| Oswald West State Park |
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| Camping or Trees? |
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Oswald West State Park is one of Oregon’s prized public places. A million people a year visit, mostly to walk, hike, play on the beach and surf. We also have a small, primitive campground there (30 sites), that serves 15,000 people.
Last year, just as summer was warming up, people sleeping in the full campground were shaken awake. A mammoth spruce tree, 11’ feet in diameter at its base, fell with no warning. No storm. No wind. No rain. Just down.
We closed the campground, and this last fall and winter, sent our park managers and tree guys through to inspect the camping area. They looked closely at nearly a hundred trees, and found half of them were dead, dying or diseased and could also collapse without warning.
To re-open the campground, we’d have to cut the trees down. We’ve had to fell a tree here and there over time, but never so many trees at once in the campground. Taking out four dozen trees all at once will create a hole, and once those trees come out, a couple of things could happen:
1) Weeds and other invading plants could move in.
2) Other trees around the harvest area will become weaker and may also have to come down (or will blow over on their own).
3) There will be less wildlife habitat for birds like marbled murrelets, and less of the mature forest people come to the park to enjoy.
On the positive side, cutting trees would put those campsites back in service. The trees we cut down would have to stay on the ground (there’s no easy way to pull them out of the park), so we might lose a few campsites in the process. But "how do you harvest trees?" isn’t the question. Should we do it?
Keep Oswald West natural
Oswald West is supposed to be managed as a natural park according to a 1986 plan for state parks in Tillamook County. The plan directs us to keep the trails open, protect buildings, and give people what they need from a place like this: as few changes as possible. So, we have parking, trails and bridges and restrooms.
Would taking down those 49 trees be "as few changes as possible" or would it be the start of much heavier-handed management?
Here’s what we want to do: leave the trees (except for those few that could fall on a building or other high-use facility), keep the campground closed indefinitely, and continue to make Oswald West one of the last places you can take a walk through an ancient spruce-hemlock forest.
Here’s a map showing where the hazardous trees are in relation to the campsites.
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