Introduction to a Clearcut

Welcome to The Bald, where feelings run high

Today I introduce you to a wild and broken place that is a twenty minute walk from our home at Hylamuck. We have dubbed it The Bald. Its ongoing story will be told as a sort of recurring series here at Infinite Peninsula.

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I could begin with orange trumpet honeysuckle climbing a small broken dogwood that still flowers brilliant white. I could begin with dewberry and blackcap raspberry harvests, or I could begin with mountain beavers. I could begin with manroot or hairy manzanita or a tiny green butterfly that was the first of its kind ever seen in this county.

If you had told me five years ago I would fall in love with a clearcut and have some of my deepest explorations as a naturalist among stumps and slash, I would not have known what to think.

A coyote picks its way across The Bald this winter. Chris Rurik

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This week I’ve been out there again, putting in the hours, acting like a good forest steward and freeing baby trees by hacking back the brush. It’s high time I introduced the place, and it’s hard to know where to begin because The Bald is a place where I am assailed, as I fight my way across it, by a wild range of emotions. Almost feral emotions. It forces me to hold conflicting feelings, without resolution, right in the heart of my chest. (Only this week, covered in scratches and spiders, have I found these words to describe it.) On The Bald, joy and despair are forced into suspension. Freedom and resignation. Cynicism. Surprise. It’s a fatal attraction. My time on The Bald pulses with that kind of dangerous energy. The growth is lush, and the good is all tangled up with the bad. The Bald laughs at my sweat, swallows up my hard work, and then sometimes rewards it, obliquely.

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Here is the back story. Before 2019, the land had been owned by a woman whose family has owned a cluster of parcels here for years. It was undeveloped. The trees were over eighty years old. Locals have told me it was a beautiful chanterelle-hunting ground. The family fell on hard times. A small local logging outfit—the kind that posts signs along the backroads that read, “Need cash? Got trees?”—offered the woman a quick closing. She took it.

The logger underpaid for the land, made a fistful off the timber, and prepared to sell the land for twice as much as what he bought if for. Exactly the kind of scalp-and-flip job that boils my blood, since the logger has zero incentive to think of the future of the forest while logging other than the basic replanting required by law. The soil was trashed.

In our county, a development moratorium requires a six-year waiting period between the logging of a parcel and its development for homes. The moratorium aims to slow the wholesale loss of our forest base. There is, of course, an exemption. If you leave ten percent of the trees, you don’t have to wait the six years.

The logger left two patches of standing trees. They are the thinnest, least valuable trees. About a dozen of them fell in the first year after logging thanks to sudden exposure to sun and wind. Now, any natural reseeding of this forest will derive from these trees, which have the site’s poorest genetics, while the most vigorous trees have long since been turned to 2x4s. That’s one thing I mean by no investment in the forest’s future. I don’t mind logging. But I hate smash-and-grab logging.

One corner of The Bald as it looked a few months after logging and replanting. Chris Rurik

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But okay. Remember, we’re holding conflicting emotions here.

This was the first land we had ever owned. (Its own set of magnified emotions.) I talked the logger down in price but we still paid 70% more than what he bought it for fully forested. Disembodied and matter-of-fact, he talked up its home sites, the cost of the access road he built across a wetland, the odds of the land being rezoned as more valuable commercial land. I had to bite my tongue. It all happened over the phone. I never got to shake his hand or stare into his eyes. He knew he could dispense of these clearcut parcels on his terms, and many buyers would see the removal of trees as a helpful first step in laying out a home.

And yet, the first time we stepped foot on the land after closing—I won’t forget that feeling. Surrounded by slash, curled sword ferns, shredded remnants of big huckleberry bushes, heaped mounds of butt logs, the two clumps of leave trees, the baby firs replanted in loose rows between and around the stumps—the big picture fell away. Instantly it was more fascination than recoil.

We were in it for the long game. The land felt like a stage where dramas were sure to play out, and we could only guess at the roles we would be assigned to play. We were eager to feel out the place’s corners, read into its stumps, find its surviving bones. We would carve paths and walk them. It was a remarkable feeling, ownership of land, as strange as it is to write those words.

The first summer brought a flush of new growth. Looking at this photo today, I can only shake my head: it’s a whole lot harder to get around now that the brush has grown up. Chris Rurik

From that first day, our fates felt intertwined with the place. Its trees had vanished into a global commodity economy where 2x4s are untraceable to their origins. Its acreage had been on the verge of being treated the same way, as the tether was cut between its past forest and owners and whoever would come next. One of the core features of extractive capitalism is the way it separates us from the context of its products. It pushes things out of sight. Well, we were locals and we remembered those stumps as trees. The Bald’s horrors were now ours.

But so were any gifts it might bestow.

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At the time, the idea was simple: let those little trees grow. Help the forest bounce back. Rewild it, baby.

Four years later? I’d say that in my personal education as a forester, The Bald has been a diamond sword cutting away illusions.

Usually forestry work moves at the slow pace of tree growth, but a clearcut for the first half-decade is in a critical phase. Either the trees reach a height where they are “free to grow,” as foresters say, or they are choked out by invasive Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry. It’s a squeeze to get the trees into their rightful dominant place, and longer, drier summers are only making it harder for the trees to hit their growth spurts.

We soon discovered that the logger’s replanting effort was skimped at best. The baby trees were huddled around the access road and landings—places a regulator was likely to look.

In western Washington, the legal obligation to reforest after a timber harvest dictates that 190 seedlings per acre survive a year after they are planted. Making inquiries, we learned that the obligation runs with the land, and unless we wanted to take the logger to civil court for underplanting, we were on the hook for the big areas where replanted trees were thin or absent.

Within a few months of taking ownership of the land, such an accounting of the replanted trees per acre became impossible. The 2021 heat dome struck. Temperatures broke 104 degrees for three days straight, shattering all-time records. The Bald’s bare earth, still unshaded then, baked. Something like two-thirds of the baby trees died that summer.

In December of 2022, with the help of family and community members, we planted 800 more trees.

Since then, it’s been a battle to beat back the explosive growth of Scotch broom and give those trees the airspace they need. It’s hard to understate the power of these invasive species to throw our young forests off the rails, especially when soil has been abused.

A photo from last summer of the worst of the Scotch broom. Scale is tough in this photo, but the thickets are up to ten feet tall. Note the young firs in the bottom left corner. Chris Rurik

As of this year, the most eager of the trees are now free to grow.

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That’s a forestry take, focused on trees. As I worked, my naturalist eyes, alert to every flutter of wings and strange small plant, caught another story fighting to emerge.

Here was a serviceberry snag. Here was a zone of little oceansprays. Here was a strange bushy alder that I did not recognize. A Sitka alder, it turned out. Then here came hordes of hairy manzanitas, a rare plant in our area—rare because it likes land that has been scraped or burned clean and has lots of sun, and it cannot compete with Scotch broom.

Hairy manzanita became indicative, for me, of the incredible assemblage of early successional species that are native to our region and are so rarely seen because they are choked out by more aggressive plants. They support an incredible array of insects and birds. (I wrote about such early seral communities when I described the rare green butterfly I found on The Bald.)

The Bald, I came to realize, has all the seeds of that rich community of life. I get these incredible glimpses of it, and I imagine what it would be like if only it could be fully expressed. Just last week I had one of the most exciting finds yet: a snowbrush ceanothus getting started along the access road. I’ve only ever seen snowbrush in one other place on the Key Peninsula. Its seeds, which sprout best after a fire, are reported to be viable in the soil for several centuries. When was the last fully grown and flowering snowbrush in this place? How long has the seed been lying in wait?

Once, I was cutting firewood from one of the firs that toppled out of the unlogged patches. (Abundant firewood was The Bald’s first gift.) I had to toss the rounds through the underbrush to get them to where I could load them into a truck. Months later I was back in that area and found that one of the rounds had escaped me and hidden out in some ferns. I went to retrieve it, and there underneath was the first long-toed salamander I had ever seen. Its speckled back looked like a galaxy. I shook my head and replaced the wayward round of firewood and vowed that whenever I cut wood I would leave a chunk behind.

The Bald’s been like that. It has taught me to embrace imperfection and incompletion, both my own and the land’s. It’s sloppy, and that’s often cool. It has trained me to stay alert while working hard.

In my management plan for The Bald, the primary priority reads, “Maximize biodiversity of native species through a heterogeneous mix of habitats, plant communities, ecotones, and seral stages.”

This runs counter to standard forestry practice. Instead of putting all my attention on the firs until they are established, and then adding biodiversity from below, I’m spending time releasing snowberry and oceanspray and pines from the chokehold of Scotch broom. I’m letting red alder go in some areas. I’ve created an early seral preserve of hairy manzanita next to the access road and, shocker alert, I have actually uprooted firs from the area. (It was really hard to get up the gumption to yank that first fir.)

Maximum biodiversity. That fires my imagination. It gets me out there working.

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But when months go by between my visits to The Bald, I grow scared of it. I think I’m letting it slip away. What can I even do? It’s a train wreck.

Then I muster up the courage and go and, paradoxically, no matter how ‘bad’ it looks, no matter how few trees I can find among the blackberries, it’s a spiritual refresh to be there. The trails I built that first year are obliterated by growth, yet there is a constant stream of new discoveries. I fall seamlessly into the groove of lopping and tramping and pausing and surveying. Sometimes I arrive ready to blow off steam, but in the act of taking care of the place I never feel the rush of frustration. Don’t get me wrong, I often look up and recognize how little is the dent I’ve made in the cancerous wall of yellow-flowered growth, yet my reaction is never to lash out and swing wildly with my pick-mattock.

Somehow the care and intention I’ve invested in this place so far, mixed with its hidden treasures of life, suffuses it even in my most cynical moments.

And I just work away, lop lop lop lop. It’s the place that interrupts, not the demons. This week it was two eagles whooshing into its considerable airspace, their wings inches apart as they chased and spun. Then it was an unexpected red-flowering currant in a thick blackberry area.

My task on The Bald has evolved. Now it is less one of planting and more one of selective cutting and curation, the way writing should be. Finding what’s there, weeding out what’s bad, and watching it grow into shape over time.

I have avoided putting many photos into this introduction to force your imagination to take the lead, but I’ll be sharing images throughout the coming years (decades? centuries, kids?) to give you a real sense of what I mean by the seeds of an incredible biodiversity trying its damnedest to flourish here.

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There you have it: a speed-dash of an introduction to the place. I realize now I barely even touched on its topography. Alas, too many layers. That will come.

What I’d like to know is what piques your interest. Which part of this story begs for more detail? What should I tackle next at The Bald?

Thanks for reading Infinite Peninsula. Subscribe to receive every ramble and adventure, become a paid subscriber to keep me going, and share with anyone who would dig a spy’s-eye view of the world we share with Cascadia critters, including this mountain beaver on The Bald.