Native Son Returns to Take the Reins : Environment: New forest supervisor faces competing demands inside his Angeles domain as well as increasing pressures on its outskirts.

On a walk back to his Arcadia office after lunch, Michael J. Rogers, five months into his job as supervisor of the Angeles National Forest, gazed toward part of the vast domain he oversees.

“Sometimes . . . I look up at the mountains and think: ‘Are we really taking good care of the resources?’ But somehow they survive all the worrying, the plotting and the short budgets. And with all the fires, all the floods, they really haven’t changed that much. There is something the mountains say to you about stability.”

Dressed in wing-tips the color of pine bark, a forest green blazer with a U.S. Forest Service emblem on the breast pocket and sage green trousers, Rogers presents a stable, efficient image.

Stability is just what the job requires, he said. “There’s a lot of turmoil on the forest right now,” said Rogers, whose predecessor retired in February. Rogers explained that a high turnover rate among the 498-member Angeles work force has hampered its ability to adequately manage the 693,000-acre preserve that stretches from near Gorman in the west to Wrightwood in the east.

His own career has been one of constant movement, between forests throughout the state--the Cleveland and the Angeles in the south and the Mendocino and Shasta-Trinity in the north--and a four-year stint at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Never at any previous post longer than six years, he says now: “I’m here to stay.”

He is a native son returned home. Rogers, a silver-haired man of 52 years, grew up in Altadena.

A father of four, weeknights he now stays with his mother in the house of his boyhood. Weekends, he commutes back to San Diego, where his wife teaches fifth-grade in a parochial school.

Among Rogers’ first childhood memories are images of the Angeles. “I remember picnic tables, big trees and coffee on a Klamath stove,” he said in his slight Western twang.

As a boy, he hiked the Sam Merrill Trail with his younger brother and camped out with buddies. He fished at daybreak on Crystal Lake with his father. “We were up in the mountains all the time,” he said.

As a Pasadena City College student and a seasonal Forest Service employee, he fought fires in 1957 with the Chilao Hotshots firefighting crew.

Now that he is the boss, the biggest challenge, he says, is to manage competing demands from a multicultural, diverse urban population surrounding the forest. The Angeles, among the nation’s most popular forests, with 6 million to 7 million visitors each year, functions like a huge city park for Los Angeles.

Rogers and the Angeles face a number of issues, such as a controversial proposal by Mobil Oil Corp. to replace a pipeline which cuts through the forest’s Saugus District along the Golden State Freeway; the continuing dispute over whether to reopen the long-closed Highway 39 through a mid-San Gabriel Valley portion of the forest; proposed expansion of mining at Soledad Canyon; and a plan to convert Elsmere Canyon into a landfill.

Subdivision development surrounding the Angeles also poses a thorny problem, Rogers said. “We certainly can have communities built up against the forest. We’re not trying to dictate the use of private land. But I want to make sure the public’s access to this forest is not compromised.”

He ticked off a short, fast list of other competing interests and pressures: Target shooters, off-road-vehicle users, mountain bike riders, hikers, picnickers and skiers. “You’ve got people that want to jump off bridges with bungee cords tied to them. You’ve got hang gliders.” Then, he said, there are the people who simply want solitude and silence.

“When you look at all the various users, you’re going to have a lot of conflicts. We’re having more and more user conflicts. That’s going to just continue. We’re always going to be criticized, second-guessed. In some cases, we’re just going to agree to disagree.”

Rogers, who as a ninth-grader worked on his uncle’s wheat ranch in Oregon and in 1966 graduated with a bachelor of science degree from Oregon State University, said he hopes to increase ways to teach visitors about the natural world. “We’ve got a whole generation that doesn’t have a tie to the land. They don’t know where their milk comes from, their water comes from.”

The main thing Rogers said he wants people to know is this: “We’re operating the public’s forest. I want to hear ideas. And if we’re doing something good, we’d like to hear about it, too. I want to be--and I want the whole forest to be--accessible.”