O.R.C.

Eight miles southwest of Oakridge Oregon, on Jan 19th, Coyote Mountain took a swipe at the Union Pacific Railroad Company. As the U.P. mainline switchbacks up Coyote Mountain, a major landslide 20 acres wide and 200 feet deep plunged down the mountain. It took with it 1,500 ft. of upper track and another 150 ft of the lower track and buried 60 acres. One 3,000-foot segment was covered in mud and logs 20 feet deep.With the mainline cut off UP has been forced to divert traffic from Eugene, Oregon to Roseville, Claifornia though Bend, Oregon and as far east as Salt Lake City, Utah. The cushions of Amtrak are also feeling the blow, as they had to temporarily suspend the Coastal Starlight train that runs between San Fransico and Seattle, offering bus services instead.

The slide, known as the Frazier Slide, was originally thought to be an easy cleanup but kept the tracks closed until April 5th. Local lumber mills such as Weyerhouser in Springfield and Roseburg Forest Products (known for being one of the few companies to mill old-growth lumber) complained of delays in empty lumber cars. Forestry Service research geologist Fred Swanson said that a 1992 clear-cut at the origin of the slide was not to blame: “From a geology perspective, stuff falls,” he said. “We’ve got gravity. We’ve got tectonic forces and volcanic forces pushing rocks up, and they’ve got to come down. … We talk of these processes as disturbance agents, but geologists don’t refer to them that way. They’re just part of the land-sculpting phenomenon. This is just one little tick in a multimillion-year history of that river valley.” But whether these suspect words are true or false, the Forestry Service still claims that the 700,000 board feet of trees already pulled from the slide, as well as the trees not yet removed, are federal property and shall be sold to the highest bidder once all the trees have been recovered. Nevermind, of course, the importance of biomass in helping damaged ecosystems recover.