Bly, Oregon

Reflection

As I’ve been building the logging history section of this website, I’ve realized that it’s been weighing on me more than I expected.

Reading through the history and then going back out into the mountains makes the contrast hard to ignore. You start to understand that what once stood here was not just forest in a generic sense, but something far more developed and stable than what exists now. Trees that took centuries to grow. Landscapes that functioned in ways we barely recognize anymore.

One of the last rides I took with my great-grandpa, Jack Lansdowne, was just a couple weeks before he passed away. He took me up into the country northeast of Mitchell Monument, along the edges of Deming Creek toward Haystack Rock. As we drove, he pointed things out the way someone does when they’re not guessing, but remembering.

He told me that when he first arrived there, the timber was massive. Some of the trees were eight feet around or more. The canopies stood high above the ground, so high that fire couldn’t reach them. Down below, there was grass. Real grass. It stayed there because the shade from those big ponderosa pines kept the ground cool and open. Fire moved through those forests along the ground, not through the tops.

Standing in those same places now, it’s hard not to feel angry. The forests that exist today are more crowded, more fragile, and far more prone to catastrophic fire. Hiking through burned areas recently has made that reality impossible to ignore. It feels like a system that was reshaped into something that was always going to fail eventually.

At the same time, working through this history has forced me to be honest about something else.

Bly exists because of logging. Not abstractly, but directly. The town, the jobs, the families who settled here, and my own childhood all trace back to that period. This wasn’t destruction that happened somewhere else. It happened here, and it built the place I grew up in.

The more I read, the more I’ve come to see that this all unfolded during a relatively short span of time. A couple generations, really. The United States was expanding quickly, using the resources that were available, and not fully understanding the long-term consequences yet. The forests were consumed by a young country behaving like a growing organism. That doesn’t make it painless to look back on, but it does make it human.

I don’t think Bly could exist without that history. And I also don’t think the forests that once stood here will ever truly return. Both of those things feel true at the same time.

There are places, like Quartz Mountain, where forest management has tried to move things back toward a more open and resilient structure. Even without knowing every detail of how those projects were carried out, you can feel the difference when you walk through them. They don’t recreate the past, but they hint at what once worked.

This is where I’ve landed while building this site. The logging history of Bly matters. It deserves to be documented clearly and honestly. So does the loss that came with it.

This website isn’t meant to glorify the past or condemn it. It’s meant to tell the story as it actually unfolded, and to acknowledge the costs along with the benefits. Understanding how this place came to be feels like a necessary step toward being more thoughtful about what comes next.

For those who want to explore the historical record itself, the full logging history of Bly can be found here: