As It Grapples With Its Future, the Village Called Happy Camp Isn’t : Communities: Without a viable economic base, the former logging town in Northern California must reinvent itself or die.

Stepping off the two-lane highway here is like taking a trip back to a simpler time. Mountains rise up uninterrupted by power lines. The air is sweet and the Klamath River runs sparkling clear, a delight for swimmers and rafters.

But something is wrong in Happy Camp, a former logging town deep inside national forests about 20 miles south of the Oregon border. Thirtysomethings and Gen-Xers are conspicuously absent. Longtime residents agree: Their town is dying.

“There’s nothing for them to do here,” said Debbie Virtue, 40, who has waited tables at the Frontier Cafe for 11 years. “There’s no reason to stay.”

Walt Backstrom, who considers Happy Camp to be California’s “last undiscovered paradise,” has had the family’s gift shop up for sale for 12 years, with no more than a few nibbles.

“The only saving grace of this place is, it’s beautiful and the weather’s great,” Backstrom said. “Somebody will discover it someday and it will boom, but not in our lifetime.”

While other local economies in the Pacific Northwest diversified and increased tourism after logging was restricted by the Endangered Species Act, Happy Camp has not been as nimble.

A big part of the problem is Happy Camp’s isolation, two hours west of the heavily traveled Interstate 5 corridor.

Nearly 80% of all jobs west of Denver are within a 1 1/2-hour commute of I-5, said Ed Whitelaw, an economics professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Whitelaw says the region’s timber industry was declining even before environmental regulations were an issue. He thinks young people with families to support in the town are best advised to move away.

“They should get out as quickly as possible to get more education and relocate,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

Most loggers, millworkers and truck drivers have done just that. Others travel long distances to work and come home on weekends. Fewer than a thousand remain in Happy Camp. Most are retirees, Koruk Indians and people on welfare.

At least 70% receive some type of government assistance, said Jean Martin, a Siskiyou County social worker. All 180 students at the elementary school receive free breakfast and lunch.

Alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and depression are just some of the town’s problems. “There’s a sense of despair,” Martin said. “It’s a dying community.”

Anger bubbles just beneath the surface of Dale Foster’s soft-spoken, friendly demeanor. The longer he talks, the more animated he becomes.

“They’re forcing everybody into the larger cities for work,” said Foster, who has refocused his logging business on less lucrative construction jobs. “They’re trying to make a museum of this land here: Look, don’t touch.”

Ann Pope’s husband, Lee, also was a logger. Now the couple runs the Klamath Inn Motel, one of two aging motels where occasional visitors stay.

Every weekend, Ann Pope watches tourists float down the river in jumbo-size yellow rafts. But they never set foot in Happy Camp. They’re trucked in from Yreka and trucked back at the end of the day. No shopping, no eating, no spending.

Business is much better along Siskiyou County’s I-5 corridor, where new motels and restaurants cater to visitors on their way to Mt. Shasta, Lake Shasta and the Oregon cities of Medford and Ashland. Countywide, tourism and other service industry jobs have nearly doubled in the past 15 years.

But Happy Camp, which may have gotten its name after gold was discovered there, has just two restaurants, a pizza parlor and a grocery store. Gasoline--when the station is open--costs about $2 a gallon.

The district once produced about 100 million board feet of timber a year. Now only 1 million board feet are harvested, mostly by outside companies that mill the lumber elsewhere, the U.S. Forest Service said.

The town’s last mill, Stone Forest Industries, shut down in 1994. Last fall the company finally auctioned off the equipment--very cheaply, residents say.

“As long as that mill was standing, these people had hope,” Pope said.

Some still do.

Ed Head, who built Stone Forest in the early 1950s, bought back much of the equipment recently and has hired a few men to build a small mill about three miles outside town. By November he expects to have 12-15 employees producing daily up to 25,000 board feet of softwood, which is used mainly for housing framing, and 15,000 board feet of hardwood, which is used primarily for floors and furniture. All this adds up to less than four truckloads a day.

“It is crazy. No one will doubt that,” he said. “But you’d think one little mill could survive.”

But Whitelaw, the economist, says Happy Camp’s future lies outside logging. Like Rust Belt cities after the steel industry declined or Midwestern towns bypassed by railroads, Happy Camp will reestablish itself once people with substantial retirement incomes, yuppies looking for summer homes and “rat-race escapees” discover its natural appeal.

“Happy Camp is more isolated, and without that logging bringing in the money, it’s going to have trouble for a while, but over the long haul, with its river and rugged mountains--that’s going to be a scarcity for professionals and retirees trying to find places to live.”

That doesn’t help families put food on the table now, he acknowledged.

Happy Camp forest ranger Michael Condon also understands the old-timers’ frustration. “They feel like an endangered species themselves,” he said.

Whatever happens, Willie Attebery, a former logger, says he’ll stay in Happy Camp.

“People look at those clear cuts and say it’s ugly, but I go to the city and see all that blacktop and concrete and that’s ugly, too,” he said. “We love this country. We want to preserve as much as we can.”