Chapter 7

Wisdom Creek Ranch,
Union County, Oregon

"As a landowner, I'm having a harder time cutting [the trees]. They're just so darned beautiful." -- Ted Brown Photo: Ted Brown Courtesy of Marty Knapp

Ted and Mary Brown bought the first part of Wisdom Creek Ranch in 1957. While about half of their newly acquired land was stocked with vigorous young forests, other stands on the property were under attack by every type of insect pest and pathogen known in the Blue Mountain region.

In the early decades of the 20th century most of the original ponderosa pine forests of northeastern Oregon had been heavily logged, including what is now the Browns' property. In drier, more exposed areas, the forests failed to come back. Where they did come back, the innovation of fire suppression, along with cattle and sheep grazing, allowed them to grow up crowded with true fir and Douglas fir -- conditions that turned out to be highly favorable for pests and parasites.

In addition, fire risk on the Browns' new ranch was high because of an ample accumulation of fuel loads in the form of dead wood and dense stands of small trees. In dry conditions any fire could become a conflagration in the forest crown.

The Browns quickly started nursing their forests back to a healthier condition, one that would be more resistant to fire. They thinned the stands to reduce competition and increase vigor among remaining trees, since vigorous trees are more able to ward off attacks by forest pests. The Browns' thinning methods favored ponderosa pine, the dominant species prior to logging, but they usually maintained a mix of tree species and ages, because such diversity also increases a stand's resistance to most diseases and pests. By reducing fuel loads, thinning also reduces the likelihood of catastrophic fire.

The Browns aggressively harvested ailing and dead trees while leaving most of the healthy dominant and co-dominant individuals. Some cuts were made with the central aim of reducing mistletoe infestations. They replanted after harvests and began to reforest areas that had been cut over years earlier but regenerated poorly.

Ted and Mary Brown have now lived on their forest property for more than 45 years, and in that time many of their ponderosa stands have developed into beautiful park-like groves with grassy forest floors. At the same time, income from the Browns' highly selective timber harvests has helped pay for their retirement.

One of their favorite mementos is a photograph of much of Wisdom Creek Ranch taken from an opposing ridge a few years before their purchase of the property. The photo captured a forestland in trouble: pockets of conifers regenerating in thick stands interspersed with areas nearly barren of trees. Pictures taken today from the same vantage show a landscape covered in healthy, free-growing forest.

Looking at these pictures encourages the Browns. It reminds them that they have overcome many challenges in forest management, and that their basic convictions about silviculture have been correct. Amid the public and private forestland surrounding them, much of which has been decimated by insects and disease, Wisdom Creek Ranch remains a model of health and productivity in the high, dry forests of northeastern Oregon.

A History of Change

Wisdom Creek Ranch covers 755 acres in the Wallowa Mountains, just to the east of the Blue Mountains, about 14 miles southeast of the town of Union, in Oregon's Union County. The ranch lies in the watershed of the Powder River, a tributary of the Snake. Elevations on the Brown property range from 3,700 to 4,100 feet, and average yearly precipitation ranges from 14 to 18 inches as rain and snow.

Of the ranch's total acreage, 637 acres (85 percent) are forested, while the remainder is grassland. The ranch supports pure ponderosa pine stands in its lower areas, and mixed conifer stands at higher elevations and on north-facing slopes. Ponderosa pine makes up 75 percent of the trees per acre, with 20 percent Douglas fir, 3 percent white fir, 2 percent western larch, and less than 1 percent lodgepole pine.

Before European settlers arrived in the late 1850s ponderosa pine stands and natural grassland dominated the landscape of the Powder River area and the adjacent Grande Ronde Valley. Periodic low-intensity fires started by lightning strikes and Native American burning practices kept the forest understories mostly free of brush and fire-sensitive tree species like white fir and Douglas fir, while favoring ponderosa pine and western larch, both of which are adapted to fire.

Around the turn of the century, commercial harvests of old-growth ponderosa pine began in the Wallowa Mountains. Logging crews built railroads into the hills and high-graded pine from north-facing, mixed-species slopes, leaving the weakened and diseased trees and the shade-tolerant fir. South-facing slopes, often pure ponderosa pine, were denuded by the harvests. Most of the logging on Wisdom Creek Ranch was conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. The remains of the old railroad grade can still be traced winding through the property.

As a teenager in Cincinnati, Ted Brown decided to become a biologist. He studied biology in college, where he was influenced by Jim Cope, an expert naturalist and professor at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

After college, Brown joined the U.S. Forest Service and he and his wife, Mary, moved to Maine, where he worked on a spruce budworm project. Ted and Mary followed the budworm project to the Pacific Northwest, and this took them to Union in 1955.

They bought the ranch in 1957 and wanted to remain in Union, so Brown left the Forest Service and worked as a high school teacher and then a Spanish instructor at nearby Eastern Oregon State College, where he taught until he retired in 1991.

When the Browns purchased the first 440 acres of Wisdom Creek Ranch, some relatives advised them that even at $30 or $35 per acre timberland was a poor investment. Undaunted, Ted and Mary helped pay for the property with salvaged ponderosa pine milled on site into boards for corral fences, and in 1973 they purchased an additional 300 acres. In his spare time Ted Brown worked on the tree farm and managed his own logging business.

Using Good Forestry to Vanquish Forest Pests

There are two forest management goals of Wisdom Creek Ranch. The first is to restore stands to health with a native composition of trees dominated by ponderosa pine. The second is to encourage optimum growth among large-diameter trees, because such individuals add volume quickly and produce larger logs that yield higher prices.

Stands on the Brown property have been divided into two types. The richer stands (536 acres) are well stocked with ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, white fir, western larch and lodgepole pine. Annual growth is estimated at 276 board feet per acre per year in these stands, and average stocking is estimated at 11,530 board feet per acre.

The poorer stand type on the ranch (102 acres) is thinly stocked with a mixture of open-grown ponderosa pine and grassland. Regularly spaced stumps indicate that these south-facing slopes were once fully forested in pine, but failed to regenerate after they were stripped of trees in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, open meadows still dominate these areas, and pine seedlings are limited to the proximity of established trees and other microsites (stumps, logs, and manzanita) that offer protection from the sun. Large clearings with southern exposures and on shallow soils or rocky outcrops have been particularly difficult to regenerate.

Increasing the vigor of individual trees increases the health of the forest, and in the Browns' stands, vigor depends on plenty of growing room, because moisture and nutrients are limited. So reducing crowding through thinning remains a top priority on the ranch. This mimics the ample growing room these trees had in prior centuries when periodic ground fires suppressed all but the most fire-resistant survivors.

When ponderosa pine are thinned, whether young or as mature as 120 years, vigor increases and burrowing beetles are more likely to be rejected, according to the Oregon State University Extension Service. The degree of resistance to the beetles is proportional to the extent of the thinning. So thinning remains the chief weapon against this type of forest pest on the Brown property.

Ponderosa pine require lots of sunlight and suffers from shading as stands grow more crowded and the forest canopy closes. But in the dry forest types of Wisdom Creek Ranch, competition for below ground resources (water and nutrients) often becomes more important than competition for sunlight. In some stands within the nearby Blue Mountains, older pines had enough light but died when understories developed and made demands on limited water and nutrients. Ted Brown has learned the importance of early and aggressive thinning to re-establish dominance of ponderosa pine.

Pine is the preferred species at lower elevations, but Douglas fir and white fir are allowed to recruit at the higher elevations and on north-facing slopes. In these areas Brown selects trees for thinning in a way that encourages diverse species and mixed ages in the surviving stand. Most forest pests have strong host preferences and many are host-specific, requiring trees of particular species and ages. By avoiding concentrations of same-species, even-aged host trees like those typical of plantation forests, Brown reduces the risk of insect and disease outbreaks.

Salvage cutting is another key tool in improving forest health. Except for earmarked wildlife trees and snags, Brown quickly removes dead and dying individuals to reduce the spread of disease to their neighbors. The Wisdom Creek Ranch stands are visibly healthier than adjacent Forest Service stands, and Brown explains, "Part of that is that I have pretty ruthlessly gone after trees after they've died."

He encourages new recruits by opening up small patches within stands and taking out trees that are slowing in growth. Pockets of aspen are also retained to promote species diversity and bird habitat. "They are nitrogen-fixers and they make wonderful wildlife habitat," Brown says.

As a reminder of what many stands looked like prior to thinning, he has retained some unmanaged one-fifth-acre plots, which still harbor crowded, spindly trees that are stagnant in growth. By comparison, fifteen years after the harvest, trees outside the plots are well spaced and at least twice the diameter.

The Browns normally conduct harvests in the late summer and fall, when the ground is dry and the likelihood of encouraging insect outbreaks is minimal. By this time of year the soil compacts less, too. Sometimes logging takes place in the winter, when snow and ice further minimize soil compaction. Brown explains why logging is avoided in the spring, when the ground is moist and the sap is running.

"For one, you get tremendous soil compaction, which I'm concerned about. Two, if you don't get your logs to the market in a very timely manner, they blue. When the sap's in the tree, it blues very quickly." Blueing is a dye left in the saw wood by the Ambrosia fungus, which is introduced into the sapwood of newly dead pine trees by Ambrosia beetles.

"Third, pine is very susceptible to insect attack. As a matter of fact, when the sap is up in pine, it draws Scolytus and Ips beetles to it. So if you log in the spring and develop an accumulation of slash, you get tremendous insect populations."

Dwarf mistletoe is another serious adversary on Wisdom Creek Ranch. These small parasitic plants of the genus Arceuthobuim attach to a conifer's branches, send root-like strands into the tree's living tissue and draw out nutrients. Seeds of the parasite spread from tree to tree when mistletoe berries pop open. Each species of mistletoe targets a single species of conifer and both the ponderosa pine and Douglas fir types are present on Wisdom Creek.

Ted Brown has conducted several intensive harvests to remove mistletoe-infected trees from the forest canopy, while retaining seed trees that appeared vigorous and free of infection. In the resulting openings, he planted a different conifer species to slow the parasite's spread.

In a 17-acre area of the ranch, ponderosa pine dwarf mistletoe had spread from a nearby stand and was killing trees outright. Brown harvested the infected pine in a 300-foot-wide corridor and replanted it with Douglas fir, which resists pine mistletoe. "The scheme was to create a green barrier of Douglas fir that would interrupt the wind patterns that were carrying the mistletoe from a badly infected adjacent stand," Brown explained.

Unfortunately, the site was too harsh for Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine are slowly regenerating on their own. Paul Oester, a cooperative extension agent with Oregon State University, has recommended that Brown limit the spread of the infection by controlling stocking levels and pruning infected branches. With careful pruning, Oester believes, the pine recruits are likely to grow to maturity without significant reduction in growth.

Ted Brown has tried prescribed burning to keep fuel loads down, but worries about the danger of fire getting out of control. Although forest scientists see prescribed burning as a promising tool in restoring the fire-adapted forests on the east side of the Cascades, actual use by private landowners is limited.

"Fire is very difficult for landowners to use because of liability, and they just don't have the equipment a lot of times," explains Oester. So landowners turn to silvicultural prescriptions like thinning and selective harvest, he says.

Growing Big Trees

Ponderosa pine stumps, many four and five feet in diameter, are found on the floor of the Grande Ronde Valley and attest to the cathedral-like groves that once existed. The beauty of large pines is one reason the Browns are growing them today. There are important economic reasons, too. Large diameter trees on Wisdom Creek Ranch, if healthy and given enough room, are great producers of timber volume.

Explaining his interest in large-diameter trees, Brown says, "Partly it's just that, without them, we're going to lose sight of what an old-growth stand can look like. But it's also that one-sixteenth of an inch of growth on a 30-inch tree is putting on much more volume than a quarter-inch of growth on a 10-inch tree. A 30-inch tree is taking up a lot of site, but it's putting on very valuable growth."

In addition, the larger-diameter ponderosa logs draw higher prices at the mill per thousand board feet. Although prices for all species of conifer logs have fallen significantly in recent years, a premium is still paid for large-girth pine at the mill in La Grande where the Browns sell their logs.

The main tool used on Wisdom Creek Ranch to foster large-diameter trees is a modified type of "thinning from below," the practice of harvesting among the lower canopy levels while leaving behind the large, dominant trees. The difference in Brown's approach is that he is willing to take some dominant individuals if the spacing is such that co-dominant or intermediate trees will replace them.

One of the best examples of Ted and Mary Brown's forest management is a 70-acre stand of ponderosa pine averaging 80 years in age. The Browns commercially thinned this stand in 1959 and 1972. In these entries, they selected the less vigorous along with the dead and dying trees, but he also selected some dominant trees where the opening in the canopy would allow seedlings to regenerate. Much of the regeneration is ponderosa pine. Some white fir is allowed to recruit into these stands, but Brown watches for signs of crowding and below-ground competition to head off the chance of insect attack.

Reforesting Old Fields

Over the last 25 years, Ted and Mary have established stands of ponderosa pine in old agricultural fields around their house. Reforestation in these areas is a challenge: Summers are dry and hot, and grasses compete with seedlings. Using ponderosa pine seedling stock collected at a nearby site and grown for two years at a local nursery, Brown plants after the snows melt in March or April.

He usually applies herbicides around the seedlings to control grass competition, commonly using Velpar, which kills the competing grass but seems to have little effect on conifer growth. He returns nearly every year to interplant gaps created by tree mortality.

In 1974, the Browns had a unique regeneration success. Noticing it was going to be a good seed year, Brown plowed a 10-acre section of field that would receive the seed fall from adjacent ponderosa stands. Regeneration was a big success. "It was just a lucky happenstance," he says. "I've tried it several times since and haven't been able to get anything to grow."

To date, approximately 35 acres of old agricultural fields, which originally were forestland, have been restored back to ponderosa pine and are in various stages of growth. Brown expects these trees to put on an average of 14 inches of vertical growth a year. He doesn't plan to prune limbs but will adjust spacing from 10-by-10 feet to 12-by-12 feet -- spacing that is still tight enough to cause the trees to self-prune.

Brown planted a small section with 4,000 seedlings of non-native Scotch pine, few of which survived. He says, "If I were to give advice to anybody in eastern Oregon, it would be 'forget about Scotch pine.'" The experience underlines the advantage that native conifers have over non-native species.

Grazing continues on Wisdom Creek Ranch to this day, but the Browns run only 35 head of cattle, and they have fenced stock out of the main watercourse, Beagle Creek, for 15 years. As a result their quarter-mile section of creek is in better condition than the stream's course through the rest of the valley, they note.

When ponderosa pine seedlings are four to five years old, Brown releases cattle in the young stands in mid- to late-June to control fuel loads during the dry, hot summers. Cattle are allowed to graze grasses without overgrazing. Brown has found little if any damage to pine seedlings and saplings from the cattle. "The main reason we pasture is to remove the fire danger," says Brown.

Test Plots

Ted Brown is an avid tree farmer and statistics about the forests of Wisdom Creek Ranch are of great interest to him. He seeks data about timber volume and growth on his and Mary's land, and he wants to assess the outcomes of varying management and harvest methods.

For many years he relied on periodic timber cruises. Then in 1996, the Browns installed a system of 76 permanent tenth-acre plots spanning the property, and made a series of measurements in each plot. The plan is to gather this growth and yield data from the plots every five years. The plots are spaced at intervals of 440 feet and each plot is circular, with a radius of 37.2 feet.

Brown is convinced that any owner of working forestland needs good data for timber volume and growth in their stands. Regarding forest inventories, Brown says, "As a management principle, I think anyone who is serious about forest management should have an inventory. If for no other reason, if you suffered a catastrophic loss, you'd have a good record for recovery. And in terms of estate planning, you're not dealing with abstractions." Brown also finds the inventory valuable to estimate future economic returns.

Thinning Study Confirms Importance of Low Stocking

Brown works closely with Oregon State University Extension foresters and has received much valuable advice from them over the years. He also contributes to their research program through a series of experimental thinning plots on Wisdom Creek Ranch.

Bill Emmingham and Paul Oester, Oregon State Cooperative Extension silvicultural specialists, established nine thinning plots in 1986. They were divided into three groups, and the three plots in each group were thinned in a different way. One was heavily thinned from below, another was lightly thinned from below, and in the third -- dubbed the "Ted Brown Cut" -- trees from all diameter classes were taken in a heavy thin, in which about 40 percent of the standing board footage was removed.

Stands were re-measured at five and 10 years for growth. Results so far have shown the fastest growth in the Ted Brown cut as well as a higher growth response among the co-dominant trees than the dominant trees.

Oester emphasizes two preliminary conclusions of the study. First, low stocking levels are important. "If you want healthy trees, if you want regeneration, if you want to protect your pine stands from bark beetles, all those kinds of things, you really have to get the stocking down to that range of 60 to 90 square feet of basal area [per acre], and then let it grow." Second, for successful management in east-side forests, retaining the dominant and co-dominant trees with healthy crowns is key. The study continues.

Logging and Roads

The size of a timber sale on Wisdom Creek Ranch averages about 10 acres, and stands are re-entered every 20 to 25 years. The planned annual cut is 100,000 board feet, but actual harvests amount to less than that. "Mortality takes a lot of trees that were supposed to contribute to growth and harvest," Brown says. Harvest rates on the ranch average out to slightly less than the rate of growth, which is about 3 percent annually.

In the past, Brown and his family did the planning, tree marking, and much of the logging on the property, although recently he has reduced his logging activities. He occasionally hires a contract faller to work with him and often gets help from his three grown children, all of whom are actively involved in forest management and harvesting on the ranch.

The main harvesting equipment is a small treaded John Deere tractor. Brown often uses a cable with several chokers (a "bull line") to drag the logs to a skid trail. The steepest ground that Brown will skid is around 35 percent. He believes the lowland stands of ponderosa pine are the perfect ground for a mechanical processor and is considering hiring a contractor with one for some upcoming harvests.

To minimize residual damage during harvests, Brown practices staged logging. "In staged logging, you cut about what a skidder can handle," he explains. "So I cut four to five trees at a time.

"Then we clean those up and get them to a landing, and then drop the next few trees into the new opening. Commercial loggers seldom do that. Normally they would come into a unit and fall every tree, and it would just be mayhem."

Brown installed his road system by himself in the 1950s and '60s. The soils on the ranch are tough and none of the roads are rocked, and are not used in wet conditions. Annual road maintenance involves cutting off snags and windthrow. Brown says he wants to do more with water bars, although erosion and sedimentation on the ranch is not a big issue. Culverts have been installed in all of the stream crossings. Landings and skid trails are seeded with native grasses after harvesting to prevent erosion.

For the future, Brown's ideal is to locate roads on poor timber sites in order to leave productive land free for growing trees. In building some of the original roads he followed existing access routes, but will do it differently next time, since in certain cases these now cover some of the best timber sites on the property.

Economics

Ted and Mary Brown have found their timber inventory assessments to be invaluable for economic planning. "I'm really hooked on these inventories," Ted Brown says. "I think every budding tree farmer should have one of these."

Volumes are reported by tree species in two-inch increments. Brown can then plan future harvests to take advantage of particular species and diameters. "I'm playing a game with the market, especially in the case of pine," Brown says.

The higher prices fetched by larger dimension timber ponderosa pine provide Brown with a big incentive to hold trees a little longer in order to push logs into the next size category.

Paul Oester likens the investment in larger-diameter trees to a bank account: "If you left that tree that's 10 inches now, and if you're getting 10 rings to the inch, in 10 years, you'll add two inches in diameter. It's like you have the investment value of the tree at that point, of the 10 inches, and it's growing in value if the timber prices go up, and you get that additional bump when you go up to 12 inches."

Brown adds, "And that additional bump is worth more than the increment. In fact, it can double."

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