The "Sport Logger"

There was a time, about 30 years ago, when getting up at 3 a.m. and heading out to the woods to fall timber was a thing Dave Elpi did with a song in his heart, and the good feeling that he was doing the right thing. As a professional logger, he thought himself a success. He was doing what he wanted to do, doing it the best he could, and getting paid for it.

Then, without much warning, his wonderful world of falling timber began to collapse, and he had to change or perish. The forests around Sisters he knew so well were no longer "tree farms," but became "forest ecosystems." The battle between the forest products industry, which championed the slogan, "trees forever," and the environmental community changed to "Save the Old-Growth!" and Dave was out of a job.

At one point, during those days when he thought he'd be falling trees forever, he made a deal with the old B-B Bar in Sisters: They paid him $35 a cord for firewood, split and stacked at the bar, and he could have all he wanted to drink and eat, and money in his pocket. Dave gets that dreamy look on his face today and says, "Most fun I ever had..."

Before that, around 1976, he was cutting blocks (bolts) from the big old cedar and tamarack pumpkins for Chet Bradley's shake mill in Sisters.

After the collapse of the glory days of logging, Dave scratched around the periphery of the woods, picking up this-and-that thinning contract and falling job, but it wasn't like it was during the good old days. Dave jumped back into timber falling after wildfires swept through the forests, cutting burned trees for lumber, but even that drifted off like the smoke of the fires.

When the colossal B&B Fire swept through over 90,000 acres of the Sisters District environs, the Forest Service sold millions of board feet of burned trees to private timber companies to be milled into dimensional lumber, and Dave went back to work fallin' timber - doing what he liked to do best.

But that went to hell in a handbasket, too. The environmental community challenged the size of trees harvested from the fire, stating they were way bigger in diameter than the Forest Service said they'd cut, and a federal judge shut the whole shebang down, leaving thousands of logs piled up alongside the roads in what are known as "cold decks."

Dave didn't sit on his bottom and moan and groan, he went to work salvaging the cold decks for fun and profit, purchasing them for firewood. At one time he had 110 logging trucks hauling over one million board feet of burned trees out of the B&B Fire Complex - a deal that left him scratching his head.

He didn't have the land along Highway 126 where Sisters Forest Products is based today; he was forced to stack logs on his place in Sisters, friends' yards everywhere, and just about any flat place he could find. Then he went out and purchased a slick piece of equipment - made in the good old USA of all things - that cuts and splits logs into firewood.

He also made his own jury-rigged apparatus that splits incense cedar from the B&B cold decks into split-rail fencing. That worked out better then he thought it would, so he snaked all the cedar he could from the B&B logs, went out and found more to buy and started stockpiling cedar fence posts. If you want a split-rail fence around your place that'll last longer than you will, call Dave.

In between making firewood, sawdust and split-rail fencing, Dave gets his logs from "stand enhancement" and thinning for fuels reduction, both of which help in managing a forest as an ecosystem. Stand enhancement allows trees to grow in a more healthy environment, and at the same time, cuts back on the chances of having a catastrophic wildfire.

Dave understands that fire, when used wisely and with good planning, is a natural tool in forest management, and knows from years of experience in the woods that it not a question of "if" a fire will happen, but "when."

Dave is quick to blame the environmental community for putting spotted owls before the needs of man for forest products and jobs - but at the same time, he's not a champion of shipping raw logs overseas for some other country's sawmills to cut up into plywood and lumber. He also notes that many of the private timber companies are changing to forest ecosystem management, looking for long-term yields and the elusive forest health focus so popular today.