'Lost 40' timberlands for sale?

LOON LAKE — Surrounded by miles of private timber land and just three miles east of Coos County is the “Lost 40,” a parcel of public forest land the Bush administration has proposed to sell.

It’s miles away from a public entrance, accessible only by a private timber road that meanders through clearcuts and Douglas fir tree farms. But the 40-acre parcel’s potential sale could help benefit the timber safety net, which provides Douglas County with $50 million a year in funds.

It’s just one piece of approximately 300,000 acres of national forest lands across the country the administration has deemed as remote or hard to manage.

It proposes selling the land to fund half of the extension of the timber safety net through 2011, when the administration has called for the safety net’s termination.

But even though access to the Lost 40 is denied by a locked gate, some would like to see it remain exactly as it is: part of the Umpqua National Forest.

No one in the Umpqua National Forest’s supervisor’s office is exactly sure why the Lost 40 exists so far removed from the main system.

Situated about 25 miles northwest of Roseburg, the Lost 40 remains mostly forgotten within thousands of acres of Weyerhaeuser timber lands. It exists six miles from the southeast corner of the Elliott State Forest, but a world away from the Umpqua National Forest.

“We’re miles away from any other landowner,” said Mark Nauman, a Weyerhaeuser forestry engineer, who gave Umpqua Forest Service employees and interested parties a tour Friday through the private land and to the small square of public forest.

The forest service took the opportunity to survey culverts on the part of the logging road that runs through federal property. The Lost 40 is the only tract of public land in Douglas County that is included in Bush’s national forest land sale proposal.

But Nauman doesn’t believe Congress will approve Bush’s proposal and make the 40-acre plot available.

“We personally would be kind of surprised if it ever did become available,” Nauman said.

On a tour that began at the Loon Lake Lodge, south of Scottsburg, Nauman escorted a caravan of Forest Service sport-utility vehicles on a gravel road past a gate and farther south, to the Lost 40.

Along on the tour were two representative members of the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians. Both representatives said the Lost 40 exists in the confederated tribes’ aboriginal territory, so they were interested in the tour.

“The tribes are interested in all 1.6 million acres of its ancestral territory,” said Howard Crombie, a director for the department of natural resources for the confederated tribes, who declined to elaborate any further.

When the caravan reached the abandoned logging road that cuts through the Lost 40, Nauman stopped his truck and told the group it was walking from that point.

The tour group came upon a logging road that was rutted and slippery. Nauman said Weyerhaeuser had stopped using the road in the 1970s.

Larry Broeker, a geologist with the Umpqua National Forest, carried a pickax and walked up to the first culvert he saw to inspect it. He surveyed the culvert, measured it, and then drove his pickax into the bottom of the corrugated metal tube.

His pickax went straight through.

“There’s nothing there,” Broeker said.

A half mile up the road, another culvert was found, rusty and clogged with debris at its opening. At the drain end, the road and shoulder around it had slumped into the creek.

Broeker said the culvert was too small and water had scoured around it, causing the mini-landslide.

Susan Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Umpqua National Forest, said she wasn’t sure who was responsible for repairing the culvert damage.

“It’s a unique situation so that’s what we’re going to look into,” she said.

On Monday, Johnson said that Weyerhaeuser was issued a special-use permit for the road in 1972, but it did not reapply for a road easement when the Forest Service changed its road regulations in 1982.

Because of that, the forgotten road in the Lost 40 was no longer Weyerhaeuser’s responsibility.

“It looks like it is the responsibility of the Forest Service,” Johnson said.

But whether the single road will receive culvert repairs remains as unclear as the Lost 40’s future ownership.

In the meantime, Johnson said the Forest Service will list the road as a priority as it surveys damaged roads over the next two to three months.

Johnson said she’s not sure if the Lost 40 will get any maintenance since this year’s record rains did its worst to roads in the Umpqua National Forest.

“There’s a lot of damaged roads out there,” she said.


• You can reach reporter Adam Pearson at 957-4213 or by e-mail at apearson@newsreview.info.