Red Gold Brings Its Own Rush

Don’t call Oral Martin Whitlow Jr. a river pirate. He’s no poacher either. This fourth-generation woodsman says he’s in the redwood salvage business, when the opportunity presents itself.

And he would be happily salvaging a giant redwood on this wintry day if park rangers didn’t harbor the foolish notion that the towering trees in Humboldt Redwoods State Park belong to the state -- even after they topple into the swollen Eel River and begin to float away.

“They’d have you in handcuffs and in the crowbar motel before you know it,” Whitlow says. That’s his way of explaining why he left his chain saw at home.

Still, Whitlow admires “a good little stick” when he spots one in the Eel. He angles his jet-powered river sled toward one resting on a gravel bar, expertly coming alongside the hulking trunk. His calloused hands run over the reddish bark to take its measure.

“See? No knots,” he says. Clear, vertical grain. Five feet in diameter. His eyes close as he does some figuring. Milled right and sold on the right market, this slab of old-growth redwood could fetch $60,000.

“That’s red gold,” he says.

The gold rush for old-growth redwood is long past, of course. About 3% of California’s native stands of giant redwoods remain, most of them protected in public parks and reserves like this one, an hour’s drive south of Eureka.

Such protections make old-growth redwood all the more valuable -- and enticing -- not just to unemployed loggers in this chronically depressed region but to rural residents whose families have made a living from the forests for generations.

Park officials say the protected forests are under siege. Redwood National Park has documented dozens of incidents of redwood theft or vandalism in the last five years. One woodworker was convicted last fall of cutting down a redwood in an area where seven others previously had been felled.

State park officials don’t collect such records, but park rangers from the Oregon border to the mountains above Santa Cruz play a continual round of cat and mouse with poachers trying to truck off parts of coastal redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth.

Poachers slip into the protected forests under the cover of darkness and fire up chain saws to cut off the toes or knobby knees of the giant redwoods. They are after the burls, the intricately whorled growths. The swirling grain of this wood, when carved into bowls, sculptures or tabletops, forms bird’s eyes and other beautiful patterns.

The amputations normally don’t kill the trees, but poachers are not above cutting down a tree to get a burl that is too high to reach from the ground. Two stout redwoods were felled recently in the heart of the park’s primeval Rockefeller Forest. One, dated by its rings, had a history stretching back to the American Revolution. The other was a sapling before Christopher Columbus reached the New World.

The poachers got away, but left without their prized burls. One of them, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, rests in the park’s maintenance yard as confiscated evidence. Park officials estimate it would be worth about $4,000 to the redwood curio shops that ring the park.

Others fill their pickups with any parts of old-growth redwoods they can get because of the usually tight rings and hardiness of these trees, which grew slowly over hundreds of years in the dense forest. The lumber from these trees is prized because it resists rot and holds up longer than other types of wood.

Thieves pound wedges into fallen tree trunks, splitting off pieces suitable for fence posts or rails.

Whitlow insists that he would go after a park tree only after it had fallen into the river and headed to the ocean. He has been rescuing trees from the river since the 1950s, he says, and has made thousands and thousands of dollars.

The problem is that state officials have declared all of the park’s trees off-limits to scroungers. Trees that fall in the forest or even ones that drop into the adjacent Eel River, which flows through the park, play an important role in nature’s cycle, ecologists say.

On land, they provide a reservoir of moisture and organic material that replenishes the forest floor. In the river, they create deep, cool crevices that help young salmon and trout survive hot summers.

“Let nature rule,” says Steve Horvitz, superintendent of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. “That’s what the parks are all about.”

Each tree, he says, has value beyond the number of board-feet it can supply. Every year, millions of visitors come to see the ancient coastal redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which grow taller than the Statue of Liberty and live as long as 2,000 years. Visitors tend to lower their voices when they approach a grove of ancient redwoods as if entering a cathedral. Even the fallen trees have the allure of ancient ruins.

This sort of nature worship drives Whitlow, well, up a tree. This is God’s larder, not his museum, he says.

What does Whitlow see when he takes in an old redwood? “Dollars and cents,” he says

As for the tourists, he says, they’re a lot closer to eternity than they realize. “People drive up here, walk through the redwoods and have no idea how dangerous it is.”

Whitlow pulls his boat onto a gravel embankment near Founders Grove, a particularly breathtaking stand of giant trees named in honor of the pioneer preservationists who founded the Save the Redwoods League in 1918 to protect as many of the giants as possible.

“This is a disaster waiting to happen,” Whitlow says, becoming increasingly agitated as he walks amid the towering redwoods. He points a calloused finger at one ancient tree listing toward the park’s central road, called Avenue of the Giants. “It should be taken out before it kills somebody.”

He picks at the burned-out base of another tree, showing how fire has gnawed away one side. “We are standing in a very dangerous place. All of these trees are going to fall down,” Whitlow says.

He sees mismanagement at every turn in the park. “If they want to do something right, they would cut that tree before it falls and salvage it,” he says. “It would create jobs for people and the money could benefit the park.”

“See all of this wood lying here,” he says, pointing to trees knocked over by a big one like so many dominoes. “Beautiful sticks going to waste. When they hit the ground, they break into small pieces. It’s a waste of material.”

Whitlow knows these woods. He has lived all of his 69 years on a nearly 2,000-acre parcel of timberland that his great-great-grandfather acquired in 1869 -- long before any park existed.

He feels lucky to be alive with four functioning limbs after more than five decades working as a tree faller and a “powder monkey” laying dynamite and doing other dangerous jobs in the woods. He touches a blackened ear, recently bruised by a tree branch that snapped back when he was clearing brush with his bulldozer.

He and two other old-timers make the circuit of logging jubilees and timber shows every summer in Northern California, Oregon and Washington to demonstrate the “world’s oldest motorized saws.” One of those, a 1915, 275-pound drag saw, is on display at a local chain-saw dealer, marked with pride: “Owner, Oral Whitlow.”

Whitlow also knows the Eel River. During wet weather, it is the most accessible route to his riverfront land, about seven miles from the park boundary. He has helped the sheriff with river rescues, and assisted friends salvaging logs.

Log salvage, as Whitlow describes it, is a dicey business best accomplished in the dead of night during a heavy rainstorm.

You wait for high water to erode the riverbank and undercut some redwoods, causing them to crash into the river and barrel downstream at 15 mph. Then the log rodeo begins.

The massive logs can twist and turn and even upend. “You can’t pull a log, but you can push it,” Whitlow says. “You don’t want to get pinched between the tree and the bank. It will sink your boat and crush you.”

Using boats and steel cables, Whitlow and others steer the tree trunks around river bends and gravel bars beyond the park boundaries toward the shore of a friendly landowner. There they cut the tree into sections and load them onto trucks or bring in a portable mill.

The scroungers have won the grudging respect of John D. O’Rourke, the head state park ranger who has been trying to stop them.

“These river pirates have skills,” he says. “I’ll give them that. It’s manly, it’s exciting, it’s heroic to go wrestle logs in the river. It’s also against the law.”

The scofflaws have a worthy adversary in O’Rourke, a man who has literally immersed himself in his work. A former state lifeguard from Southern California, he began donning a wetsuit a few years ago and slipping into the river to sneak up on the pirates from the water.

“I jump up on the log and tell them that it’s park property,” he says. “They would be freaked. I’d write down the boat’s number, and then leave.”

Park rangers don’t believe the river scavengers are confining their activities to downed trees. With their shallow roots, redwoods are easily undermined by high water. But the natural process sometimes gets a helping hand. Along the banks of the Eel, rangers have found evidence of tree roots that have been chain- sawed and dynamited.

Still, park rangers have had trouble making cases. “It comes down to grand theft, but the local judges have told us they don’t side with us,” O’Rourke says.

One problem is proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that trees floating in the river belong to the park -- even though rangers argue that there are hardly any old-growth redwoods left outside of the park.

Rangers have spray-painted park initials in bright orange, only to find the bark stripped. They have applied metal tags, only to find them cut away with the swipe of a chain saw. This summer, park officials plan to take DNA samples of all the trees along the river so they can prove ownership in court.

The rangers also try to beat the scavengers to the logs and relocate the logs in the park where they can benefit nature. They have lashed some of the logs to riverbanks farther upstream to improve fish habitat.

All this makes no sense to Whitlow. “They don’t want to use the trees, but they don’t want anybody else to have them either,” he says.

He is angriest when rangers claim a tree from salvagers, and then allow the rising river to carry it away. “It’s a total waste of valuable timber to let this go out to the ocean where nobody is going to get it,” he says. “The state of California should be reprimanded for letting this happen.”

Whitlow insists that he hasn’t had a brush with the law over river logging. But some of his friends have.

Recently, Pete Porter was stunned to find himself facing grand theft charges for something he had done for years.

He and his cousin had been turning to the river’s bounty every winter, during the rainy months when flooded roads kept Porter from his regular job driving a lumber truck. A big score one year, he says, covered the down payment on a house.

Rangers closed in a few years ago, confronting Porter over a massive tree in the river. In the end, a judge threw out the grand theft charge, reassuring Porter that his view of river salvage law was correct: “If it’s moving and free-floating and surrounded by water and there are no identifiable marks, then it’s salvageable.”

Park Supt. Horvitz sees things differently. “If your car rolls down the street and into somebody else’s garage, it’s still your car,” he says.

This clash of values has led to some tense moments.

In one incident a few years ago, a landslide along the Eel River dumped more than a dozen trees into the river. Salvagers worked through the night to steer them to private property about 300 yards outside the park. When park rangers arrived to claim the trees, reinforced by sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers, they were confronted by shotgun-toting locals.

As O’Rourke recalled the standoff, it came down to a simple question: “Do we really want a gunfight with these guys over trees?” Negotiations led to a political decision. Park rangers agreed to split the trees with the locals, allowing them to keep half.

Whitlow says this Solomon-esque decision was a rare example of common sense by the government these days. He harks back to the 1960s, when the California Department of Fish and Game paid people to remove logs from streams and rivers, believing that they were barriers to fish swimming upstream to spawn. These days, Fish and Game installs concrete “logs” in rivers and streams to improve fish habitat.

Motoring around the river, Whitlow puffs on his pipe, his long upper lip and sullen expression vaguely reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart aboard the African Queen.

He brightens as his boat comes around a bend, revealing that another monster tree has crash-landed in the river. “That’s an awful nice stick that fell over there,” he says.