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Cloud Girls By Jenny Wyss Ulrich
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Mountain Gazette Library
Cloud Girls By Jenny Wyss Ulrich
Hello and welcome back to the Mountain Gazette Library. I'm John Buzar and this week join us as we explore cloud girls, the young Oregon women who saved a forest. The inspiring story of how these young women dedicated their summers to protecting and rebuilding after the devastating Tillamook burn. [MUSIC] Mountain Gazette Library is proudly presented by Steel. Designed, developed, and tested at the base of the Tetons in Jackson, whole Wyoming, Steel was founded to inspire connection with the outdoors through premium technical apparel for the epic and everyday. Learn more at steel.com, stio.com, steel, let the outside in. The Mountain Gazette Library is proudly presented by Gordini. Based in Vermont and family run, Gordini has focused on the same mission since 1956, to keep you outside longer. Our gloves, socks, and goggles aren't merely accessories. They are critical pieces of equipment that are built to last season after season. We take our commitment to people and the planet seriously and build that into every detail. From introducing the first-ever down mitts to knitting quilted dual layer socks, innovation is always done in the spirit of progress. Learn more about what drives our passions and products at Gordini.com. G-O-R-D-I-N-I.com Mountain Gazette Library is also proudly presented by Visit Idaho and Visit Sun Valley. Discover where adventure meets style in Sun Valley, Idaho. Welcome to America's pioneering mountain town that veers off the beaten path. Explore five distinct mountain races, over 200 miles of single-track mountain biking trails, a myriad of fly fishing waters, exciting events, and inviting dining options. Plan your summer escape at visit sunvalley.com. Cloud girls, the young Oregon women who saved a forest, by Jenny Wiss Ulrich. Wildfires are deeply embedded in the collective memory of Telemuk, a small farming town on the northwest coast of Oregon. The walls of social halls and diners display grainy black and white photographs of mountains, scorched velvet black, clouds of acrid smoke hovering over dairy pastures, and grinning schoolchildren stooped over, planting tree seedlings into the scorched earth. Even today, many locals have connections to someone who fought the fires, or joined the unprecedented replanting efforts, witnesses to both the destruction and regeneration of an entire forest within their lifetimes. The force of nature, known as the Telemuk burn, consumed over 350,000 acres of old growth timber in a series of wildfires between 1933 and 1952, transforming the lives and livelihoods of many Oregonians without warning. Amidst this, 14 brave young women dedicated their summers to protecting the new forests that followed. In the summer of 1933, forest conditions were bone dry in the coast range above Telemuk. Around noon on August 14th, a spark from a remote logging operation ignited one of the most devastating wildfires in Oregon's history. The flames spread rapidly through the dry underbrush and over rugged terrain, outpacing the loggers who tried in vain to contain it amidst utter chaos. Within an hour, the fire had torn through 60 acres. Logging crews throughout the mountains were caught off guard and scrambled to evacuate the area along the few roads cut into the deep landscape. One dramatic account tells of a truck loaded with men driving for miles at top speed down a narrow hairpin logging road. In reverse, unhindered, the burn raged for weeks, fueled by strong east winds. Ash filled the air, reported to have rained down onto the decks of ships 500 miles out to sea, and darkened the skies as far away as Portland, turning day into night. It was September before the rains finally extinguished to the raging blaze of 1933. In the year that followed, a significant operation began to salvage the usable cores of the burnt trees, known as snags. Crews constructed 380 miles of logging roads to recover an estimated 1.5 million snags. Many loggers pivoted to join the salvage crews, whose job was to plane off the blackened shells of the snags and send the usable wood to lumber mills, returning home looking more like coal miners than timber fallers. It seemed the logging industry would soon overcome the dual devastation of the telemuck burn and the Great Depression. However, a terrifying pattern developed. Every six years, 1939, 1945, 1951, became known as the jinx years, during which the forest burned again, leaving a 400 square mile wasteland. 350,000 acres burned and re-burned, leaving a desolate sea of blackened snags crosshatching the coast range as far as the eye could see. By 1951, the community was prepared for the next jinx year. What had been a goldmine of private timberlands had transitioned to county and then state ownership? Fire crews, better trained in suppression tactics, could mobilize more quickly and with better resources. The fires came, but the six-year jinx of 1951, passed with only 32,000 acres lost. After the telemuck burn, with lands now managed by the Oregon Department of Forestry, Oregonians from all walks of life joined an unprecedented reforestation movement. A monumental tree replanting effort began with snags cleared and fire suppression efforts in place. Initial attempts to replant the forest involved dropping bushels of tree seeds from plains. But when few seeds took root, laborers undertook the painstaking task of hand planting seedlings, carrying slings of baby trees over land, digging holes, and planting them. The Forestry Department inmates and civic groups from across the state replanted with two-year-old Douglas fir seedlings, a fast-maturing, industrious stock suitable for lumber. School children on field trips climbed out of buses to join the effort, heralded by newsreels as "young Americans on the march with something fine and constructive to do." Collectively, they traversed hundreds of thousands of acres to replant the burn. Over the next two decades, Oregonians replanted 72 million trees, one by one. Yet even with this concerted effort, the new trees faced a hostile environment. For every three trees planted, returning deer and elk consumed two. Seasonal heavy rainfall threatened soil erosion on the steep and barren mountain slopes. And every six years, Oregonians held their breath, waiting for the return of the jinx that never came. As the replanting effort began to pay off, it became clear that the young forest was an investment that needed protecting. The history of fire lookouts in the west is rich, filled with harrowing tales of surviving furious ridgetops storms, long periods of isolation, and the stress of confronting wildfires alone. Stories of adventure and independence and service to the forest. Fire season after the spring snows melt, and until the fall rains re-saturate the land, is lookout season. By some accounts, Mabel Gray was the first lookout in the U.S. In 1902, Gray worked as the cook in a private timber camp in headquarters, Idaho. Between meal preparation and managing the mess hall, she also had to walk to the top of Bertha Hill twice a day to look for any smoke on the horizon. A decade later, Halley Daggett became famously the first official female fire lookout. She was hired in 1913 and held the position for 15 years at Eddie's Gulch lookout station, atop Klamath Peak in Klamath National Forest. However, female lookouts continued to be a rarity for the next 25 years. This changed during World War II when men joined the war effort. Waves of women could enter the workforce for the first time, accessing jobs across industries that men had previously dominated. Jobs as fire lookouts, in particular, provided women with the means to live independently while protecting an essential national resource. In fire lookout job postings from the era, qualities of self-motivation, patience, and endurance were emphasized as vital. In 1944, six students from the University of Oregon landed summer jobs as lookouts throughout the Tillamook burn. The media was enchanted by these young women in forestry, nicknaming them "the cloud girls." Their moniker stemmed from the public's romantic notion of days spent among the clouds in their towers, above the fog rolling in from the Pacific, filling the valleys below their posts. More importantly, they served their country by taking a position that few would risk. By the 1950s, a network of lookout towers dotted the high country of the coast range, and 14 cloud girls operated them in the decades following the Tillamook burn. On a unique mission from those who had served before them, they were pioneers in their role as protectors of a forest in its infancy, of land given a second chance by humans. Eleanor Mitchell was among them. In the summer of 1950, she worked as a cloud girl on Trask Mountain and recalled that she "just wanted to do it." It was a way of earning money. Plus, I was familiar with the terminology for map reading and such. So that was it. Mitchell worked on the Trask Mountain lookout for more than 20 seasons. Another lookout, Jane Asher, said, "For me, it was just being in the woods all summer. A lot of work, but like a big camping trip. It was great with the view, and I loved it." In the summer of 1957, Phyllis Martin began working as a lookout after her sophomore year at the University of Oregon, where she studied speech. Her friend, Marge Wells, had been a lookout on Round Top the year before and encouraged Martin to apply. That summer, Martin was stationed at the South Saddle Mountain lookout, along with her pet cat, PK, short for Phyllis cat. Getting to the towers was arduous. Some had no roads, so the only way to get there was via a rugged hike to an isolated peak. South Saddle Mountain was accessible by taking a small rail track maintenance car along 17.5 miles of dead-end track, then hiking a half-mile up the ridge to the top of the mountain. About a half-hour pack from where the rails ended. Martin's on-the-job training was simple, but critical. They took me out there, showed me what needed to be done, made sure I knew how to do it, and said goodbye. When she first arrived at the tower, her supervisor gave her basic instructions in four subjects, how to use the Osborne Firefinder, take data from the tower's weather station, use radio 10 codes, and call in daily weather reports via the radio. Being stationed in solitude as the guardian of the forest took extraordinary patience and determination. The days were long and often quiet, aside from the occasional radio chatter among towers in dispatch, the only lifeline to the outside world. Cloud girls spent long days observing the horizon, sweeping the sky through binoculars for signs of inclement weather, and the trees for indications of nascent fire. Twice daily, Martin would call in the weather via radio. Each lookout tower in the district had an order in the reporting rotation and had to be ready when called. First thing each morning, Martin would climb down the 40-foot tower to collect data from the weather station below. She manually checked humidity, dewpoint, temperature, and precipitation. Back at the top, she read the sky for clouds and noted any concerning weather. Everything was recorded in the tower's logbook. On top of regular weather checks, a lookout's primary job was to report any signs of fire. Still, from miles away, it's not always clear what is genuinely fire and what might be something else, such as agricultural operations or dust kick-up. New lookouts often faced a dilemma in determining when to call in a smoke report, since they wanted to prove their competency, but didn't want to strain the system with false alarms. The distinction was rarely easy, as Martin recalled, but when a possible wildfire is on the line, it's better to be prudent. Martin didn't particularly want to spot a fire, but after all, that was why she was there. It was a jinxier, the sixth since the last eruption of the Tillamook burn in 1951, so the fear of fire was constant in the hot, dry summer that kept her and the other cloud girls alert with their eyes on the sky. Her one embarrassing triumph, as she called it, was reporting a plume of white smoke rising from the valley near Gaston, Oregon, about 14 miles away. She couldn't be sure it was a fire sign, but to be on the safe side, she called it in as a smoke report. A ground crew barreled out to investigate, and discovered it was only a farmer liming a field, to the relief of all. Her supervisor, however, said she had nailed the exact location. The Osborne firefighter, invented in 1911 and still used today, is the primary tool lookouts used to plot the location of smoke relative to the tower. Dominating the center of each tower stands a podium, topped by an instrument resembling a sundial, fitted with a significant brass compass. The tower is the pivot point at the center of a circular map of the surrounding forest. Lookouts align two sites to find a bearing in degrees and an approximate distance based on their understanding of the topography. Then they relay coordinates to their dispatch, who direct ground crews. Smoke reports also include character descriptions of the smoke, such as its color, volume, and movement, providing ground crews with valuable information about what lies beneath the visible tree cover, such as fuel type and burn temperature. By positioning a tactical network of towers across vast swaths of forest, multiple lookouts could site and triangulate precise locations of incidents. South Saddle Mountain Tower, Martin's home for the summers, was built in 1948 for $1,554.83, equal to $19,116 in 2022, to replace an earlier tower that resembled little more than a crow's nest. Like three others constructed in the Tillamuck burn that same year, the 40-foot timber structure supported a one-room 14-by-14-foot cabin. Commonly known as the L4 type, the room had glass pane walls and a 360-degree view from miles in all directions. A low-pitched roof supported heavy shutters, hinged above the windows to provide shade and summer and protection from snow and wind in the winter when the towers were empty. Lookouts had few possessions in the towers, most of which were considered permanent supplies left behind from past patrols. A simple wooden bed, a desk with a radio, a chair, a wood stove, and a dry kitchen fitted snuggly into the room with the Osborne firefinder in the center. Among the basics, Martin was surprised to find a tattered guide to identifying aircraft silhouettes. During the Second World War, lookouts had also served as enemy plane spotters. Martin brought along a portable AM radio and painting supplies to help her pass the time on quiet days. Living alone in a tower in the woods is both a vulnerable and an empowering reality. There were no days off, little relief from the elements, and a vein of self-reliance that fueled daily life. Rangers packed in supplies on a mule every few weeks. Canned food and dry goods were essential, with long stretches between ration deliveries and no refrigeration. Lookouts could request special items like books, magazines, or more coffee, placing their orders over the shared radio channels. Gloria Wilson was a cloud girl on Grindstone Mountain. Her regular supply deliveries were suddenly halted when all available personnel were called out to fight a fire, and she nearly ran out of food. She recalled having to eat pancake mix for a week and get special permission to eat the few emergency rations she had left. It got so bad that she had to keep the wood stove constantly burning because her supply of matches was running out. Without plumbing, water for drinking and cooking had to be carried up daily from a nearby spring. But for those towers without a nearby water source, Rangers hauled up rations in military-style jerry cans during their regular deliveries. Getting the water up into the cabin was the duty of the lookout, who either carried it up the stairs and buckets, or used a simple pulley system. While pantry foods and dried meat fueled the primary diet, some lookouts maintained a small garden for nutritional variety. However, keeping it alive required extra effort. Even if a lookout was lucky enough to have a nearby water source, the garden had to be irrigated by hand with water carried up from a hike. The effort paid off with fresh produce, albeit highly taxed, as anyone who has attempted to grow a garden in the forest has quickly learned, one does end up sharing most of the bounty with the neighboring animals that become part of everyday life in the wilderness. Nights at elevation can be frigid, even in summer, but the towers offered a simple comfort. Most were outfitted with a small iron wood stove for warmth and cooking. Their very existence, 40 feet in the sky, a marvel of wilderness transportation. Wood too had to be sourced from the forest below. Little was available in the area ravaged by the Tillamook burn, but what could be found was said to warm one many times over. Chop it, stack it, carry it up 72 steps, and stack it again. The weather during Phyllis Martin's first summer as a cloud girl in 1957 was typical for the coast range, a string of warm, clear days punctuated by a wet storm. Nothing prepared Martin for life in a 40-foot tower perched on a mountaintop. Winds would sway the creaking lookout as it blew cold through the floorboards, but Martin's cat, P.K., was never bothered by the wind. "I remember being able to watch the clouds come in from the coast and fill up the valleys," Martin recalled. "Pretty soon, you'd just be sitting up there, on top of the clouds, and everything was below you. On a good day, I could see five mountains in the Cascade range, a couple in Washington, Mount St. Helens and Adams, and Mount Hood. The duty of a lookout isn't only to prevent the forest from burning, but to be there, when it does. Eleanor Mitchell, one of the original cloud girls of 1944, was stationed primarily at Trask Mountain lookout for her 20 seasons, but in the summer of 1951, she was stationed at the lookout on Round Top Mountain. Not many green trees were visible, with three sides of the mountain previously burned, and just a small stand of timber left on the northwest side. That summer, Mitchell witnessed the last major blaze of the Tillamook burn, as it roared within a mile of her tower. "I watched it grow up the canyon, but stayed involved over the radio," she remembered. Yet in the face of thickening smoke and raining embers, Mitchell kept relaying crucial information to the field office and fire crews. She later found out that embers from the fire had settled into the roof of her tower, some burning holes. In that final jinx year, the fires came and went with only 32,000 acres lost, in large part due to the unwavering service of the cloud girls. While there once were thousands of lookout towers across the U.S., today only a few hundred remain, Martin's South Saddle Mountain Tower was dismantled in 1974. Trask Lookout, where Mitchell was stationed for many years, was the last staffed fire lookout used in northwest Oregon, and was closed at the end of the fire season in 1982. Once essential in forest management, today's competing modern technologies of drones and global mesh satellites make the cost of maintaining and staffing the structures barely viable. Nonetheless, outdoor enthusiasts and history buffs alike can step back in time by hiking to the remaining towers, some of which are even available to rent for overnight stays. If you're lucky, you might visit one of the handful that are still staffed across the west, where you can thank a lookout for us all. In 1973, Oregon Governor Tom McCall renamed the Tillamook burn area the Tillamook state forest. In doing so, he signaled the immense forest regeneration that Oregonians of all walks of life had made possible. Today, a drive-along U.S. Route 26 between Portland and the Pacific Coast reveals a thriving ecosystem. The road winds through the Wilson River Canyon, buttressed by towering peaks that bristle with Douglas fir, big leaf maple, and alder. A rich carpet of moss and swordferns keeps the humidity high. If you sit quietly, you can observe new generations of deer and elk that thrive under the thick canopy. The few remaining stands of old growth hemlock and cedar that predate the burn no longer amount to a forest primeval. But the cloud girls and the fire lookouts who have served since kept vigil over that arboreal nursery, giving it a chance to become a forest once more. Those who witnessed the Tillamook burn over and over didn't know if they'd ever again see it as a verdant forest. But today, they have. Special thanks to the Tillamook Forest Center in Tillamook Oregon for sharing their historical archives. To learn more or to make a donation, visit Tillamookforestcenter.org. Mountain Gazette Library is produced by Mountain Gazette, executive produced by Mike Rokey, produced and hosted by John Booster. Austin Holt is our marketing director. No part of this podcast or the magazine can be reproduced or used to train large language models without express written consent from Verb Cabin LLC. That means you open AI. To learn more about Mountain Gazette, please visit us at mountaingazette.com. [MUSIC]