Logging Visits Rather Than Trees

For generations, the people of Shasta County made their livings by taking from the land, logging and mining. Today they are trying to exploit nature in a different way -- through preserving and sharing its beauty.

Shasta and seven other Northern California counties are increasingly advertising themselves as vacation destinations for nature lovers, and they are seeking to capitalize on their striking terrains, hundreds of miles of rugged forest trails and abundant angler- and boat-friendly waterways.

“We had built an economy on taking things out and taking things away,” said Bob Warren, tourism officer at Redding’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Now the mind-set is that things need to stay.”

Promoting ecotourism was partly instigated by the decline of the lumber and mining industries, but it also was prompted by one of the worst ecological disasters the region had ever known.

In 1991, a freight train derailed just north of Dunsmuir in the upper Sacramento River gorge, spilling 19,000 gallons of potent herbicide into the water. The chemical killed everything in its path for almost 40 miles.

The disaster gutted Dunsmuir’s tourism and fishing industries and, local officials now say, triggered community and government resolve to better protect and promote the region’s natural environment.

Redding, a city of close to 100,000 people two hours north of Sacramento in Shasta County, is spearheading the ecotourism drive in Northern California, mostly through advertising. The counties of Butte, Tehama, Trinity, Siskiyou, Modoc, Lassen and Plumas, which make up the so-called Shasta Cascade region, are following suit to varying degrees.

The counties encompass about 30,000 square miles and feature a blend of alpine peaks, placid lakes, dense conifer forests, limestone caves, volcanic landscapes -- and few people.

The promotion of ecotourism as a primary money earner is not without its detractors.

“The agenda of the extreme environmentalists up in the northern counties is to shut these counties down in terms of business and development and return these counties to the wilds,” said M. David Stirling, vice president of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based anti-regulatory group that has been involved in several legal battles related to the decline of the timber industry.

That decline has been dramatic.

By the end of the 1990s, California’s capacity to process logs had fallen to less than 50% of harvest levels in the late 1980s, according to a study last year by the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Montana.

A 2004 report by the California Forest Products Commission found that, since 1989, the state’s rural counties have lost 77 wood products mills and factories and more than 20,000 related jobs -- 1,000 of them around Redding. Jobs generated by ecotourism, usually service industry-type jobs, are generally not as lucrative as those in timber and mining, Stirling said.

“There must be a balance. You can have the cleanest air and the cleanest water in the world. If people don’t have jobs, it’s not going to make much of a difference,” Stirling said. “You need a certain percentage of manufacturing jobs to have a truly stable economy.”

But in former lumber towns, many people have found work in the sector dedicated to protecting the natural resources that their former employers once harvested.

Before being laid off, Ron Averyt spent half of his life repairing machinery at the Shasta Paper Mill Co., which at one point made 450 tons of labels, printing paper and bleached packaging per day.

The former millwright now plies his trade at Redding’s 300-acre Turtle Bay Exploration Park, a nature complex with a park, museum and, at its centerpiece, a stunning 700-foot-long harp-shaped suspension bridge made of steel, glass and granite.

Though initially distressed about the loss of a high-paying job with good benefits, Averyt has settled into his new lifestyle and has embraced a greater appreciation for safeguarding the environment.

“I think it’s important,” said Averyt, 49, Turtle Bay’s director of facilities. “You really see the effects up here. You see the advantages of keeping the river clean and keeping the trees and so forth to enjoy them.”

Promoters at Turtle Bay are banking on the pedestrian bridge, which serves as a new downtown entrance for the city’s extensive Sacramento River Trail system, to transform Redding into a destination.

“A lot of people drive on I-5 and just drive straight by us,” said Karen Whitaker, tourism development manager for the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Assn., a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the Shasta Cascade counties. “People think of Redding as a service industry. You stop, get your groceries, get your gas, and you move on.”

The bridge design aims to send a message -- that Redding is embracing, not abusing, nature.

Designed by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the bridge is suspended by a 217-foot-tall slanting “sundial” pylon, thus ensuring that none of its 3 million pounds touches the river and disturbs nearby salmon-spawning habitat.

A 2 1/4-inch-thick glass top, with a nonskid opaque surface, casts some shade over the river, where a temperature gauge has been installed to track whether the water remains between 50 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit -- temperatures best for breeding salmon. The fish numbers had dropped to just 200 a year in recent times but are now up to around 8,000.

“We didn’t want to ruin that success,” said Warren, noting: “The fish are part of what makes this area worth coming to and makes it unique.”

Warren said that in the first two months after the Sundial Bridge opened last July, an additional 12,000 hotel rooms were booked in Redding, and there was a substantial increase in gift shop sales at the Turtle Bay museum.

“We think of it as being like what the Golden Gate Bridge is to San Francisco,” Whitaker said.

The private McConnell Foundation, established in Redding in 1964, funded most of the bridge’s $23.5-million cost.

But critics bristle over the $3 million that came from city coffers and the $8 million from state bond proceeds. Some residents have also expressed concern about overmarketing their town and attracting too many guests.

But many visitors and locals love Calatrava’s bridge.

“It adds beauty,” said Redding native Norma Oldbury, 45, as she marveled at the intricate tile work. “It adds a sense of art, a sense of geometry.”

Back inside the buildings at the Turtle Bay complex, every structure represents a sustainable use of natural resources.

A wall in the visitor center is made from rice straw bales, the countertops from recycled glass dredged from the nearby Mt. Shasta Dam. The floors are lined with timber salvaged from a demolished lumber mill.

“It is part of our reinvention, because we no longer have forestry,” said Virginia Germann, director of marketing and publications for Turtle Bay.

An arboretum and 15 acres of gardens, featuring 16,000 plant species, is scheduled to open in May.

To tout their natural treasures, Shasta and the seven other counties rely heavily on the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Assn., which is directed by a volunteer board and composed of regional community leaders.

The association’s tourism marketing is funded through hotel bed taxes. While some counties give little or nothing, others dedicate their entire bed-tax revenue to funding the association, which has an annual budget of $350,000.

The association tries to spread its message through glossy brochures, websites, advertising and trade shows, and it operates the California Welcome Center in Anderson.

Idaho, Washington and Nevada are particularly targeted because they account for a large percentage of Redding’s consistent visitors. Britons and Germans make up the region’s main international guests.

Curiosity brought Joe Breed of Washington state to Turtle Bay last November. The timber industry worker was impressed but expressed concern over the bad rap that logging had gotten in recent years.

“Many times the timber industry helps the environment,” Breed said. “There is this notion that there aren’t any more trees. There are lots of trees. We do replanting.”

Each town and county tries to highlight its own special features.

Whiskeytown, eight miles west of Redding, flaunts the 203,587 acres of cool forests and sparkling waters in the Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area.

Tehama County, traditionally cattle country, has long promoted its annual Red Bluff Round-Up, a professional rodeo that attracts stars from all over. But in recent years, the county has started promoting festivals and fairs to advertise its agricultural products, among them olives, prunes, almonds and walnuts. And several new hotels are using agriculture-themed ecotourism to draw customers, according to Tehama businessman John Koeberer, a member of the California Tourism Commission.

There are about 8,000 hotel rooms available throughout the Shasta Cascade region. Two new hotels under construction in Redding and Red Bluff are expected to add 200 rooms.

Will ecotourism transform the region? It’s too soon to say. But local officials watch the growing interest in Redding’s Turtle Bay with hope.

About 100,000 people have visited the exploration park since it opened in June 2002, promoters said. And Whitaker, of the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Assn., recalled that when she came to town 13 years ago, Redding’s visitors bureau logged only about 2,000 people a year.