Episode 55: Forest Fire Recovery (in English)

Episode 55 - Final__complete (edited)

[00:00:00]

Introduction to In the Woods Podcast

Lauren Grand: From the Oregon State University's Extension Service, you are listening to In the Woods with the Forestry and Natural Resources Program. This podcast brings the forest to listeners by sharing the stories and voices of forest scientists, land managers, and enthusiastic members of the public. Each episode, we will bring you research and science based information that aims to offer some insight into what we know and are still learning about forest science and management.

Stick around to discover a new topic related to forests on each episode.

Steve Fitzgerald: Hi everyone. My name is Steve Fitzgerald. I'm an extension silviculture specialist. And welcome to this segment of our In the Woods podcast.

Meet the Guests: Kate McMichael and Teresa Hauser

Steve Fitzgerald: We have two guests with us today, Kate McMichael and Teresa Hauser, who own and manage their Elk Ridge Tree Farm.

Thank you for talking with us today.

Teresa Hauser: Oh, great to be with you, Fitz. Always good to spend time with you. Always.

Steve Fitzgerald: Great, great. So, your story [00:01:00] and journey in managing your property, You know, I look at it, it's both tragic yet it's been really inspiring and I think others would find it inspiring as well. It really demonstrates a lot of fortitude and resilience on both of your parts.

I know you've put a lot of work into your property. But, you know, before we get into your story, perhaps you could introduce yourselves again and maybe a little bit more about your background.

Teresa's Background and Journey

Teresa Hauser: I'm Teresa and I would say that pretty much nothing in my experience prepared me for what we're doing now. I grew up in what became suburban Southern California.

It was not quite to the point of suburbia yet when I was there and I liked being outside. I rode horses. I loved that. I dreamed of running away to the Northwest out of Southern California. Um, but by the time I went to [00:02:00] college I studied theology I worked as a minister for a few years in a fabulous, fabulous college.

Entry to that kind of work. And I'm still indebted to the young women I worked with there. And then I went to seminary and seminary really doesn't prepare you for this kind of work. And eventually, Got to a point where just my own faith's journey took me away from that. Kate and I had buried our, all our parents, a lot of our friends.

I had gotten a job helping out at a nursery just because the owner of the nursery was a friend, not because I had any aptitude for plant life, which I really didn't. But I did discover that, wow, I love being outside working. I love the manual labor. I love the being in the dirt. And so we had had a fantasy at one [00:03:00] point that, Oh, maybe one day we'd get some property and originally we'd thought have horses.

The very first permutation of that was, Oh, we could take broken critters and bring broken people to be together cause it's, you heal when you work on helping heal something or someone else. And at that time we were working with really broken people. Anyhow, we started thinking about retiring, realized we couldn't afford to retire in California.

She found this place online, made contact with the realtor, who is Fred Sperry shout out to him he made this possible for us. And so we had this dream that we'd have this little piece of land and we could care for this little piece of land the rest of our days. That's how we got here.[00:04:00]

Steve Fitzgerald: So what about you, Kate?

Kate's Background and Journey

Kate McMichael: So, unlike Teresa, I actually grew up in the Northwest. Well, Idaho considers itself part of the Northwest, at least Boise did and outside city limits. So I grew up with trees all around me and loved that. So coming back to Oregon has felt like a return to my childhood roots.

So that was part of the appeal that brought me to Oregon, or brought us to Oregon. But before that from Idaho, you know, went to co did the whole college thing and eventually ended up in California. And the last number of years I too did seminary and worked in an inner city parish for a lot of years.

And then, you know, wrote myself out of a job at one point to keep a a hospitality center for homeless folks running because grant money was harder to find. And writing myself out of a job, but then I ended up teaching high school. So I taught world religions and ethics [00:05:00] and I've been thinking a lot about that.

It's like I asked my girls, I taught in a girls high school, I asked my girls a lot to step out of their comfort zone. And there has been nothing like the last number of years since we moved up here and took on this little beautiful forest property, forgetting us to step out of our comfort zone.

Steve Fitzgerald: You both are so brave.

Kate McMichael: Or stupid. I'm not sure which.

First Steps in Forest Management

Steve Fitzgerald: So, you both retired and you found a piece of land. And what was, now, what were you thinking? What was going through your mind now that you had a piece of property that you had to care for?

Kate McMichael: Well, that it turned out that you don't really know as much as you think you do. Probably one of the upsides of both of us having come out of an education background, both being pretty educated, but also having done the popular education.

And then, you know, I taught high school. It's like, you know, if you don't know [00:06:00] stuff, the first thing you really need to do is start learning. And when we realized like one of the first times we walked up our, one of the big skid trails, and we're looking at it going, is this all really Doug fir? But this bark looks kind of cool.

And my sister was visiting, you know, she's a master gardener from Idaho. And she's like, is it white pine? And we're like, I don't know. And so we got in touch with our extension forester and actually took every single class we could come up that she'd offered.

Learning and Adapting to Forest Management

Kate McMichael: And You know, and that was, and that felt really important to us because we realized that however much we had been backpackers and hikers and we loved wilderness and the outdoors, and that makes you very passionate about those things, but it doesn't mean you know anything when it comes to actually wanting to care for a little piece of property.

So yeah, learning was the first thing that we felt we needed to do.

Steve Fitzgerald: So you were, uh, taking a lot of classes and probably going on a lot of [00:07:00] forestry field trips. So, you know, in thinking about your property, what were the kind of topics or things that you were interested in learning the most about and maybe applying here on your property?

Kate McMichael: Well, I know we were really interested in how to, you know, Forest health and resilience and wildfire resilience and resistance, I guess, partly because coming out of California, part of what sent us away is we had hit that point where wildfires were becoming more and more frequent in California.

Ironic by now because They're even more frequent. But we were within that six degrees of separation of everyone for NorCal fires and SoCal fires at a point. And we're like, we just can't stay here anymore. This is just too hard. And we're like, Western Oregon seems like a better place to be, but we want to do everything we can to protect the, protect our forest.

And it was pretty tight. You know, it. Needed our 35 year olds probably could have done 35

Steve Fitzgerald: year old trees. We

Kate McMichael: had a 35, a stand of 35 year olds and the 35 year olds [00:08:00] probably could have done with a thinning. I think they probably missed their pre commercial thinning time and, you know, So we learned things like that, you know.

What is an intermediate or suppressed tree? Suppressed means dead, but but at least it did for us. It's like, oh, we can actually learn to cut this one down because it's small enough that, you know, you don't really have to worry about how it falls, really, because you can kind of guide it with your hand and then carry it away.

Which, we did a lot of that. We were trying to think. thin out some of that, thin out some of the crazy understory, all of the dog hair it makes it so that, you know, the skid trails were clearer because right after we signed on the property, Snowmageddon happened. And so it took us like six months to find our way through the major skid trail that runs through the whole 35 year old stand from one end of the, you know, sort of one end of that side of the property to the other.

And so we had, you know, we had a lot to learn. It

Teresa Hauser: can't be overstated how little we knew when [00:09:00] we got this place. I mean, in a just world, we probably wouldn't have been allowed to purchase it. Like, you know, if we had gone to adopt a dog, they'd have said, I'm sorry, since you don't know how many legs a dog has, and that many of them do, and some of them don't have tails.

When you learn something about dogs, come back and you can adopt a dog. But I mean, We, our first walkthrough with Lauren Grant, God bless her she was saying that, no, this looks really healthy. I'm like, why? What do you see that makes it look healthy? So all the words Kate just used, we didn't know any of those words.

Lauren said, well, you know, you can look at the leaders on these young trees. What's a leader? We, you know, We didn't know anything and people have been incredibly patient and gracious and generous about helping us learn things from literally the ground up.

Steve Fitzgerald: So [00:10:00] you purchased the property in 2019? Yep.

Facing the 2020 Wildfires

Steve Fitzgerald: And so you're on this kind of knowledge journey about trees and forests and resiliency and suppressed trees and cutting trees and and then 2020 happened. The large wildfires of 2020 that swept through the McKenzie Valley, the Holiday Farm fire. And.

Tell us a little bit about where you were what was what you were going through mentally. I know. And so, yeah.

Kate McMichael: One of the great ironies, I've always thought, is that, like, the week before the fire happened, we had just finished, like, all the way, opening up, like, our skid trail all the way, so that, you know, it could be used for ingress or egress We had actually just been doing a recording session [00:11:00] with a couple of with Lauren, actually, and another young consulting forester in the area for Oregon Women in Timber, and we'd managed to open up this a path to one of the streams, and we were working with Pure Water Partners, we were on the preservation track because our water, our riparian areas were so healthy and filled with native plants and everything.

And actually, the day before the fire, we were here hanging out. We visited with my one of my siblings had come with his family and they were off floating the McKenzie and we were hanging out in our camper, our truck camper because we didn't want to float the McKenzie. And I was reading through the management plan that had been written for, you know, pure water partners.

And It was really an awesome day. And I mention it because we returned to that one again and again feeling so grateful. Because it was, I think, one of the very few days we'd had where we spent a chunk of hours on the property without working on something. We were just there.

Steve Fitzgerald: Just enjoying it.

Kate McMichael: [00:12:00] Just enjoying it. And right, and then the fire. And At first, I think our biggest concern was that, like, our neighbors got out okay,

Steve Fitzgerald: And you weren't living on the property at the time.

Kate McMichael: We weren't living on the property. We'd been working on some of the, helping with some of the clearance for where the home site would be and stuff.

But, yeah, we weren't

Teresa Hauser: We were renting in Springfield and that's when the east wind event started. And I mean, I grew up in SoCal. I know Santa Ana's. I know wind driven fires. I was six when I was first evacuated because of a wildfire that came to probably within 50 feet of our house. Wow. So you

Steve Fitzgerald: had evacuated.

Teresa Hauser: I, yes.

Steve Fitzgerald: Prior to, in your youth. Yeah. Wow.

Teresa Hauser: And the barn where I rode, we had a couple of times where we had all the horses and halters out on one of the sandy arenas watching fire creep down a hill at night. So, and [00:13:00] apparently, based on some of my responses, I have some trauma from that I hadn't known.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah.

Teresa Hauser: So when we started getting these. This crazy smoke in Springfield for both of us, our tension ratcheted up. We texted the neighbors, it's up here, kind of, oh my god, are you guys okay? And Rick responded, yeah, but we've never really seen winds like this since I've been here. And Ricky's been here his whole life.

Yeah.

Steve Fitzgerald: And he's one of your neighbors?

Teresa Hauser: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, But according, yeah, according to record that our fire hadn't even started. This was smoke from other fires. And I don't know when we heard for sure about our fire. But again, our big one was making sure that our neighbors got out.

Kate McMichael: I think we were up most of the night.

At some point, something alerted us to the fact that fire had started. And we didn't really sleep a whole lot. And then, it was helpful. I [00:14:00] mean, we were really relieved that all the neighbors got out. And at first, That was the main thing we were concerned about. I do remember we started thinking, should we, you know, be prepared to evacuate?

I too grew up with a little bit of fire trauma cause growing up in Boise, Idaho, in the middle of desert where, you know, fire happened all the time. And we didn't have city fire protection. We had BLM fire protection and they were always off dealing with wildfires started by stupid people somewhere else.

not near our, where we lived. And so, I mean, I went to bed every night as a kid in the summer, thinking what I would actually grab to take with me if a fire came. So this was like, wow, all of those childhood, you know, my childhood anxieties and her childhood traumas kind of coming together. So we started packing up, you know, we were really right, the very leading edge of Thurston.

And so we were like, yeah, fire could get closer. And I remember as we were going Every time we'd go outside, there'd be more and more ash on the truck. And I remember trying to go, [00:15:00] These are our trees, blessing us. These are our trees. I know these are our trees. And, you know, everybody else's trees up there.

But these are our trees, blessing us. Which I think that kind of anxiety carried us through for the first few weeks. I mean, we weren't out

Teresa Hauser: three weeks, wasn't it? Before we were allowed back up. So

Steve Fitzgerald: they had it all closed while they were trying to do all the suppression. So landowners or homeowners and landowners couldn't come back.

Yeah.

Kate McMichael: I think it was February, September 23rd when they finally let us back up on the property

Teresa Hauser: and some Weyerhaeuser folks had been up here. And Rick had connections, and so they actually did a drive by of all the properties so that people could at least see if their homes were left. And that was good because the Lane County map had a lot of inaccurate information.

So we knew that, well, all we had at that point was a hole in the ground. And so yeah, some of our insulation had blown away, but [00:16:00] I mean this, the Bucks port a

Kate McMichael: potty had blown over, which amused everyone. So I think people were grasping for humor wherever they could. So that was funny to people.

But the irony there was like, we didn't really care about the, house that hadn't been built yet. We wanted to know how our trees were. And that's where we started realizing this connectedness of the timber and forestry community, because that young woman forester who we had been interviewing the week before, her husband is a a reforestation forester for Justina.

And so he was up here because they were, everybody was up here fighting the fires. And we, that was one of the big things we learned too was how much industry folk are part of fire fighting, whether it's on their land or not. And anyway, she made Garrett drive through and take pictures of our trees because she knew that that's what we would want to see were our trees.

Returning to the Burned Property

Steve Fitzgerald: So, you were talking about the fire [00:17:00] and that the fact is you couldn't come here to examine your property for quite a while, but when you're able to get here, what was that like? What was that like? What did you anticipate you might see?

Teresa Hauser: I think from Garrett's trip through, we had thought things might not look too, too bad.

And one of our neighbors had gotten a heat signature and it hadn't looked too bad. And we didn't know then that that meant that everything had already burned. And One of our neighbors, Mark Miller he's a consulting forester with Trout Mountain Forestry, and he. There'd been some contact and he wanted to know if we wanted to touch base.

He and his wife were coming [00:18:00] back up to look at their property and did we wanna touch base after we'd had a chance to see ours? And we thought that would be great. And we came up and you know, there's still this. pall of smoke. And everything was sort of a pale orange. It, I thought it looked kind of like my imagination of a nuclear blast, which comes mainly from the word yellow cake and yellow cake uranium, whatever that is.

And, you know, just that kind of yellow orange of everything. But I don't know that we were prepared for the almost complete devastation to our trees. It kind of surpassed what we had feared and then the needle cast. And we also Much like when we toured the property with Lauren, we didn't know what we were looking at.

[00:19:00] So I knew brush fires from Southern California. I didn't know timber fires. And so, you know, all this needle cast, what was that? What were the orange trees? Though we figured that wasn't good.

Kate McMichael: The fire freeze is so interesting too, where it looked like the tree, you know, where they're trying to get away from the, branches are trying to get away from the heat, but it almost looks like they're dancing.

Which has this kind of horrifying sort of beauty to it.

Steve Fitzgerald: They're kind of frozen in the direction the fire came.

Kate McMichael: Yes. Yeah. And it was, but It was awful. We walked down the skid through the 35 year olds and it's, yeah, the needle cast, the ground was yellow. There were areas where older trees that, you know, we had learned enough to know that they should have maybe done better and it's like, no, I mean, everybody just, it just got.

Torched, but not enough to destroy everything. Just enough to really [00:20:00] kill everything. And then obvious, of course, our little, we had a, we were kind of like a third, the 35 year olds, a third, they were about eight, they had had an amazing summer. I mean, 16 inch leaders. And they were, you know, obviously just torched because the little ones couldn't make it.

And then our 18 year olds, They didn't look good either. I remember we were walking down on the other side through the 18 year olds and I got a call from our contractor who was checking in on us. I mean, we were really lucky that our contractor stayed super connected and as committed to us as we were to them through this process.

And I remember going, Josh, it's all. It's like, it's all gone. I mean, everything. And we'd been working with him like that few days before the fire. And it's just like, but it's just gone. One of the hardest parts still is when we do anything, a retrospective [00:21:00] for anyone that asks us, Oh, what was the fire stuff?

Or we end up going through pictures. It's like, it's still just kind of makes me queasy. To look at those pictures, it's actually even more heart wrenching to look at the before pictures and kind of go, Oh my God, cause I've almost forgotten by now how beautiful our forest was before the fire. Cause it was really, it was beautiful.

I mean, it had its messy quality. Lauren taught us healthy forests are messy, but it was. It was beautiful and it was not beautiful anymore. But the big thing that really happened for us being back here was it made it really clear that we'd spent enough time being here, you know, trimming out, clearing out those intermediate and suppressed trees and, you know, creating, you know, old piles of lumber or Yeah.

Well, little pyres of logs that I was hoping to mill into lumber and stuff. And we'd spend a lot of time pulling up [00:22:00] bracken fern and different things, trying to help clear out the area for the home site. And we formed a real intimacy

Teresa Hauser: with the land over our fairly brief period with it. And a different kind of intimacy than say, if we just hiked through it, but actually learning how to care for it was really different than just caring about it.

And so learning, you know, which trees are going to make it, which trees aren't, which, you know, sure. Kind of a moot point by now. But we had a real intimate relationship with this land, even if it was forged in a very brief period of time. And it made it really clear to us that

Kate McMichael: we were not just responsible for this piece of land, but responsible to it.

That there'd been a relationship formed. And I mean, we thought it was only reasonable to like have that kind of conversation with one another. Like, wow, this is not the retirement we planned. What are we going to do? Are we going to cut our [00:23:00] losses or are we going to stay? And I mean, it was a really pretty short conversation.

Cause we were like, well, of course we're going to stay. How can we. desert our trees. You know, it's our little patch of land. How can we turn our back on it now that it's hurting? And we,

Teresa Hauser: it,

Steve Fitzgerald: that's a really interesting way to, to think about that because, you know, here you have this dream and now it's in some ways, you know, it's gone up in smoke, but it's this desire to, to help it recover, you know, nurture it.

bring it back despite what that's going to take.

Teresa Hauser: So there's a book that I read a million years ago called the Cardinal that was written probably a million and a half years ago. And it's about this young man who becomes a priest and eventually becomes a cardinal in a church [00:24:00] that most of us wouldn't recognize by now.

But in it, there's a scene where the young man goes to kind of discern his vocation. And as part of that, he ends up at what are they called? Those places that priests live rectory,

Steve Fitzgerald: rectory. Thank you.

Teresa Hauser: It's been a while. So he goes to the rectory and the the active priest there has him care for.

The old priest who lives there, who is beyond being able to care for himself. And so the young man does that without really any hesitation or any qualm about it. And the priest who's Assigned that task to him for the day wonders if that's a good idea for a young man discerning a vocation that people getting married, if they knew where the marriage would end, how one of them would end up [00:25:00] perhaps in need of absolute physical care.

Would they still get married? Was this too much to put on him? And clearly, in that case, it wasn't But I think of that sometimes, you know, if we had known that within a year and a half. Our little retirement paradise would be ash, would we have done that? And, it's not a fair question. You can never know.

Anything can always happen. And this is what happened to us and to our land, and Now we deal with it.

Steve Fitzgerald: Why don't we go take a walk and maybe you can kind of describe you know, what kind of restoration work you've been doing and the effort that it has taken thus far.

Teresa Hauser: Cool. Sure.

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay. Well, let's go. So[00:26:00]

you came back and. A lot of your property had been burned. How did you figure out what your next steps were going to be?

Community Support and Salvage Harvest

Teresa Hauser: Well, we were never alone in this, and this is part of, if you want to go, oh, if we had moved someplace different, if we had lived someplace different, things may have been different, but you know what?

We hadn't even gotten up to the property before some of the people we'd gotten to know in the forestry and timber community were calling us, asking us how we were, if we'd had a chance to see how our property was, if we needed help. Somebody called pretty immediately and said, you're going to want to get seedlings, call this woman at Brooks tree farm, get nursery, Brooks nursery get some stuff from her.

So. [00:27:00] Ev eh. I'm not sure how we would have figured it out if we were stuck doing it on our own, but we never were. And so we had our neighbor Mark saying that he thought maybe this could be a salvage harvest, that the 35 year olds could maybe be a salvage. We had Anna saying that she'd get in touch with a logger friend of hers.

He could come out and see if he thought it was something that could be salvaged. We, And these weren't people we sought out. These were people being in touch with us. So like a

Steve Fitzgerald: community.

Teresa Hauser: Exactly. And that was exactly what we weren't going to do when we retired. We weren't going to do community.

Kate McMichael: We weren't going to go places, do things, meet people, join things.

We were done with that. You know, high introverts. here. You know, it was God's little practical joke that I was a high school, you know, I was a teacher and on every day. I was like, okay, we're going to be off for a [00:28:00] while. It was going to be awesome.

Steve Fitzgerald: And here you are.

Kate McMichael: There is that old joke, right? How do you make the Holy Spirit laugh?

Make plans. So it's like, that's been totally kind of our experience. I mean, in some ways I think we probably did everything almost too much. Like, Oh, we'll try everything. So yes, we ordered seedlings. Not very many, but we ordered, you know, Oh, what we could get. Cause there weren't dug for anymore. So we got Willamette Valley, Ponderosa and incense cedar.

You know, we ordered half a pound of dug first seed so we could maybe grow some of our own, like everything. Everything we could think of took every, well, the OSU, the fire program, we were at, we, you know, made sure we tuned in to every episode kept trying to, you know, learn as much as we could and write the next addendum to the management plan.

Cause you know, we had taken our intro to management class and we had pretty much, we'd finally finished, you know, the first draft of the management plan, which was by now totally pointless and [00:29:00] except as a historic. Record of what things had been and so we kind of came up with a plan working with Mark on what

Teresa Hauser: would happen And our stewardship Forester we had him out almost immediately after we were in the Oregon Department of Forestry yes, and I mean we

Kate McMichael: love him I mean, I think half the meeting was all of us, you know sharing our trauma together because there was just so much of it.

But yeah, he was supportive from the get go. He's always been supportive telling us, you know, we're doing the right thing. And, you know, he's a hundred percent behind us and he always has been. Yet we could hardly be more fortunate in the community that formed around us, whether we'd intended it or not.

Steve Fitzgerald: So tell me so you did a salvage harvest tell me a bit about what that was like and the planning that it took and how it came out.

Kate McMichael: We were really lucky. I mean, I emailed someone had [00:30:00] suggested Miller Timber. I emailed them. They emailed back immediately and someone came up. Someone came out. It turned out that he'd had family up here who'd lost property and Seneca.

This is before Seneca. And SPI did their thing. The

Steve Fitzgerald: sawmill. The

Kate McMichael: sawmill. Seneca was releasing their loggers to work with folks needing to get salvage harvests done in the holiday footprint, in the holiday farm footprint. And so we were lucky enough that could happen here. And then since Mark lived here, it was, he, it was possible for him to connect our salvage job with our neighbor's salvage job that no one would look at.

Cause it was smaller and complicated. And so we were able to combine them together, which that was actually awesome. We were here every day that the loggers were here. Cause it felt like it was important to be with our trees as they went to their next, this next phase in their lives to become wood products.

Teresa Hauser: It went well. [00:31:00] Apparently, not so much that we could tell, but apparently our job wasn't that complicated, so they could put young loggers on, on the job. And so that was cool. The sweet guys had some great conversations with them and it went. It went well. I mean, the big trees came down. It wasn't an area we could interplant.

The trees were too big for that to be safe for anybody And too tightly spaced. Yeah. So

Kate McMichael: I mean, it's ugly, right? I mean, that's the sad part. I mean, there's no getting around Fact that, you know, where there were 30 5-year-old trees, now there's like tons of slash on the ground that they drove over.

It was cut to length logging and so they were protecting the soil from compaction. But, you know, you have you, for a while, we could kind of pretend the trees were still there while they were standing. You know, you could get shade underneath them at least for a little while. [00:32:00] But, you know.

Cork Boots and Log Trucks

Kate McMichael: But all that slash, we did get corks.

Yeah, we did

Teresa Hauser: get

Kate McMichael: corks.

Steve Fitzgerald: Corks, yeah, cork boots. Yeah.

Kate McMichael: And actually what was funny in some ways is the day they started actually moving the logs out was the day the planters arrived. And so we have some pictures of log trucks moving out and planters moving around where they were. Kind of late. I mean, I know that we did those classes.

Lessons from Intro to Management

Kate McMichael: This was our, this would be one bit of advice we would have for anyone else. When you take your Intro to Management class and you find yourself going, I can kind of, you know, zone out during this part because it'll never impact me, like we did with logging and reforestation. It might. It might. So paying attention is good.

I mean, thank God we still had notes and we had assistance going through all that. Never say never. Never say, yeah, never say never.

Challenges of Early Planting

Kate McMichael: So, we know you should plan all those things ahead, but the fire had different plans. And so, planting [00:33:00] early April probably wasn't great. We had a really dry spring that year, and then we had the heat dome.

So, we actually started trying to water trees.

Watering During the Heat Dome

Steve Fitzgerald: So, the heat dome, for our listeners, was that really hot spell in June, late June of 2021. 2021.

Kate McMichael: 2021. It was like, what, 106 outside. And we'd been actually watering on a fairly regular cycle. The acre, probably the 1200 seedlings or so that were closest around the house that we could get to ultimately ended up getting firefighter backpacks, you know, the five gallon water packs.

We fell down a lot. we finally started to, we have lots and lots of pin flags from trying to mark the combo of tree wells and just the. Vegetation comes back,

Steve Fitzgerald: right? So, I mean, for our listeners, in most cases, when seedlings are planted, they are not watered, so to don a a water, Backpack [00:34:00] and then water 1200 seedlings.

That's incredible.

Kate McMichael: It didn't help us Yeah, we watched them. I mean we were watering the days of that heat wave that heat dome and it's like we still watch trees That were beautiful and green turn rust orange by the end of it because they just couldn't. I mean, there was nothing that we could have done.

So that was not a really successful planting year. Both the ones we tried to water and the others.

Site Preparation and Replanting

Kate McMichael: So we ended up needing by the end of the fall that year doing, getting, doing site prep again so that we planted again the next winter.

Steve Fitzgerald: So site prep for our listeners. What did that entail?

Kate McMichael: This one was more chemical than mechanical.

We were still, because some of what grows back right away are the pioneering species, so the blackberry, the thistle, senecio, bracken, fern, all of that.

Teresa Hauser: A little more thistle. A little

Kate McMichael: more thistle and [00:35:00] even more thistle. So we needed to get that kind of knocked back a bit so that the little trees would have a better chance of making it the second year.

And so the second year we planted, you know, early December, no, early January. It was raining at the time. Oh, that's awesome. Things seemed like it was

Teresa Hauser: going to be

Kate McMichael: great. What happened? And they just

Teresa Hauser: spring

Kate McMichael: And then the spring, I guess the spring was dry, but those trees didn't make it either. That was

Teresa Hauser: a nursery issue.

Kate McMichael: And some people wondered if it could be a nursery issue. If maybe they were putting trees out there. Cause there was such a need that weren't quite.

Steve Fitzgerald: So when you say nursery issue, the seedlings may have been not less vigorous than they normally would be. Yeah. Less

Teresa Hauser: vigorous. vigorous. And that was thought to be a factor because both for our forester and some other foresters that had used that stock, they'd seen an abnormally [00:36:00] high level of mortality.

Got it.

Steve Fitzgerald: Got it.

Teresa Hauser: And we, when we took our intro to management class, we had all these things, you know, we're not going to over plant seedlings. If we ever have to plant them, you know, our seedlings will live. We'll get them on a decent spacing and we won't have to do all that extra thinning. And now it's, well, what spacing are you doing?

I don't care. I want live trees.

Kate McMichael: That's by replant three in particular, which we took took more responsibility. For probably, once again, the area around the home site and then selective areas we're taking responsibility for. So this past winter we planted about 600 grubbed out every single space, planted all of them.

We're doing a lot of experiments in terms of species.

Steve Fitzgerald: So grubbed out meaning you cleared the vegetation where you're going to plant the seedling?

Kate McMichael: Yes, about that four foot square around every one of them, which is a lot of work. Yeah, actually, one [00:37:00] of the biggest ironies about the fire is it killed all the trees.

It killed a lot of the brush, like the hazel and and the vine maple and the maple and all of that, but it left the skeletons behind. So you also, so we, I mean, we're standing right next to the skeleton of one of our, one of our babies that didn't make it through the fire. Fire, but you can still also see all the brush everywhere as well.

So that's a lot of stuff we fall over. We tried to take down at different points and yeah, we've tried every stupid thing you could possibly do. That was probably a huge amount of effort for no appreciable gain.

Steve Fitzgerald: So I'm looking at a seedling here. It looks like a pine. It's actually looking pretty good.

It's in this blue tube.

Experimenting with Blue Tubes

Steve Fitzgerald: So maybe explain what you're doing here with the, you know, what, to get this seedling where it's at, what you did here and what this [00:38:00] tube does.

Teresa Hauser: Well, we started with the grubbing out. So you see this clear area. This is. This is one of the places that didn't grow back too badly in terms of grasses and weeds.

And then the blue tube is supposed to provide a little bit different kind of protection than the Vexar tubes, which are the white plasticky things. You can also put on seedlings to protect them from deer browse. These being solid should also protect them from rodent browse, which We had run into on what we call the nose where we also have Ponderosa pine.

We went with Willamette Valley Ponderosa here because it's super exposed. This is one of the places where in the heat dome the dugs just fried overnight.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah, I mean, I can feel the heat right here now.

Kate McMichael: And the Ponderosa have actually been what's done the best, even from that first year post fire, because while the [00:39:00] industrial folks were doing the big planting of a nice mix of Doug fir, Western hemlock.

Western Red Cedar and Grand Fir we had ordered these Ponderosa Pine and so learned how to, you know, plant bare root seedlings, which is kind of terrifying because we knew that at least from the slide we'd seen about Doug Fir that, you know, there were nine ways you could plant a Doug, ten ways you could plant a Doug Fir, nine of which were wrong, and we were assuming that would be the same with the Ponderosa, but they actually survived pretty well even through the heat dome.

So we're like, okay, we love the dug for and some of the other species, but maybe we'll give the Ponderosa a chance. Cause it's seemingly, they like it droughty or wet. And we're like, well, one or the other is going to happen. So why not try them? The blue tubes we have grown to kind of hate the Vexar tubes.

Cause they are a lot of work. To put on, and then they shatter pretty quickly. They degrade a lot faster. And then once they come out of [00:40:00] that, Oh, 10 of them in a bundle thing, they take a ton of space to store or put, store flat. Yes. The blue ones will store flat. They only need one bamboo. They're supposed, they seem to provide a little bit of shade to like,

Steve Fitzgerald: yeah.

Kate McMichael: And so far,

Steve Fitzgerald: and I wonder when you look at these, that. That solid blue tube, you know, kind of reduces the wind, therefore the evaporation. Yeah. Yeah.

Teresa Hauser: And this little dude seems to like it.

Kate McMichael: Yeah.

Steve Fitzgerald: It's got really good buds.

Kate McMichael: And this year, so we took a year off from watering and, you know, had huge mortality again.

This year we were much more

Teresa Hauser: Circumspect?

Kate McMichael: Yeah, we did deliberate in our choices of when to water. So instead of like having everyone on this two week rotation, we were like, here's some June rain. I think we were May rain and June rain and a little bit of July rain. And so we just would do one. We kind of had met, Mark had [00:41:00] measured how much Four squirts of the backpack was and he said, that's about a half an inch of rain for a month.

That's not bad for the little ones. And the blue tubes are great too, because you actually can squirt directly down to the base of the tree. And so, yeah, I can see that. You're actually getting the water, not just spreading it everywhere where all of the invasives get it too, but it's really going down and maybe going a little bit deeper and helping the little guys go, Oh yeah, my roots should go down.

Teresa Hauser: Yeah. We also went from spray to stream to really push the water underground. We'll see.

Steve Fitzgerald: So let's walk over to this Doug fir that you planted. This one looks pretty green, bushy. I noticed that you've got this kind of black plastic. What are those?

Kate McMichael: They're shades.

Steve Fitzgerald: And we So we're not talking about sunglasses.

Kate McMichael: [00:42:00] We're not talking about sunglasses. We have heard, um, that the, you know, when the sun's really bad, the ground can get really hot and it's not good for, you know You know, not only is it dry out the soil, but that's a lot of heat radiating toward the base of the stem of the tree. And so we had shaded a lot of them the very first year, which didn't really help with the heat dome.

But when we replanted this year and use blue tubes on a lot of them, we sort of redeployed a lot of our shade. So a lot of them now have two sort of facing where. Where the sun comes at them the hardest kind

of like the southeast the southwest

Rescuing and Nurturing Seedlings

Kate McMichael: exactly exactly And this little guy I think was one of the we've done a lot of rescuing of trees that seem to be in a bad spot like, you know little self seeders or Occasionally when the planters would have planted something in the path or right where there was a live tree like, you know, two inches away.

And so we would put them in a, we have growing beds in [00:43:00] in our growing ground. And so we'd raise them up for another year or so and then plant them. And so this little guy has gotten, he's gotten kind of good treatment for a couple of years. And is, he's doing well.

Steve Fitzgerald: It's a he?

Kate McMichael: Oddly,

Teresa Hauser: there are babies tend to be he's and then really old trees tend to become crones and grandmothers.

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay, got it. So he's doing pretty good. He looks pretty bushy. It looks like he's got some good buds. So maybe next year we might see him. We will see that nice leader growth

Teresa Hauser: that we're hoping we are hoping but seriously at this point any of our trees that have survived That's genetic material you want to save because even if they're rough looking those are badass little trees You know, they've

Kate McMichael: been through a lot.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah,

Kate McMichael: it's also been an interesting literally on the ground explanation or of, you know, we took classes and we learned all about slope and aspect and how those matter. And what's really interesting is that is so [00:44:00] theoretical until you like walk, you know, we walk our skid trail and one part of it, it's like where things are a little more northeast facing.

Well, there was a little less tree mortality and the seedlings are doing better. And so we have a few that made it through the heat dome year and are, you know, free to grow size. So. That's kind of amazing. So

Steve Fitzgerald: free to grow for our listeners are trees that are now big enough that you don't have to kind of babysit them.

They're kind of they're kind of They're ready to take off on their own

Kate McMichael: and it's fun because you can find them So, you know the little ones they kind of get hidden by all the other brush and stuff But once they're once they hit that free to grow stage, that's kind of fun. And This year we made a conscious effort to, when we go for a walk, because we try to go for a walk most days, we've gotten some trails put in, and for a long time we would just notice all the ones that had died, or were looking bad, and we would just kind of go, oh little guy, I'm sorry.

And we would be [00:45:00] so depressed by the time we got home. And so we finally were like, this is ridiculous because there are some that are making it. And sort of like when you go into a room, you arrive somewhere and somebody else comes in and goes, well, nobody's here. And you're like, but I'm here. No, the little ones that are surviving, they need to get some cheerleading.

Right, or pep

Steve Fitzgerald: talk.

Kate McMichael: Exactly. So we walk by those guys every day going, look at you. And, you know, some of them, you know, we pet their little leaders. You're

Steve Fitzgerald: growing like a weed now.

Teresa Hauser: Exactly.

Kate McMichael: We'll keep doing that.

Teresa Hauser: If only, if only. You grow like a weed. You go.

Steve Fitzgerald: That's great. So, You mentioned you had a little nursery up here, so let's go up and take a look at that.

So, we've just walked into your greenhouse. So, I see little baby trees here. Can you How'd you do that?

Kate McMichael: So, that half pound of Doug fir [00:46:00] seeds, which is a lot of Doug fir seeds. They are very small. From Dorena? No, they weren't from Dorena. They were from Silva Seed. All the directions on how to stratify the seeds came from someone at Dorena who works with Doug for propagation.

Steve Fitzgerald: So to stratify, the reason for stratifying seed is to kind of break the dormancy. So they'll germinate.

Kate McMichael: So we went through that whole process, you know, who needs space in your crisper if you want to grow trees, right? So they spent a number of weeks. Month and a half or so in the crisper. So in your refrigerator in our refrigerator Well, you know in winter it's seedlings.

So in spring it might as well be seeds and then I had gotten Stuff from one of the from that one of the tree nurseries. So it's little trays and two, essentially tubes that they can go on. And I had no idea what, so I created my own mixture of soil.

Steve Fitzgerald: Nice. So what we're [00:47:00] looking at here is a seedling that is probably about three inches high and it's got a nice little plug that its roots are in.

And all of these are looking pretty good.

Kate McMichael: Yeah. Cause Some of them are actually pretty.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah, they're even taller than that.

Kate McMichael: Yeah, so I kind of did a mix to keep soil in and then every day I pull them out They all get watered and the trays get swapped around so that they get a different They get a shared amount of sunlight every day It took a really long time for them to actually germinate, which I was pretty sure I was going to get nothing because it was like almost a month.

And then suddenly little trees pop up. And then I've transplanted some where I get, because there were a lot of seeds. There were probably six or seven seeds in each one because, you know. I over, I'd stratified way more than I could plant and I have so much greater appreciation for nurseries now. But I have some where I have doubles and when they look really good and somebody else hasn't made it.

I'm [00:48:00] transplanting them, and then we think we'll probably build a new bed for them, because we have two raised beds out in the growing ground that we built actually from those intermediate trees we'd taken down that the fire just licked over on our, one of our skid trails, and so we built growing beds out of them.

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay, well let's go take a look at those. Wow, okay, so here's, this is what we would call a transplant bed.

Kate McMichael: Yes. Okay. Well, that first year when we bought the incense cedar from Brooks, they were tiny and Kathy at Brooks said they'd need to be in a bed for the first year before we planted them out in the forest.

And so we built the beds and hauled in soil and had those guys in there. And then last year, after we had planted all the incense cedar, we had some leftover hemlock that we'd planted. Oh, and we'd bought some sequoia because we've been playing with some, variation, and then other ones that we, because we're always [00:49:00] rescuing little trees from cut banks or different places, and then those guys got planted in the winter, and so these are all rescues.

Teresa Hauser: Yeah, these were mostly cut bank trees.

Kate McMichael: They were mostly cut bank trees.

Steve Fitzgerald: So cut bank trees, those are little seedlings you dug out of the cut bank off the road or skid trail? Yeah. Okay, and then stuck them in here to see if they would take?

Kate McMichael: Because, you know, a hundred percent of trees where you're going to do fire clearance work die, so.

They have a better chance in one of these little beds. Actually, one of our favorites from last year was a super bushy little guy and we actually potted him up and took him up to the admin support person for Mike Kroon at Oregon Department of Forestry who has been, well, and Heather has been stuck with all of us on the committee for family forest land.

So her birthday present was a Doug fir and cause we didn't. He was so beautiful. We didn't want to trust him, trust the ground to be nice to him. So we gave him to someone who works for ODF instead.

Steve Fitzgerald: [00:50:00] How nice of you. That's great. Wow. Well, that's this is a tremendous amount of work. So I, it's. For two people to do this across, what, 40 some odd acres and it's really tremendous.

We haven't

Kate McMichael: done all, that's kind of you, we haven't done all of it on our own. We keep taking on little broader swaths all the time, but.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah, so, I mean, I think other landowners, you know, can learn from what you've had to do, maybe even be inspired and kind of keep that positive attitude because I can see, you know, after your trees are burned, you know, you have this dread, you know, what's next?

And I mean, you've shown what can be done not easy, but what can be done. So, I guess, you know, what's next here? On your property with all of this.

Managing the West Unit

Kate McMichael: Well, we haven't really focused as much on the West Unit, which is where our 18 year olds were. That were pretty, also pretty tightly [00:51:00] spaced, too young to be merchantable.

We planted right away, pretty right away, thinking they would be good shade. So you

Steve Fitzgerald: planted under them.

Kate McMichael: Planted under them. That was the decision. And it was too pricey to take the 18 year olds down.

Steve Fitzgerald: Before you planted. Planted. Yeah.

Kate McMichael: Although, I think if we had known now what we did then, we might have, I don't know.

Now it's kind of like they're a giant game of pick up sticks, they just fall everywhere. So they fall over the road, to the neighbors they fall on every path we've put in there. You know, every day we go and have something else to cut down and you get it all cleared and then they fall down again. Well, new trees.

New trees. It's not the same trees. It's not the same trees. But there are a lot of them and there, there's a little bit of regrowth in there and some sort of seedling survival. So we really want to focus our attention there and little by little, you know, get them actually on the ground intentionally and

Steve Fitzgerald: The dead 18 year old

Kate McMichael: cheese.

The dead 18 year olds. Like, clean up some of the mess made by the ones that have already [00:52:00] fallen. Get them limbed, and get to use that chipper we got to put on the back of the tractor. And, because we never thought we'd need a tractor, but yeah, it turns out when all your trees are falling down. So, I see you

Steve Fitzgerald: have a Kubota.

Yes. So, I'm envious. I love Kubotas. I wish I had one, but

Kate McMichael: yeah, we, yeah, if you wanna come drive ours anytime, you know, you can come help us out whenever you want. Thank you. Thank you.

Steve Fitzgerald: I would love that.

Kate McMichael: We're hoping that, you know, we can clean up some of the branches, get the living done, and then take the stems and kind of create little micro sites and it really intentionally.

Determine over the course of the next year, what we plant, what the next replant is like be able to do a serious inventory of survival versus mortality over in that West unit, which is also really steep and then figure out what we plant. a year from this winter. That's one thing we've sort of learned is like we kind of want to rush into everything and have it all succeed right away and [00:53:00] forests are on a different timeline.

That,

Teresa Hauser: that has been the hard part. I mean we if we had to do it over maybe we would have given it a little bit more time. I think any of the choices we've made are justifiable because You know, if that first planting had gone better then some of the spraying wouldn't have happened because there wouldn't have been all this free space for all those invasives.

Right,

Steve Fitzgerald: right, right.

Teresa Hauser: We joked about it. You know, here we are, look at us, making mistakes, so you don't have to but

you know, we've tried to jump into it and you, some of the failures give us a chance to kind of take a step back and go, okay, so what is working? And so even this last winter, we kind of did a, okay, so we have some dugs from If they don't work in these locations, I think dugs aren't going to work because those seedlings have done [00:54:00] fabulously across various parts of our landscape.

And if they're not making it, then maybe we need to look at a species diversification. And I think we need to take this next winter to do, you know, some of that really physical labor of let's get this down, let's move it where we want it and let's figure out where we're going to plant and what's going to plant and what.

What things actually look like instead of just running into. Put more stuff down.

Revising the Management Plan

Steve Fitzgerald: So I imagine you've revised your plan, your management plan, or at least in the process of doing that.

Kate McMichael: We did. We actually managed last summer to get certified. So we're tree farm certified. And then this winter I went through and I know I had great plans that I was going to rewrite parts of it, which didn't quite happen, but we read through everything, did lots of lists.

Oh, here are the things we did and marked those down and then started mapping out what's going to happen or [00:55:00] what was going to happen this year, which we've done a lot of those things. And then we'll do that same thing again at some point, I'm going to need to, you know, go actually type all that stuff in again.

But, and by January 1st, Oh, right. Before the, some of the yeah That's irrelevant to this conversation. But yeah, so the management plan is an ongoing kind of living document. We're not as good as some people are always having, you know, new stuff that they've written down, but we didn't come into this as foresters.

We came into this as former, you know, pastoral ministers and teachers. we're kind of growing into it slowly. the other thing we've learned is that if you don't get it done this year, it's. It's not like it's going to magically go away. It will still be there to be done next year.

And yeah, the to do list feels like it's, you know, the old thing of, you know, two steps, three steps forward, one step back, a to do list grows like, oh, four items added, one finished, four more added, one [00:56:00] finished, maybe two sometimes.

Steve Fitzgerald: Welcome to property ownership.

Teresa Hauser: Oh my goodness. Yes.

Kate McMichael: But, you know, we kind of have a few more plans of other places we want to have trails, because walking stuff every day makes a difference.

We kind of see things that need to get done, and it keeps building that level of intimacy and connection with this piece of land that we are responsible to, as well as responsible for. And, you know, there are those, like, Little hidden moments or hidden spots where you kind of come on this come upon this amazing beauty where it's It feels like you know, the land kind of gone.

Yeah, I feel in relationship with you, too

Steve Fitzgerald: Nice.

Lightning Round and Resources

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay before we wrap this podcast up, let's get into the lightning round of questions

What is your favorite tree?

Teresa Hauser: Oh, please forgive me all my [00:57:00] precious dugs, but probably a Coast Redwood. And I'm thinking, at this

Kate McMichael: very moment, I'm loving the Pacific Madrone.

Steve Fitzgerald: What is something unique that you carry in your cruiser vest that helps you with your work?

Kate McMichael: I don't know if it's a fun thing I always carry, but I'm always trying to bring my felcos with me because we went on a walk once with another woodland woman, woodland owner, Lindsay Reeves, and watched her pull out clippers about 15 times to go after, you know, blackberries on the side of the road.

And so by now, when we go for a walk, I try to make sure I have my sword in one pocket and my felcos in another pocket in case we need to. And I'm usually going after. in case there are thistles I need to cut down.

Steve Fitzgerald: What other resources can you share on for a listener that would like to dive deeper on the subject?

Kate McMichael: Well, my first thought, and what [00:58:00] we always say to people is, have you checked out extension? Which you didn't ask for that sort of plug, but I mean, we say, have you talked to your extension forester? And I mean, I think we always are pushing people in that direction between extension and oh, free. To go check out the Oregon Forest Resources Institute website because there are amazing resources there.

But for the peer to peer, Extension and then Small Woodlands.

Teresa Hauser: Yeah. Yeah, check out your local Small Woodlands chapter. But with Extension and OFRI, I don't even know that in a lifetime you could get through all of the resources available. It's astounding. I think we thought we'd gone to heaven when we discovered those

Steve Fitzgerald: websites.

Kate McMichael: And with all of the TreeSchool online recordings as well, I mean you can do an awful lot of learning without having to leave your living room.

Steve Fitzgerald: Well, thank you both for spending [00:59:00] time with me and sharing your story and journey and Pain and joy of managing this awesome piece of property. Thank you so much.

Teresa Hauser: Thanks. And, Fitz, thank you. You've been one of those teachers. We've sat in on a number of your classes on Zoom. And

Kate McMichael: actually when we were doing our planting this winter, you had visited not too long before and given us ideas and we kept going, okay, well, Fitz said we should, we could think about this. And it's like, Oh, and then maybe when he gets out here next time, you can show him what we did.

And actually it's being that center of a group of people who cheerlead for you makes all the difference. And it makes us want to cheerlead for others as well.

Steve Fitzgerald: Great. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it. So great. Take care.

Kate McMichael: You too.

Podcast Credits and Closing

Lauren Grand: The In the Woods podcast is produced by Lauren Grand, Jacob Putney, and Scott Lovingood, who are all members of the Oregon State University Forestry and [01:00:00] Natural Resources Extension team. Other members of the team who've been involved in the podcast include Carrie Berger, Jason O'Brien, and Stephen Fitzgerald.

Episodes are edited and produced by Carrie Cantrell. Music for In the Woods was composed by Jeffrey Hino, and graphic design was created by Christina Fryhoff. Funding for In the Woods Is provided by Oregon State University, Forestry and Natural Resources Extension, the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, and the USDA Renewable Resources Extension Act funding.

We hope you enjoyed the episode and we can't wait to talk to you again next month. Until then, what's in your woods?

Episode 55 - Final__complete (edited)

[00:00:00]

Introduction to In the Woods Podcast

Lauren Grand: From the Oregon State University's Extension Service, you are listening to In the Woods with the Forestry and Natural Resources Program. This podcast brings the forest to listeners by sharing the stories and voices of forest scientists, land managers, and enthusiastic members of the public. Each episode, we will bring you research and science based information that aims to offer some insight into what we know and are still learning about forest science and management.

Stick around to discover a new topic related to forests on each episode.

Steve Fitzgerald: Hi everyone. My name is Steve Fitzgerald. I'm an extension silviculture specialist. And welcome to this segment of our In the Woods podcast.

Meet the Guests: Kate McMichael and Teresa Hauser

Steve Fitzgerald: We have two guests with us today, Kate McMichael and Teresa Hauser, who own and manage their Elk Ridge Tree Farm.

Thank you for talking with us today.

Teresa Hauser: Oh, great to be with you, Fitz. Always good to spend time with you. Always.

Steve Fitzgerald: Great, great. So, your story [00:01:00] and journey in managing your property, You know, I look at it, it's both tragic yet it's been really inspiring and I think others would find it inspiring as well. It really demonstrates a lot of fortitude and resilience on both of your parts.

I know you've put a lot of work into your property. But, you know, before we get into your story, perhaps you could introduce yourselves again and maybe a little bit more about your background.

Teresa's Background and Journey

Teresa Hauser: I'm Teresa and I would say that pretty much nothing in my experience prepared me for what we're doing now. I grew up in what became suburban Southern California.

It was not quite to the point of suburbia yet when I was there and I liked being outside. I rode horses. I loved that. I dreamed of running away to the Northwest out of Southern California. Um, but by the time I went to [00:02:00] college I studied theology I worked as a minister for a few years in a fabulous, fabulous college.

Entry to that kind of work. And I'm still indebted to the young women I worked with there. And then I went to seminary and seminary really doesn't prepare you for this kind of work. And eventually, Got to a point where just my own faith's journey took me away from that. Kate and I had buried our, all our parents, a lot of our friends.

I had gotten a job helping out at a nursery just because the owner of the nursery was a friend, not because I had any aptitude for plant life, which I really didn't. But I did discover that, wow, I love being outside working. I love the manual labor. I love the being in the dirt. And so we had had a fantasy at one [00:03:00] point that, Oh, maybe one day we'd get some property and originally we'd thought have horses.

The very first permutation of that was, Oh, we could take broken critters and bring broken people to be together cause it's, you heal when you work on helping heal something or someone else. And at that time we were working with really broken people. Anyhow, we started thinking about retiring, realized we couldn't afford to retire in California.

She found this place online, made contact with the realtor, who is Fred Sperry shout out to him he made this possible for us. And so we had this dream that we'd have this little piece of land and we could care for this little piece of land the rest of our days. That's how we got here.[00:04:00]

Steve Fitzgerald: So what about you, Kate?

Kate's Background and Journey

Kate McMichael: So, unlike Teresa, I actually grew up in the Northwest. Well, Idaho considers itself part of the Northwest, at least Boise did and outside city limits. So I grew up with trees all around me and loved that. So coming back to Oregon has felt like a return to my childhood roots.

So that was part of the appeal that brought me to Oregon, or brought us to Oregon. But before that from Idaho, you know, went to co did the whole college thing and eventually ended up in California. And the last number of years I too did seminary and worked in an inner city parish for a lot of years.

And then, you know, wrote myself out of a job at one point to keep a a hospitality center for homeless folks running because grant money was harder to find. And writing myself out of a job, but then I ended up teaching high school. So I taught world religions and ethics [00:05:00] and I've been thinking a lot about that.

It's like I asked my girls, I taught in a girls high school, I asked my girls a lot to step out of their comfort zone. And there has been nothing like the last number of years since we moved up here and took on this little beautiful forest property, forgetting us to step out of our comfort zone.

Steve Fitzgerald: You both are so brave.

Kate McMichael: Or stupid. I'm not sure which.

First Steps in Forest Management

Steve Fitzgerald: So, you both retired and you found a piece of land. And what was, now, what were you thinking? What was going through your mind now that you had a piece of property that you had to care for?

Kate McMichael: Well, that it turned out that you don't really know as much as you think you do. Probably one of the upsides of both of us having come out of an education background, both being pretty educated, but also having done the popular education.

And then, you know, I taught high school. It's like, you know, if you don't know [00:06:00] stuff, the first thing you really need to do is start learning. And when we realized like one of the first times we walked up our, one of the big skid trails, and we're looking at it going, is this all really Doug fir? But this bark looks kind of cool.

And my sister was visiting, you know, she's a master gardener from Idaho. And she's like, is it white pine? And we're like, I don't know. And so we got in touch with our extension forester and actually took every single class we could come up that she'd offered.

Learning and Adapting to Forest Management

Kate McMichael: And You know, and that was, and that felt really important to us because we realized that however much we had been backpackers and hikers and we loved wilderness and the outdoors, and that makes you very passionate about those things, but it doesn't mean you know anything when it comes to actually wanting to care for a little piece of property.

So yeah, learning was the first thing that we felt we needed to do.

Steve Fitzgerald: So you were, uh, taking a lot of classes and probably going on a lot of [00:07:00] forestry field trips. So, you know, in thinking about your property, what were the kind of topics or things that you were interested in learning the most about and maybe applying here on your property?

Kate McMichael: Well, I know we were really interested in how to, you know, Forest health and resilience and wildfire resilience and resistance, I guess, partly because coming out of California, part of what sent us away is we had hit that point where wildfires were becoming more and more frequent in California.

Ironic by now because They're even more frequent. But we were within that six degrees of separation of everyone for NorCal fires and SoCal fires at a point. And we're like, we just can't stay here anymore. This is just too hard. And we're like, Western Oregon seems like a better place to be, but we want to do everything we can to protect the, protect our forest.

And it was pretty tight. You know, it. Needed our 35 year olds probably could have done 35

Steve Fitzgerald: year old trees. We

Kate McMichael: had a 35, a stand of 35 year olds and the 35 year olds [00:08:00] probably could have done with a thinning. I think they probably missed their pre commercial thinning time and, you know, So we learned things like that, you know.

What is an intermediate or suppressed tree? Suppressed means dead, but but at least it did for us. It's like, oh, we can actually learn to cut this one down because it's small enough that, you know, you don't really have to worry about how it falls, really, because you can kind of guide it with your hand and then carry it away.

Which, we did a lot of that. We were trying to think. thin out some of that, thin out some of the crazy understory, all of the dog hair it makes it so that, you know, the skid trails were clearer because right after we signed on the property, Snowmageddon happened. And so it took us like six months to find our way through the major skid trail that runs through the whole 35 year old stand from one end of the, you know, sort of one end of that side of the property to the other.

And so we had, you know, we had a lot to learn. It

Teresa Hauser: can't be overstated how little we knew when [00:09:00] we got this place. I mean, in a just world, we probably wouldn't have been allowed to purchase it. Like, you know, if we had gone to adopt a dog, they'd have said, I'm sorry, since you don't know how many legs a dog has, and that many of them do, and some of them don't have tails.

When you learn something about dogs, come back and you can adopt a dog. But I mean, We, our first walkthrough with Lauren Grant, God bless her she was saying that, no, this looks really healthy. I'm like, why? What do you see that makes it look healthy? So all the words Kate just used, we didn't know any of those words.

Lauren said, well, you know, you can look at the leaders on these young trees. What's a leader? We, you know, We didn't know anything and people have been incredibly patient and gracious and generous about helping us learn things from literally the ground up.

Steve Fitzgerald: So [00:10:00] you purchased the property in 2019? Yep.

Facing the 2020 Wildfires

Steve Fitzgerald: And so you're on this kind of knowledge journey about trees and forests and resiliency and suppressed trees and cutting trees and and then 2020 happened. The large wildfires of 2020 that swept through the McKenzie Valley, the Holiday Farm fire. And.

Tell us a little bit about where you were what was what you were going through mentally. I know. And so, yeah.

Kate McMichael: One of the great ironies, I've always thought, is that, like, the week before the fire happened, we had just finished, like, all the way, opening up, like, our skid trail all the way, so that, you know, it could be used for ingress or egress We had actually just been doing a recording session [00:11:00] with a couple of with Lauren, actually, and another young consulting forester in the area for Oregon Women in Timber, and we'd managed to open up this a path to one of the streams, and we were working with Pure Water Partners, we were on the preservation track because our water, our riparian areas were so healthy and filled with native plants and everything.

And actually, the day before the fire, we were here hanging out. We visited with my one of my siblings had come with his family and they were off floating the McKenzie and we were hanging out in our camper, our truck camper because we didn't want to float the McKenzie. And I was reading through the management plan that had been written for, you know, pure water partners.

And It was really an awesome day. And I mention it because we returned to that one again and again feeling so grateful. Because it was, I think, one of the very few days we'd had where we spent a chunk of hours on the property without working on something. We were just there.

Steve Fitzgerald: Just enjoying it.

Kate McMichael: [00:12:00] Just enjoying it. And right, and then the fire. And At first, I think our biggest concern was that, like, our neighbors got out okay,

Steve Fitzgerald: And you weren't living on the property at the time.

Kate McMichael: We weren't living on the property. We'd been working on some of the, helping with some of the clearance for where the home site would be and stuff.

But, yeah, we weren't

Teresa Hauser: We were renting in Springfield and that's when the east wind event started. And I mean, I grew up in SoCal. I know Santa Ana's. I know wind driven fires. I was six when I was first evacuated because of a wildfire that came to probably within 50 feet of our house. Wow. So you

Steve Fitzgerald: had evacuated.

Teresa Hauser: I, yes.

Steve Fitzgerald: Prior to, in your youth. Yeah. Wow.

Teresa Hauser: And the barn where I rode, we had a couple of times where we had all the horses and halters out on one of the sandy arenas watching fire creep down a hill at night. So, and [00:13:00] apparently, based on some of my responses, I have some trauma from that I hadn't known.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah.

Teresa Hauser: So when we started getting these. This crazy smoke in Springfield for both of us, our tension ratcheted up. We texted the neighbors, it's up here, kind of, oh my god, are you guys okay? And Rick responded, yeah, but we've never really seen winds like this since I've been here. And Ricky's been here his whole life.

Yeah.

Steve Fitzgerald: And he's one of your neighbors?

Teresa Hauser: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, But according, yeah, according to record that our fire hadn't even started. This was smoke from other fires. And I don't know when we heard for sure about our fire. But again, our big one was making sure that our neighbors got out.

Kate McMichael: I think we were up most of the night.

At some point, something alerted us to the fact that fire had started. And we didn't really sleep a whole lot. And then, it was helpful. I [00:14:00] mean, we were really relieved that all the neighbors got out. And at first, That was the main thing we were concerned about. I do remember we started thinking, should we, you know, be prepared to evacuate?

I too grew up with a little bit of fire trauma cause growing up in Boise, Idaho, in the middle of desert where, you know, fire happened all the time. And we didn't have city fire protection. We had BLM fire protection and they were always off dealing with wildfires started by stupid people somewhere else.

not near our, where we lived. And so, I mean, I went to bed every night as a kid in the summer, thinking what I would actually grab to take with me if a fire came. So this was like, wow, all of those childhood, you know, my childhood anxieties and her childhood traumas kind of coming together. So we started packing up, you know, we were really right, the very leading edge of Thurston.

And so we were like, yeah, fire could get closer. And I remember as we were going Every time we'd go outside, there'd be more and more ash on the truck. And I remember trying to go, [00:15:00] These are our trees, blessing us. These are our trees. I know these are our trees. And, you know, everybody else's trees up there.

But these are our trees, blessing us. Which I think that kind of anxiety carried us through for the first few weeks. I mean, we weren't out

Teresa Hauser: three weeks, wasn't it? Before we were allowed back up. So

Steve Fitzgerald: they had it all closed while they were trying to do all the suppression. So landowners or homeowners and landowners couldn't come back.

Yeah.

Kate McMichael: I think it was February, September 23rd when they finally let us back up on the property

Teresa Hauser: and some Weyerhaeuser folks had been up here. And Rick had connections, and so they actually did a drive by of all the properties so that people could at least see if their homes were left. And that was good because the Lane County map had a lot of inaccurate information.

So we knew that, well, all we had at that point was a hole in the ground. And so yeah, some of our insulation had blown away, but [00:16:00] I mean this, the Bucks port a

Kate McMichael: potty had blown over, which amused everyone. So I think people were grasping for humor wherever they could. So that was funny to people.

But the irony there was like, we didn't really care about the, house that hadn't been built yet. We wanted to know how our trees were. And that's where we started realizing this connectedness of the timber and forestry community, because that young woman forester who we had been interviewing the week before, her husband is a a reforestation forester for Justina.

And so he was up here because they were, everybody was up here fighting the fires. And we, that was one of the big things we learned too was how much industry folk are part of fire fighting, whether it's on their land or not. And anyway, she made Garrett drive through and take pictures of our trees because she knew that that's what we would want to see were our trees.

Returning to the Burned Property

Steve Fitzgerald: So, you were talking about the fire [00:17:00] and that the fact is you couldn't come here to examine your property for quite a while, but when you're able to get here, what was that like? What was that like? What did you anticipate you might see?

Teresa Hauser: I think from Garrett's trip through, we had thought things might not look too, too bad.

And one of our neighbors had gotten a heat signature and it hadn't looked too bad. And we didn't know then that that meant that everything had already burned. And One of our neighbors, Mark Miller he's a consulting forester with Trout Mountain Forestry, and he. There'd been some contact and he wanted to know if we wanted to touch base.

He and his wife were coming [00:18:00] back up to look at their property and did we wanna touch base after we'd had a chance to see ours? And we thought that would be great. And we came up and you know, there's still this. pall of smoke. And everything was sort of a pale orange. It, I thought it looked kind of like my imagination of a nuclear blast, which comes mainly from the word yellow cake and yellow cake uranium, whatever that is.

And, you know, just that kind of yellow orange of everything. But I don't know that we were prepared for the almost complete devastation to our trees. It kind of surpassed what we had feared and then the needle cast. And we also Much like when we toured the property with Lauren, we didn't know what we were looking at.

[00:19:00] So I knew brush fires from Southern California. I didn't know timber fires. And so, you know, all this needle cast, what was that? What were the orange trees? Though we figured that wasn't good.

Kate McMichael: The fire freeze is so interesting too, where it looked like the tree, you know, where they're trying to get away from the, branches are trying to get away from the heat, but it almost looks like they're dancing.

Which has this kind of horrifying sort of beauty to it.

Steve Fitzgerald: They're kind of frozen in the direction the fire came.

Kate McMichael: Yes. Yeah. And it was, but It was awful. We walked down the skid through the 35 year olds and it's, yeah, the needle cast, the ground was yellow. There were areas where older trees that, you know, we had learned enough to know that they should have maybe done better and it's like, no, I mean, everybody just, it just got.

Torched, but not enough to destroy everything. Just enough to really [00:20:00] kill everything. And then obvious, of course, our little, we had a, we were kind of like a third, the 35 year olds, a third, they were about eight, they had had an amazing summer. I mean, 16 inch leaders. And they were, you know, obviously just torched because the little ones couldn't make it.

And then our 18 year olds, They didn't look good either. I remember we were walking down on the other side through the 18 year olds and I got a call from our contractor who was checking in on us. I mean, we were really lucky that our contractor stayed super connected and as committed to us as we were to them through this process.

And I remember going, Josh, it's all. It's like, it's all gone. I mean, everything. And we'd been working with him like that few days before the fire. And it's just like, but it's just gone. One of the hardest parts still is when we do anything, a retrospective [00:21:00] for anyone that asks us, Oh, what was the fire stuff?

Or we end up going through pictures. It's like, it's still just kind of makes me queasy. To look at those pictures, it's actually even more heart wrenching to look at the before pictures and kind of go, Oh my God, cause I've almost forgotten by now how beautiful our forest was before the fire. Cause it was really, it was beautiful.

I mean, it had its messy quality. Lauren taught us healthy forests are messy, but it was. It was beautiful and it was not beautiful anymore. But the big thing that really happened for us being back here was it made it really clear that we'd spent enough time being here, you know, trimming out, clearing out those intermediate and suppressed trees and, you know, creating, you know, old piles of lumber or Yeah.

Well, little pyres of logs that I was hoping to mill into lumber and stuff. And we'd spend a lot of time pulling up [00:22:00] bracken fern and different things, trying to help clear out the area for the home site. And we formed a real intimacy

Teresa Hauser: with the land over our fairly brief period with it. And a different kind of intimacy than say, if we just hiked through it, but actually learning how to care for it was really different than just caring about it.

And so learning, you know, which trees are going to make it, which trees aren't, which, you know, sure. Kind of a moot point by now. But we had a real intimate relationship with this land, even if it was forged in a very brief period of time. And it made it really clear to us that

Kate McMichael: we were not just responsible for this piece of land, but responsible to it.

That there'd been a relationship formed. And I mean, we thought it was only reasonable to like have that kind of conversation with one another. Like, wow, this is not the retirement we planned. What are we going to do? Are we going to cut our [00:23:00] losses or are we going to stay? And I mean, it was a really pretty short conversation.

Cause we were like, well, of course we're going to stay. How can we. desert our trees. You know, it's our little patch of land. How can we turn our back on it now that it's hurting? And we,

Teresa Hauser: it,

Steve Fitzgerald: that's a really interesting way to, to think about that because, you know, here you have this dream and now it's in some ways, you know, it's gone up in smoke, but it's this desire to, to help it recover, you know, nurture it.

bring it back despite what that's going to take.

Teresa Hauser: So there's a book that I read a million years ago called the Cardinal that was written probably a million and a half years ago. And it's about this young man who becomes a priest and eventually becomes a cardinal in a church [00:24:00] that most of us wouldn't recognize by now.

But in it, there's a scene where the young man goes to kind of discern his vocation. And as part of that, he ends up at what are they called? Those places that priests live rectory,

Steve Fitzgerald: rectory. Thank you.

Teresa Hauser: It's been a while. So he goes to the rectory and the the active priest there has him care for.

The old priest who lives there, who is beyond being able to care for himself. And so the young man does that without really any hesitation or any qualm about it. And the priest who's Assigned that task to him for the day wonders if that's a good idea for a young man discerning a vocation that people getting married, if they knew where the marriage would end, how one of them would end up [00:25:00] perhaps in need of absolute physical care.

Would they still get married? Was this too much to put on him? And clearly, in that case, it wasn't But I think of that sometimes, you know, if we had known that within a year and a half. Our little retirement paradise would be ash, would we have done that? And, it's not a fair question. You can never know.

Anything can always happen. And this is what happened to us and to our land, and Now we deal with it.

Steve Fitzgerald: Why don't we go take a walk and maybe you can kind of describe you know, what kind of restoration work you've been doing and the effort that it has taken thus far.

Teresa Hauser: Cool. Sure.

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay. Well, let's go. So[00:26:00]

you came back and. A lot of your property had been burned. How did you figure out what your next steps were going to be?

Community Support and Salvage Harvest

Teresa Hauser: Well, we were never alone in this, and this is part of, if you want to go, oh, if we had moved someplace different, if we had lived someplace different, things may have been different, but you know what?

We hadn't even gotten up to the property before some of the people we'd gotten to know in the forestry and timber community were calling us, asking us how we were, if we'd had a chance to see how our property was, if we needed help. Somebody called pretty immediately and said, you're going to want to get seedlings, call this woman at Brooks tree farm, get nursery, Brooks nursery get some stuff from her.

So. [00:27:00] Ev eh. I'm not sure how we would have figured it out if we were stuck doing it on our own, but we never were. And so we had our neighbor Mark saying that he thought maybe this could be a salvage harvest, that the 35 year olds could maybe be a salvage. We had Anna saying that she'd get in touch with a logger friend of hers.

He could come out and see if he thought it was something that could be salvaged. We, And these weren't people we sought out. These were people being in touch with us. So like a

Steve Fitzgerald: community.

Teresa Hauser: Exactly. And that was exactly what we weren't going to do when we retired. We weren't going to do community.

Kate McMichael: We weren't going to go places, do things, meet people, join things.

We were done with that. You know, high introverts. here. You know, it was God's little practical joke that I was a high school, you know, I was a teacher and on every day. I was like, okay, we're going to be off for a [00:28:00] while. It was going to be awesome.

Steve Fitzgerald: And here you are.

Kate McMichael: There is that old joke, right? How do you make the Holy Spirit laugh?

Make plans. So it's like, that's been totally kind of our experience. I mean, in some ways I think we probably did everything almost too much. Like, Oh, we'll try everything. So yes, we ordered seedlings. Not very many, but we ordered, you know, Oh, what we could get. Cause there weren't dug for anymore. So we got Willamette Valley, Ponderosa and incense cedar.

You know, we ordered half a pound of dug first seed so we could maybe grow some of our own, like everything. Everything we could think of took every, well, the OSU, the fire program, we were at, we, you know, made sure we tuned in to every episode kept trying to, you know, learn as much as we could and write the next addendum to the management plan.

Cause you know, we had taken our intro to management class and we had pretty much, we'd finally finished, you know, the first draft of the management plan, which was by now totally pointless and [00:29:00] except as a historic. Record of what things had been and so we kind of came up with a plan working with Mark on what

Teresa Hauser: would happen And our stewardship Forester we had him out almost immediately after we were in the Oregon Department of Forestry yes, and I mean we

Kate McMichael: love him I mean, I think half the meeting was all of us, you know sharing our trauma together because there was just so much of it.

But yeah, he was supportive from the get go. He's always been supportive telling us, you know, we're doing the right thing. And, you know, he's a hundred percent behind us and he always has been. Yet we could hardly be more fortunate in the community that formed around us, whether we'd intended it or not.

Steve Fitzgerald: So tell me so you did a salvage harvest tell me a bit about what that was like and the planning that it took and how it came out.

Kate McMichael: We were really lucky. I mean, I emailed someone had [00:30:00] suggested Miller Timber. I emailed them. They emailed back immediately and someone came up. Someone came out. It turned out that he'd had family up here who'd lost property and Seneca.

This is before Seneca. And SPI did their thing. The

Steve Fitzgerald: sawmill. The

Kate McMichael: sawmill. Seneca was releasing their loggers to work with folks needing to get salvage harvests done in the holiday footprint, in the holiday farm footprint. And so we were lucky enough that could happen here. And then since Mark lived here, it was, he, it was possible for him to connect our salvage job with our neighbor's salvage job that no one would look at.

Cause it was smaller and complicated. And so we were able to combine them together, which that was actually awesome. We were here every day that the loggers were here. Cause it felt like it was important to be with our trees as they went to their next, this next phase in their lives to become wood products.

Teresa Hauser: It went well. [00:31:00] Apparently, not so much that we could tell, but apparently our job wasn't that complicated, so they could put young loggers on, on the job. And so that was cool. The sweet guys had some great conversations with them and it went. It went well. I mean, the big trees came down. It wasn't an area we could interplant.

The trees were too big for that to be safe for anybody And too tightly spaced. Yeah. So

Kate McMichael: I mean, it's ugly, right? I mean, that's the sad part. I mean, there's no getting around Fact that, you know, where there were 30 5-year-old trees, now there's like tons of slash on the ground that they drove over.

It was cut to length logging and so they were protecting the soil from compaction. But, you know, you have you, for a while, we could kind of pretend the trees were still there while they were standing. You know, you could get shade underneath them at least for a little while. [00:32:00] But, you know.

Cork Boots and Log Trucks

Kate McMichael: But all that slash, we did get corks.

Yeah, we did

Teresa Hauser: get

Kate McMichael: corks.

Steve Fitzgerald: Corks, yeah, cork boots. Yeah.

Kate McMichael: And actually what was funny in some ways is the day they started actually moving the logs out was the day the planters arrived. And so we have some pictures of log trucks moving out and planters moving around where they were. Kind of late. I mean, I know that we did those classes.

Lessons from Intro to Management

Kate McMichael: This was our, this would be one bit of advice we would have for anyone else. When you take your Intro to Management class and you find yourself going, I can kind of, you know, zone out during this part because it'll never impact me, like we did with logging and reforestation. It might. It might. So paying attention is good.

I mean, thank God we still had notes and we had assistance going through all that. Never say never. Never say, yeah, never say never.

Challenges of Early Planting

Kate McMichael: So, we know you should plan all those things ahead, but the fire had different plans. And so, planting [00:33:00] early April probably wasn't great. We had a really dry spring that year, and then we had the heat dome.

So, we actually started trying to water trees.

Watering During the Heat Dome

Steve Fitzgerald: So, the heat dome, for our listeners, was that really hot spell in June, late June of 2021. 2021.

Kate McMichael: 2021. It was like, what, 106 outside. And we'd been actually watering on a fairly regular cycle. The acre, probably the 1200 seedlings or so that were closest around the house that we could get to ultimately ended up getting firefighter backpacks, you know, the five gallon water packs.

We fell down a lot. we finally started to, we have lots and lots of pin flags from trying to mark the combo of tree wells and just the. Vegetation comes back,

Steve Fitzgerald: right? So, I mean, for our listeners, in most cases, when seedlings are planted, they are not watered, so to don a a water, Backpack [00:34:00] and then water 1200 seedlings.

That's incredible.

Kate McMichael: It didn't help us Yeah, we watched them. I mean we were watering the days of that heat wave that heat dome and it's like we still watch trees That were beautiful and green turn rust orange by the end of it because they just couldn't. I mean, there was nothing that we could have done.

So that was not a really successful planting year. Both the ones we tried to water and the others.

Site Preparation and Replanting

Kate McMichael: So we ended up needing by the end of the fall that year doing, getting, doing site prep again so that we planted again the next winter.

Steve Fitzgerald: So site prep for our listeners. What did that entail?

Kate McMichael: This one was more chemical than mechanical.

We were still, because some of what grows back right away are the pioneering species, so the blackberry, the thistle, senecio, bracken, fern, all of that.

Teresa Hauser: A little more thistle. A little

Kate McMichael: more thistle and [00:35:00] even more thistle. So we needed to get that kind of knocked back a bit so that the little trees would have a better chance of making it the second year.

And so the second year we planted, you know, early December, no, early January. It was raining at the time. Oh, that's awesome. Things seemed like it was

Teresa Hauser: going to be

Kate McMichael: great. What happened? And they just

Teresa Hauser: spring

Kate McMichael: And then the spring, I guess the spring was dry, but those trees didn't make it either. That was

Teresa Hauser: a nursery issue.

Kate McMichael: And some people wondered if it could be a nursery issue. If maybe they were putting trees out there. Cause there was such a need that weren't quite.

Steve Fitzgerald: So when you say nursery issue, the seedlings may have been not less vigorous than they normally would be. Yeah. Less

Teresa Hauser: vigorous. vigorous. And that was thought to be a factor because both for our forester and some other foresters that had used that stock, they'd seen an abnormally [00:36:00] high level of mortality.

Got it.

Steve Fitzgerald: Got it.

Teresa Hauser: And we, when we took our intro to management class, we had all these things, you know, we're not going to over plant seedlings. If we ever have to plant them, you know, our seedlings will live. We'll get them on a decent spacing and we won't have to do all that extra thinning. And now it's, well, what spacing are you doing?

I don't care. I want live trees.

Kate McMichael: That's by replant three in particular, which we took took more responsibility. For probably, once again, the area around the home site and then selective areas we're taking responsibility for. So this past winter we planted about 600 grubbed out every single space, planted all of them.

We're doing a lot of experiments in terms of species.

Steve Fitzgerald: So grubbed out meaning you cleared the vegetation where you're going to plant the seedling?

Kate McMichael: Yes, about that four foot square around every one of them, which is a lot of work. Yeah, actually, one [00:37:00] of the biggest ironies about the fire is it killed all the trees.

It killed a lot of the brush, like the hazel and and the vine maple and the maple and all of that, but it left the skeletons behind. So you also, so we, I mean, we're standing right next to the skeleton of one of our, one of our babies that didn't make it through the fire. Fire, but you can still also see all the brush everywhere as well.

So that's a lot of stuff we fall over. We tried to take down at different points and yeah, we've tried every stupid thing you could possibly do. That was probably a huge amount of effort for no appreciable gain.

Steve Fitzgerald: So I'm looking at a seedling here. It looks like a pine. It's actually looking pretty good.

It's in this blue tube.

Experimenting with Blue Tubes

Steve Fitzgerald: So maybe explain what you're doing here with the, you know, what, to get this seedling where it's at, what you did here and what this [00:38:00] tube does.

Teresa Hauser: Well, we started with the grubbing out. So you see this clear area. This is. This is one of the places that didn't grow back too badly in terms of grasses and weeds.

And then the blue tube is supposed to provide a little bit different kind of protection than the Vexar tubes, which are the white plasticky things. You can also put on seedlings to protect them from deer browse. These being solid should also protect them from rodent browse, which We had run into on what we call the nose where we also have Ponderosa pine.

We went with Willamette Valley Ponderosa here because it's super exposed. This is one of the places where in the heat dome the dugs just fried overnight.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah, I mean, I can feel the heat right here now.

Kate McMichael: And the Ponderosa have actually been what's done the best, even from that first year post fire, because while the [00:39:00] industrial folks were doing the big planting of a nice mix of Doug fir, Western hemlock.

Western Red Cedar and Grand Fir we had ordered these Ponderosa Pine and so learned how to, you know, plant bare root seedlings, which is kind of terrifying because we knew that at least from the slide we'd seen about Doug Fir that, you know, there were nine ways you could plant a Doug, ten ways you could plant a Doug Fir, nine of which were wrong, and we were assuming that would be the same with the Ponderosa, but they actually survived pretty well even through the heat dome.

So we're like, okay, we love the dug for and some of the other species, but maybe we'll give the Ponderosa a chance. Cause it's seemingly, they like it droughty or wet. And we're like, well, one or the other is going to happen. So why not try them? The blue tubes we have grown to kind of hate the Vexar tubes.

Cause they are a lot of work. To put on, and then they shatter pretty quickly. They degrade a lot faster. And then once they come out of [00:40:00] that, Oh, 10 of them in a bundle thing, they take a ton of space to store or put, store flat. Yes. The blue ones will store flat. They only need one bamboo. They're supposed, they seem to provide a little bit of shade to like,

Steve Fitzgerald: yeah.

Kate McMichael: And so far,

Steve Fitzgerald: and I wonder when you look at these, that. That solid blue tube, you know, kind of reduces the wind, therefore the evaporation. Yeah. Yeah.

Teresa Hauser: And this little dude seems to like it.

Kate McMichael: Yeah.

Steve Fitzgerald: It's got really good buds.

Kate McMichael: And this year, so we took a year off from watering and, you know, had huge mortality again.

This year we were much more

Teresa Hauser: Circumspect?

Kate McMichael: Yeah, we did deliberate in our choices of when to water. So instead of like having everyone on this two week rotation, we were like, here's some June rain. I think we were May rain and June rain and a little bit of July rain. And so we just would do one. We kind of had met, Mark had [00:41:00] measured how much Four squirts of the backpack was and he said, that's about a half an inch of rain for a month.

That's not bad for the little ones. And the blue tubes are great too, because you actually can squirt directly down to the base of the tree. And so, yeah, I can see that. You're actually getting the water, not just spreading it everywhere where all of the invasives get it too, but it's really going down and maybe going a little bit deeper and helping the little guys go, Oh yeah, my roots should go down.

Teresa Hauser: Yeah. We also went from spray to stream to really push the water underground. We'll see.

Steve Fitzgerald: So let's walk over to this Doug fir that you planted. This one looks pretty green, bushy. I noticed that you've got this kind of black plastic. What are those?

Kate McMichael: They're shades.

Steve Fitzgerald: And we So we're not talking about sunglasses.

Kate McMichael: [00:42:00] We're not talking about sunglasses. We have heard, um, that the, you know, when the sun's really bad, the ground can get really hot and it's not good for, you know You know, not only is it dry out the soil, but that's a lot of heat radiating toward the base of the stem of the tree. And so we had shaded a lot of them the very first year, which didn't really help with the heat dome.

But when we replanted this year and use blue tubes on a lot of them, we sort of redeployed a lot of our shade. So a lot of them now have two sort of facing where. Where the sun comes at them the hardest kind

of like the southeast the southwest

Rescuing and Nurturing Seedlings

Kate McMichael: exactly exactly And this little guy I think was one of the we've done a lot of rescuing of trees that seem to be in a bad spot like, you know little self seeders or Occasionally when the planters would have planted something in the path or right where there was a live tree like, you know, two inches away.

And so we would put them in a, we have growing beds in [00:43:00] in our growing ground. And so we'd raise them up for another year or so and then plant them. And so this little guy has gotten, he's gotten kind of good treatment for a couple of years. And is, he's doing well.

Steve Fitzgerald: It's a he?

Kate McMichael: Oddly,

Teresa Hauser: there are babies tend to be he's and then really old trees tend to become crones and grandmothers.

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay, got it. So he's doing pretty good. He looks pretty bushy. It looks like he's got some good buds. So maybe next year we might see him. We will see that nice leader growth

Teresa Hauser: that we're hoping we are hoping but seriously at this point any of our trees that have survived That's genetic material you want to save because even if they're rough looking those are badass little trees You know, they've

Kate McMichael: been through a lot.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah,

Kate McMichael: it's also been an interesting literally on the ground explanation or of, you know, we took classes and we learned all about slope and aspect and how those matter. And what's really interesting is that is so [00:44:00] theoretical until you like walk, you know, we walk our skid trail and one part of it, it's like where things are a little more northeast facing.

Well, there was a little less tree mortality and the seedlings are doing better. And so we have a few that made it through the heat dome year and are, you know, free to grow size. So. That's kind of amazing. So

Steve Fitzgerald: free to grow for our listeners are trees that are now big enough that you don't have to kind of babysit them.

They're kind of they're kind of They're ready to take off on their own

Kate McMichael: and it's fun because you can find them So, you know the little ones they kind of get hidden by all the other brush and stuff But once they're once they hit that free to grow stage, that's kind of fun. And This year we made a conscious effort to, when we go for a walk, because we try to go for a walk most days, we've gotten some trails put in, and for a long time we would just notice all the ones that had died, or were looking bad, and we would just kind of go, oh little guy, I'm sorry.

And we would be [00:45:00] so depressed by the time we got home. And so we finally were like, this is ridiculous because there are some that are making it. And sort of like when you go into a room, you arrive somewhere and somebody else comes in and goes, well, nobody's here. And you're like, but I'm here. No, the little ones that are surviving, they need to get some cheerleading.

Right, or pep

Steve Fitzgerald: talk.

Kate McMichael: Exactly. So we walk by those guys every day going, look at you. And, you know, some of them, you know, we pet their little leaders. You're

Steve Fitzgerald: growing like a weed now.

Teresa Hauser: Exactly.

Kate McMichael: We'll keep doing that.

Teresa Hauser: If only, if only. You grow like a weed. You go.

Steve Fitzgerald: That's great. So, You mentioned you had a little nursery up here, so let's go up and take a look at that.

So, we've just walked into your greenhouse. So, I see little baby trees here. Can you How'd you do that?

Kate McMichael: So, that half pound of Doug fir [00:46:00] seeds, which is a lot of Doug fir seeds. They are very small. From Dorena? No, they weren't from Dorena. They were from Silva Seed. All the directions on how to stratify the seeds came from someone at Dorena who works with Doug for propagation.

Steve Fitzgerald: So to stratify, the reason for stratifying seed is to kind of break the dormancy. So they'll germinate.

Kate McMichael: So we went through that whole process, you know, who needs space in your crisper if you want to grow trees, right? So they spent a number of weeks. Month and a half or so in the crisper. So in your refrigerator in our refrigerator Well, you know in winter it's seedlings.

So in spring it might as well be seeds and then I had gotten Stuff from one of the from that one of the tree nurseries. So it's little trays and two, essentially tubes that they can go on. And I had no idea what, so I created my own mixture of soil.

Steve Fitzgerald: Nice. So what we're [00:47:00] looking at here is a seedling that is probably about three inches high and it's got a nice little plug that its roots are in.

And all of these are looking pretty good.

Kate McMichael: Yeah. Cause Some of them are actually pretty.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah, they're even taller than that.

Kate McMichael: Yeah, so I kind of did a mix to keep soil in and then every day I pull them out They all get watered and the trays get swapped around so that they get a different They get a shared amount of sunlight every day It took a really long time for them to actually germinate, which I was pretty sure I was going to get nothing because it was like almost a month.

And then suddenly little trees pop up. And then I've transplanted some where I get, because there were a lot of seeds. There were probably six or seven seeds in each one because, you know. I over, I'd stratified way more than I could plant and I have so much greater appreciation for nurseries now. But I have some where I have doubles and when they look really good and somebody else hasn't made it.

I'm [00:48:00] transplanting them, and then we think we'll probably build a new bed for them, because we have two raised beds out in the growing ground that we built actually from those intermediate trees we'd taken down that the fire just licked over on our, one of our skid trails, and so we built growing beds out of them.

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay, well let's go take a look at those. Wow, okay, so here's, this is what we would call a transplant bed.

Kate McMichael: Yes. Okay. Well, that first year when we bought the incense cedar from Brooks, they were tiny and Kathy at Brooks said they'd need to be in a bed for the first year before we planted them out in the forest.

And so we built the beds and hauled in soil and had those guys in there. And then last year, after we had planted all the incense cedar, we had some leftover hemlock that we'd planted. Oh, and we'd bought some sequoia because we've been playing with some, variation, and then other ones that we, because we're always [00:49:00] rescuing little trees from cut banks or different places, and then those guys got planted in the winter, and so these are all rescues.

Teresa Hauser: Yeah, these were mostly cut bank trees.

Kate McMichael: They were mostly cut bank trees.

Steve Fitzgerald: So cut bank trees, those are little seedlings you dug out of the cut bank off the road or skid trail? Yeah. Okay, and then stuck them in here to see if they would take?

Kate McMichael: Because, you know, a hundred percent of trees where you're going to do fire clearance work die, so.

They have a better chance in one of these little beds. Actually, one of our favorites from last year was a super bushy little guy and we actually potted him up and took him up to the admin support person for Mike Kroon at Oregon Department of Forestry who has been, well, and Heather has been stuck with all of us on the committee for family forest land.

So her birthday present was a Doug fir and cause we didn't. He was so beautiful. We didn't want to trust him, trust the ground to be nice to him. So we gave him to someone who works for ODF instead.

Steve Fitzgerald: [00:50:00] How nice of you. That's great. Wow. Well, that's this is a tremendous amount of work. So I, it's. For two people to do this across, what, 40 some odd acres and it's really tremendous.

We haven't

Kate McMichael: done all, that's kind of you, we haven't done all of it on our own. We keep taking on little broader swaths all the time, but.

Steve Fitzgerald: Yeah, so, I mean, I think other landowners, you know, can learn from what you've had to do, maybe even be inspired and kind of keep that positive attitude because I can see, you know, after your trees are burned, you know, you have this dread, you know, what's next?

And I mean, you've shown what can be done not easy, but what can be done. So, I guess, you know, what's next here? On your property with all of this.

Managing the West Unit

Kate McMichael: Well, we haven't really focused as much on the West Unit, which is where our 18 year olds were. That were pretty, also pretty tightly [00:51:00] spaced, too young to be merchantable.

We planted right away, pretty right away, thinking they would be good shade. So you

Steve Fitzgerald: planted under them.

Kate McMichael: Planted under them. That was the decision. And it was too pricey to take the 18 year olds down.

Steve Fitzgerald: Before you planted. Planted. Yeah.

Kate McMichael: Although, I think if we had known now what we did then, we might have, I don't know.

Now it's kind of like they're a giant game of pick up sticks, they just fall everywhere. So they fall over the road, to the neighbors they fall on every path we've put in there. You know, every day we go and have something else to cut down and you get it all cleared and then they fall down again. Well, new trees.

New trees. It's not the same trees. It's not the same trees. But there are a lot of them and there, there's a little bit of regrowth in there and some sort of seedling survival. So we really want to focus our attention there and little by little, you know, get them actually on the ground intentionally and

Steve Fitzgerald: The dead 18 year old

Kate McMichael: cheese.

The dead 18 year olds. Like, clean up some of the mess made by the ones that have already [00:52:00] fallen. Get them limbed, and get to use that chipper we got to put on the back of the tractor. And, because we never thought we'd need a tractor, but yeah, it turns out when all your trees are falling down. So, I see you

Steve Fitzgerald: have a Kubota.

Yes. So, I'm envious. I love Kubotas. I wish I had one, but

Kate McMichael: yeah, we, yeah, if you wanna come drive ours anytime, you know, you can come help us out whenever you want. Thank you. Thank you.

Steve Fitzgerald: I would love that.

Kate McMichael: We're hoping that, you know, we can clean up some of the branches, get the living done, and then take the stems and kind of create little micro sites and it really intentionally.

Determine over the course of the next year, what we plant, what the next replant is like be able to do a serious inventory of survival versus mortality over in that West unit, which is also really steep and then figure out what we plant. a year from this winter. That's one thing we've sort of learned is like we kind of want to rush into everything and have it all succeed right away and [00:53:00] forests are on a different timeline.

That,

Teresa Hauser: that has been the hard part. I mean we if we had to do it over maybe we would have given it a little bit more time. I think any of the choices we've made are justifiable because You know, if that first planting had gone better then some of the spraying wouldn't have happened because there wouldn't have been all this free space for all those invasives.

Right,

Steve Fitzgerald: right, right.

Teresa Hauser: We joked about it. You know, here we are, look at us, making mistakes, so you don't have to but

you know, we've tried to jump into it and you, some of the failures give us a chance to kind of take a step back and go, okay, so what is working? And so even this last winter, we kind of did a, okay, so we have some dugs from If they don't work in these locations, I think dugs aren't going to work because those seedlings have done [00:54:00] fabulously across various parts of our landscape.

And if they're not making it, then maybe we need to look at a species diversification. And I think we need to take this next winter to do, you know, some of that really physical labor of let's get this down, let's move it where we want it and let's figure out where we're going to plant and what's going to plant and what.

What things actually look like instead of just running into. Put more stuff down.

Revising the Management Plan

Steve Fitzgerald: So I imagine you've revised your plan, your management plan, or at least in the process of doing that.

Kate McMichael: We did. We actually managed last summer to get certified. So we're tree farm certified. And then this winter I went through and I know I had great plans that I was going to rewrite parts of it, which didn't quite happen, but we read through everything, did lots of lists.

Oh, here are the things we did and marked those down and then started mapping out what's going to happen or [00:55:00] what was going to happen this year, which we've done a lot of those things. And then we'll do that same thing again at some point, I'm going to need to, you know, go actually type all that stuff in again.

But, and by January 1st, Oh, right. Before the, some of the yeah That's irrelevant to this conversation. But yeah, so the management plan is an ongoing kind of living document. We're not as good as some people are always having, you know, new stuff that they've written down, but we didn't come into this as foresters.

We came into this as former, you know, pastoral ministers and teachers. we're kind of growing into it slowly. the other thing we've learned is that if you don't get it done this year, it's. It's not like it's going to magically go away. It will still be there to be done next year.

And yeah, the to do list feels like it's, you know, the old thing of, you know, two steps, three steps forward, one step back, a to do list grows like, oh, four items added, one finished, four more added, one [00:56:00] finished, maybe two sometimes.

Steve Fitzgerald: Welcome to property ownership.

Teresa Hauser: Oh my goodness. Yes.

Kate McMichael: But, you know, we kind of have a few more plans of other places we want to have trails, because walking stuff every day makes a difference.

We kind of see things that need to get done, and it keeps building that level of intimacy and connection with this piece of land that we are responsible to, as well as responsible for. And, you know, there are those, like, Little hidden moments or hidden spots where you kind of come on this come upon this amazing beauty where it's It feels like you know, the land kind of gone.

Yeah, I feel in relationship with you, too

Steve Fitzgerald: Nice.

Lightning Round and Resources

Steve Fitzgerald: Okay before we wrap this podcast up, let's get into the lightning round of questions

What is your favorite tree?

Teresa Hauser: Oh, please forgive me all my [00:57:00] precious dugs, but probably a Coast Redwood. And I'm thinking, at this

Kate McMichael: very moment, I'm loving the Pacific Madrone.

Steve Fitzgerald: What is something unique that you carry in your cruiser vest that helps you with your work?

Kate McMichael: I don't know if it's a fun thing I always carry, but I'm always trying to bring my felcos with me because we went on a walk once with another woodland woman, woodland owner, Lindsay Reeves, and watched her pull out clippers about 15 times to go after, you know, blackberries on the side of the road.

And so by now, when we go for a walk, I try to make sure I have my sword in one pocket and my felcos in another pocket in case we need to. And I'm usually going after. in case there are thistles I need to cut down.

Steve Fitzgerald: What other resources can you share on for a listener that would like to dive deeper on the subject?

Kate McMichael: Well, my first thought, and what [00:58:00] we always say to people is, have you checked out extension? Which you didn't ask for that sort of plug, but I mean, we say, have you talked to your extension forester? And I mean, I think we always are pushing people in that direction between extension and oh, free. To go check out the Oregon Forest Resources Institute website because there are amazing resources there.

But for the peer to peer, Extension and then Small Woodlands.

Teresa Hauser: Yeah. Yeah, check out your local Small Woodlands chapter. But with Extension and OFRI, I don't even know that in a lifetime you could get through all of the resources available. It's astounding. I think we thought we'd gone to heaven when we discovered those

Steve Fitzgerald: websites.

Kate McMichael: And with all of the TreeSchool online recordings as well, I mean you can do an awful lot of learning without having to leave your living room.

Steve Fitzgerald: Well, thank you both for spending [00:59:00] time with me and sharing your story and journey and Pain and joy of managing this awesome piece of property. Thank you so much.

Teresa Hauser: Thanks. And, Fitz, thank you. You've been one of those teachers. We've sat in on a number of your classes on Zoom. And

Kate McMichael: actually when we were doing our planting this winter, you had visited not too long before and given us ideas and we kept going, okay, well, Fitz said we should, we could think about this. And it's like, Oh, and then maybe when he gets out here next time, you can show him what we did.

And actually it's being that center of a group of people who cheerlead for you makes all the difference. And it makes us want to cheerlead for others as well.

Steve Fitzgerald: Great. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it. So great. Take care.

Kate McMichael: You too.

Podcast Credits and Closing

Lauren Grand: The In the Woods podcast is produced by Lauren Grand, Jacob Putney, and Scott Lovingood, who are all members of the Oregon State University Forestry and [01:00:00] Natural Resources Extension team. Other members of the team who've been involved in the podcast include Carrie Berger, Jason O'Brien, and Stephen Fitzgerald.

Episodes are edited and produced by Carrie Cantrell. Music for In the Woods was composed by Jeffrey Hino, and graphic design was created by Christina Fryhoff. Funding for In the Woods Is provided by Oregon State University, Forestry and Natural Resources Extension, the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, and the USDA Renewable Resources Extension Act funding.

We hope you enjoyed the episode and we can't wait to talk to you again next month. Until then, what's in your woods?