Hiking in Jacksonville's Forest Park

Reminder to readers in the Rogue Valley: Poetry recitation Saturday, April 6, 3:00, at the Applegate Library.

    A few weeks ago I was hiking in Jacksonville's Forest Park on trails that would take me to the top of the mountain. 

    Pretty soon I started hearing chain saws. The woods suddenly gave out, and I was hiking through bare hills with lots of stumps.

    The view and the noise told the story. To my left were two hills sloping down to the valley, rounded and green with manzanita. 

Manzanita hillside in the Applegate, not in
Forest Park—just to give you an idea

The hill I was standing on and the ones I had hiked through were denuded. Slash piles of manzanita were waiting to be burned. Chainsaws buzzed in the distance. Soon the green hillsides would be as bare as these. 

    Ninety-nine percent of the manzanitas, which were ninety-nine percent of the vegetation on these hills, had been cut.

   I understood, of course. The danger of fire—and manzanitas, they say, are particularly oily—caused panic in the park managers. They said, "Cut 'em all down!"

    ("My teeth hurt." "Pull 'em out.")

    ("I have a pain in my belly." "Give her a hysterectomy.")

    Looking at those scraped-bare hills. I couldn't imagine that that destruction made good ecological sense. Surely there was a better solution.

    I turned my back on the sight and headed back towards the trailhead, hiking on a trail called Manzanita Tunnel. It will have to be renamed. The large, old manzanitas with their smooth, mahogany-red trunks no longer arch over the trail, making a delightful, magical tunnel. Now the trail goes over barren hills. We could call it Dead Souls Trail.

    When I expressed my dismay at this destruction to another hiker, she pointed out that manzanitas reseed quickly, and, yes, that's true. But earlier this month I was in another area where the manzanitas had been cut at least ten years ago. Baby manzanitas were all over the place. But they were still babies. How old were the ten-foot-high, eight-inch-thick, dense trunks of the old manzanitas that had been cut? 

I love those old manzanitas!
Here I'm hugging one on the Stein Butte trail.

Manzanitas may reseed readily, but they grow slowly. It will take untold decades for the beautiful manzanita forests to return to Forest Park's hills. If they are allowed to return.

    I haven't, myself, returned to Forest Park since that hike through scraped-bare hills. It's too painful to hike there now.

                Beautiful manzanita blossoms.      Photo by Larry Francis.