
east Washington.
In the end, it still wasn’t enough to
bring competing interests — includ-
ing loggers, ranchers, nature lovers,
ATV riders and environmentalists —
together on the same page.
Now the agency is trying a dif-
ferent approach, working directly
with state, county and tribal repre-
sentatives as part of a newly formed
intergovernmental council aimed at
resolving deep-rooted conflicts over
the Umatilla, Wallowa-Whitman and
Malheur national forests.
Collectively known as the Blue
Mountains National Forests, the
area encompasses 5.5 million acres,
roughly the size of New Jersey,
stretching from east of Walla Walla,
Washington, to south of John Day.
Each forest has its own individ-
ual resource and management plan,
which identifies goals and desired
conditions for the landscape. While
File photo
The U.S. Forest Service has formed an intergovernmental council to discuss
management of the Blue Mountains.
the plans do not make any proj-
ect-level decisions, they do establish
broader guidelines for livestock graz-
ing, timber harvest, wilderness and
roads.
Forest plans are supposed to be
updated every 15 years to account for
the latest science and changing con-
ditions. The Blue Mountains Forest
Plan was last updated in 1990.
Coming up with new plans for the
forests has proven especially diffi-
cult, with intense public scrutiny and
backlash. Earlier this year, the For-
est Service announced it was with-
drawing its latest proposal and would
re-engage with communities.
Chris French, the reviewing offi-
cer and Forest Service deputy chief,
said that while the 5,000-page plans
passed legal muster, they were diffi-
cult to understand and implement.
“I think that was really notewor-
thy news for everyone involved,”
said Eric Watrud, supervisor of
the Umatilla National Forest. “We
wanted to make sure we as an agency
could move forward with something
This is not the first time the Forest
Service has taken a step back to fix
perceived flaws in the Blue Moun-
tains Forest Plan Revision.
The agency released a draft ver-
sion of the plans in 2014, which
was met with overwhelmingly nega-
tive feedback. In response, the forest
supervisors began a series of meet-
ings around the region to develop
new plan alternatives and seek
compromise.
What they came up with —
dubbed “Alternative E-Modified” —
called for thinning 33% of dry upland
forests to improve wildfire resilience,
while doubling the current timber
harvest and designating 70,500 acres
of new wilderness.
Still, it was met with opposition.
The Eastern Oregon Counties
Association detailed eight primary
issues in its objections, including
economics; access; management area
designation; pace and scale of res-
toration; grazing; fire and salvage
See Plan, Page A18