Now that summer has kicked off, Oregonians are rushing outside to, you know, be Oregonians. But no one will be doing that at Shellburg Falls Recreation Area. The options of camping, biking, and hiking were removed on July 5 due to public safety concerns.
Salem Weekly featured a couple of hiking trails in the area that lies within the Santiam State Forest. Shellburg Falls features a campground, views of waterfalls, and mountain biking trails. It also features a timber operation, which apparently means that visitors can no longer use the area at all.
The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) closed the site, citing public safety concerns due to the timber harvest.
“Recently, separate groups of joggers and mountain bikers moved through the immediate area where large trees were being felled,” said ODF’s Russ Lane in a written statement.
ODF is responsible for managing the 47,000 acres of the North Cascade District that includes Shellburg Falls. Their stated goals are to carefully manage the state’s forest areas to “provide a range of benefits from wood products to wildlife habitat to recreation opportunities.” What it doesn’t say is that the recreation portion of the benefits can be stopped to make way for wood products.
To make matters worse, it isn’t a short-term closure. ODF has closed the area possibly for the entire summer. According to their press release, the current timber operation and another sale nearby expected to get underway soon will remain active until the fall. That means that this entire area is closed off to the public so that a timber company can get their timber.
It’s not reasonable to close out the whole population because of the operations in one part of the area. They do say that they attempted signage to stop visitors of the park from becoming victim to the hazards. But when a few bad apples (or perhaps, victims of poorly placed signs) didn’t follow the rules, the entire area was shut down. Is there no better way to prevent the safety hazard? Can we not have pretty things?
There are other options for hiking in the immediate area, but the controversy starts when an organization completely nixes one of the uses of a large area for another use. A consolation is that the state department is offering permits, but only if they have assurances that any recreation occurring in the recreational area is far enough from the hazards presented by the timber operations.
If ODF is responsible for balancing wood production and recreation in these areas, closure of recreation is a failure of epic proportions. So, OMG! WTF, Oregon Department of Forestry?
