Moving Through the Trees at Night (To Save the Forests)

I’d come to relish night hiking. In this and many ways, forest activism awakens the senses. Traipse across miles of moonless nights on labyrinthine logging roads, with fifty pounds on your back and an injunction on your head (Kurt already had one; mine was coming), on roads patrolled by armed, territorial security squads, and your senses do push-ups. Climb a thirteen-foot-diameter tree in the middle of the night and you’re running a marathon. Do it enough and the trees start talking to you.

On dark roads your senses learn how to find landmarks without your eyes, how to feel when a vehicle is approaching. At the slightest sound, your ears seem to double in size. The scent of petroleum might indicate tractors parked a quarter mile up the hill. If we spoke while hiking, we whispered.

You realize that a moonless, motionless dark is not simply black. The stars are your friends. In open country you can see a companion’s face. Where the road bisects dense woods, you don’t see anything in front of you—not the track, not the person inches away. You learn to feel the road with your feet, to understand that a distinct pitch to one side might end in a thirty-foot drop. A road through trees cuts a path into the night sky. To see where you’re going, look up.

Memory is key. Know where you are. Hike often. Understand that the long, arcing curve in the road that appears after the big snag that stands against the sky like Thor—muscled arms of wood, spidery dead branches dangling—crests at a major crossroads, but you don’t want one of these lanes. You’re after the skid trail that veers off at two o’clock, between the main roads—your private entrance to the forest primeval.

Always, no matter the time, there was risk of encountering a vehicle. It was not unusual to dodge a truck at 3 a.m. We would dive off the road, even if we couldn’t make out the landing. I still have scars.

We all wore watches. Drop times were not as important to nail as pickups. You couldn’t miss those. Pickup drivers would wait maybe five minutes. You couldn’t just hang out in your car in front of a logging gate. This was especially true as our actions became notorious. Neighbors grew wary. They started keeping dogs outside on runs. In Humboldt County you assume that everyone is armed.

So if you didn’t reach your pickup at, say, exactly midnight, your driver was going to leave for an hour or so. If you missed the second one, you would be sleeping out again. After a couple of years of being acutely tuned in to the clock, I could often tell you the time within five minutes, even if I hadn’t seen a watch all day. I still can. My family calls me the “time and temperature man.”

We arrived at the clear-cut of the desiccated millipedes at 4:30 a.m., achieved a high berm near the wall of old growth, and safely sacked out for a few hours. We ate rice crackers and cheese and beef jerky, drank a liter of water each, and moved into the old growth on the skid trail I’d found five months before. Flagging indicated that we’d entered THP 87- 240, which the Environmental Protection Information Center now had tied up in court.

We soon found the Elk Head Springs THP. The South Fork Elk River was tiny; yet, I noted, “the water here flowed as if August did not exist, and it was pure. We drank much.” From here we zigzagged up and down throughout the weird, wonderful world of Elk Head Springs: big rocks pocking the earth, redwood spires jutting from dozens of small seeps across the terrain, which everywhere was slippery. I wrote that we’d found “a unique world, a natural wonder never to be duplicated. Until, of course, it’s clear-cut.”

Road flagging wended throughout the large grove. Kurt would follow one line of flags and I another; then we’d meet up and do it again. Some of the roads were designed to cross unstable slopes with grades steeper than 65 percent, which feels almost vertical. After the first season these roads would fail and discharge mountains of debris directly into South Fork Elk River.

Finally, after half a day of exploration, Kurt found a logging road that ran alongside the South Fork Elk River, on the north side, directly across from Pacific Lumber’s property line and the magnificent “wall” of Elk Head Springs Grove. This was not a Pacific Lumber road; it belonged to a different timber company. We crossed the river, stood on the road, and looked back. The trees grew very tall— it’s likely that many reached heights of three hundred feet.

From the road we had an unobstructed view of the grove, perfect for photos. Here we could occupy the great conifers at the edge of an ongoing logging operation, and we could stage the action from a neighboring property where ground crews could hide and photographers could get their shots. We’d found an easy way to access Elk Head Springs on a road not patrolled by Maxxam.

On August 27, fifteen activists, including four from Oregon, filled the floor of my living room, packing gear. Organizers created a half dozen independent piles containing ropes, webbing, carabiners, assorted hardware, sleeping bags and pads, tarps, food, and fifty one- liter plastic water bottles. The bottles had little loops at their bottom ends, allowing them to be strung together and dangled from a tree.

We would tote more than five hundred pounds to the action site. At first my two roommates looked on in awe, if not fear, until one of them joined in—a tall, lean college student who could haul sixty pounds at a solid clip. Heading up the Oregon group as the picture of calm resolve was Mary Beth Nearing. Together, MB and I would ascend and occupy the great redwoods of Elk Head Springs.

Just after midnight on Saturday, August 29, four vehicles dropped fifteen trekkers and packs at the end of Elk River Road. In silence we hopped the gate and simply walked. No one waited; no one talked. We would regroup a quarter mile up the road. The waxing moon had come and gone, so we navigated by starlight.

The night air was perfectly cool. In my distress over witnessing a long summer of Maxxam’s accelerated destruction, I found succor in the easy tune of thirty tramping feet. Our action would be symbolic, but at that point it was all we had.

At base camp everyone sacked out until dawn. At first light five of us crept across the river to scope the site. Logging and road building, even on Saturday, were ongoing just up from Elk River, about a quarter mile from base camp. Even from a distance the sound of two bulldozers roared. Above the din an agonized chainsaw ripped through a redwood, followed by dead air at the end of the cut, then a succession of pistol cracks that preceded the redwood’s explosive crash to earth. This occurred every thirty minutes. Scattered across the scoured landscape were dozens of boles awaiting transport.

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Excerpted from The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.