Five years on the Wilson River reach

I planted my first Doug fir on this slope in spring 2020. The crew was eight people, the slash was waist-deep, and we were certain a third of the seedlings wouldn't make it through the dry summer. They did. Survival at year one was 91%, well above what the contract foresters down the road were getting on their replants. We didn't have a secret. We had time, and we picked the days.

The Wilson River reach was a 1,240-acre clearcut when we acquired it in 2019. The previous owner had pulled the merchantable timber, sprayed glyphosate twice, and was getting ready to sell the dirt to a developer who wanted to subdivide it for off-grid cabins. We outbid them by twelve thousand dollars on a parcel that was, on paper, worthless.

Year one: just keeping things alive

The first year is triage. You're not building forest yet — you're keeping seedlings alive long enough to put down a root system that can find water on its own. We planted 84,000 trees that first spring, mostly Doug fir on the dry slopes and western red cedar in the bottoms. Crew rotated every two weeks; nobody plants well past two weeks.

“We didn't have a secret. We had time, and we picked the days.”

Year three: the understory wakes up

Something happens around year three that you can't engineer. You'll be walking a unit you replanted, and the salal you didn't plant, the sword fern you didn't plant, the vine maple, the salmonberry — all of it is suddenly chest-high, suddenly seeded back from the surrounding intact forest. The land remembers. Your job in year three is to stay out of its way and pull the invasives that don't belong.

Year five: salmon

Last fall I watched a coho hen dig a redd in a side channel of the Wilson that didn't exist when we bought the property. We'd breached an old logging road in 2022, and the creek had taken back its old course. The hen was four years old, which means she'd been an alevin in this watershed the spring after we put the road to bed. That's not metaphor. That's the actual timing.

Five years is nothing in forest time. The Doug fir we planted in 2020 are eight feet tall. They'll be eighty feet tall in 2070. The cedars will outlive everyone reading this. But the salmon came back in five, and the salmon are the system telling you it's working.