A timber operation went awry. Fallout echoed far beyond the forest.

Editor’s note: “The Last Stand” is a developing series about Bureau of Land Management forestlands around Eugene and Roseburg, as the Trump administration pushes to expand timber production in western Oregon. Stakes are high for the local economies that depend on timber — and for old-growth forests that may never return.

This first story explores how the cutting of an old tree contributed to a judge’s ruling on a court case that ended a multimillion-dollar timber project. Lookout Eugene-Springfield spent four months reviewing court documents and interviewing people involved. When principal players declined to be interviewed, Lookout drew extensively on court declarations filed by those people.

As Justin Agee explained why he took a chain saw to a gigantic Douglas fir in an old-growth forest, the stump at his feet spoke for itself.  

Nearly 200 rings circled within the stump’s diameter of more than 40 inches, a size and age the Bureau of Land Management had long promised to protect from logging in the mountains of the Oregon Coast Range.

Lacy conifer branches framed a towering logging rig in a clearing about 60 miles southwest of Eugene. BLM contract administrator Jeremy Bochart wanted to know why he had found an off-limit tree cut.

In his April 21, 2026, inspection report, Bochart wrote: “40+ inch diameter trees may only be cut as an absolute last resort. Several nearby stumps indicate poor execution … More care should be taken.” 

Amid the slash of evergreens, Agee and Bochart met on a mid-April morning, the sixth day of the first unit of the 132-acre timber sale called Mean Mustard, where the agency appraised trees at over $300,000 worth of lumber. Joining them: Justin Black, the contract representative of Diamond J Timber Services, which purchased the sale, and Jerry Hammet, Agee’s fellow lumberman.

Hammet said, in hindsight, things could have been done differently. But when he felled a 36-inch tree — a size allowed for cutting — his focus was on getting it to land flat on the uneven forest floor. 

Instead, it got stuck against the protected Douglas fir, and several tons of timber dangled above, not far from the road. 

Agee cut notches into the Douglas fir to set the smaller tree free. But he missed a section on the far side of the base. As it came down, creaking, the tree crashed onto another 40-inch Douglas fir standing nearby, uprooting it.

Agee and Hammet were unaware they knocked over this second tree until Bochart told them. After stern directions to slow down, Bochart pulled Black aside as Agee and Hammet went back to work. 

“[I’ll] be monitoring the fallers closely,” Bochart said.

Bochart drove away on a gravel road winding along Yellow Creek, a trailer for the company’s security guard in his rearview mirror. 

He wasn’t the only one watching.

A group of Eugene-based volunteers hiked through the stand two weeks later. While contracted as a timber sale, the area is also on public land, accessible to all. 

They saw seven cedars greater than 40 inches in diameter, some upward of 250 years old, now severed, they testified in U.S. District Court. 

The volunteers were part of Cascadia Wildlands, a conservation group in litigation with the BLM for nearly two years, claiming that the agency failed to adequately consider and protect old-growth forests within sales like this one.

Areas like Mean Mustard — ecologically rich sections of forests in the Coast Range — are rare. They provide habitat for wildlife and filter clean water. 

Under the BLM’s Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan, the agency must balance timber harvests with the protection of these natural resources, which also provide habitat for endangered species like the marbled murrelet and spotted owl. BLM is bound by multiple environmental laws to do so. 

For additional policy details, read Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s explainer of BLM’s Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan.

Critics say Mean Mustard is an example of the agency struggling to meet its timber goals under that plan, with ancient trees as a casualty. In a motion to stop the operations, attorneys with Cascadia Wildlands reiterated that BLM was violating its own management plan. 

A federal judge sided with conservationists May 14, halting not only Mean Mustard but also the larger project, the Blue and Gold project — nearly 3,400 acres — that it’s part of.

In the weeks that followed, pleas came from timber companies, including one in Springfield, and from BLM itself, asking the judge to reverse course. They cited the far-reaching economic hardships caused by the inability to get timber from the sales to mills. They also argued that the conservationists overstated the sizes of the seven cedar trees.

Meanwhile, at the Mean Mustard unit, stacks of tinder-dry brush over 6 feet high sat piled alongside the road throughout the summer. 

And the security trailer that was part of the timber operation, tucked into a bend of Yellow Creek, was burned to scraps of charred metal, another pile the contractors are tasked with cleaning up.

Next to the rubble, a tag tied to a branch swayed in the wind. Written on the tag: a list of dates that surveyors checked for the marbled murrelet, an endangered seabird.

As the marbled murrelet flies  

The puffin-like marbled murrelet can fly up to 50 miles a day, from the Pacific Ocean to forests in the Coast Range. The seabird brings herring and other small fish back to its young. 

It nests on large mossy branches so big they act like a platform to balance the murrelet’s chick born from the solitary egg it lays. The trees that bear these branches are part of the largest temperate rainforest in the world, spanning North America’s western edge from Sitka, Alaska, through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and into California. 

Across this gargantuan swath of forests, rivers and streams, some sections, such as the Redwoods and the Olympics, have earned a pristine designation under the National Parks Service. 

Other sections, like those in Lane and Douglas counties — tucked between Interstate 5 and the Siuslaw National Forest — share its foothills with a Dairy Queen. 

The DQ is among several chain restaurants in Sutherlin, about 15 miles east from the Mean Mustard sale. Another 12 miles south down Interstate 5 is the BLM Roseburg District’s Swiftwater Field Office, where Werner Krueger is stationed. 

Krueger works in a top role for the office as its acting field manager, taking the place of the recently departed field manager, Michael Korn, who retired in December after nearly a decade with the office. 

At the office, these top managers rely on reports like those from Bochart to oversee operations in the forests. And they are often the ones signing off on timber sales, the commercial transactions government agencies make with companies that cut trees from public lands. 

On May 15, Krueger issued suspension notices to four timber sales, including Mean Mustard, in response to the court order. 

“Effective immediately, all road construction and timber harvest operations must stop within the contract area,” the notice said. “Only activities necessary for safe removal of personnel and equipment may continue during suspension.” 

From the paperwork, Krueger knew that huge piles of freshly cut timber lined the roads. He worried about financial liability and wildfires.

“In practical terms, for these sales BLM would have to reimburse purchasers for their costs,” he said in a declaration filed with the court. “And decked logs on these four sales creates an exceptionally high level of fire risk.”

As the days grew hotter and longer, the fine needles, branches and small trees cured in the sun. At the Tidy Bowl sale — one of the four suspended sales — about 50 loads of logs lay, drying out. 

Losing such a significant share of Rosboro’s volume will reverberate throughout the company. Rosboro Vice President Brian Tenbusch

Nearly $600,000 worth of inaccessible logs belonged to Rosboro Co., North America’s largest producer of laminated timber products. The company operates a sawmill in Springfield and two facilities in Veneta. 

“Wasted,” Vice President Brian Tenbusch said in his court declaration, filed alongside the one from Werner May 22. 

“Under the court’s order, the trees that have been felled must be left where they sit,” Tenbusch said. “In addition to this waste, all the costs Rosboro has sunk into the Tidy Bowl sale are now irrecoverable.”

To win against more than 300 other bidders, Rosboro had paid $2.6 million, nearly four times the BLM’s $691,000 appraisal of the Tidy Bowl sale.

The company hired five contracting businesses, who still had about a quarter of the 191-acre Tidy Bowl sale left to cut, in addition to what waited to be hauled to the mill. Unlike Mean Mustard, no inspection report flagged any problem with the contractors on Tidy Bowl, according to available public records. 

The Tidy Bowl sale — in addition to the yet-to-begin Sternbreaker sale, also within the Blue and Gold project — would account for 29% of the volume needed for production at Rosboro, which as of May had 260 full-time employees. 

“Losing such a significant share of Rosboro’s volume will reverberate throughout the company, and its employees with hard-felt consequences,” Tenbusch said. “Rosboro simply cannot lose the money.” 

The disputed grounds of public lands 

In Eugene, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai read the declarations from Krueger and Tenbusch, filed as part of the American Forest Resource Council motion for reconsideration of his order to stop timber operations.  

These harms are insufficient to overcome the real risk of ecological disruption. U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai

The council represents businesses that are members of their trade organizations, including Rosboro and Sierra Pacific Industries. Sierra Pacific also had work at stake, having purchased two other timber sales within the Blue and Gold project. The company was planning to supply its three sawmills in Eugene and one in Noti with logs from the sales. 

The council joined the lawsuit in support of BLM in 2024, when the plaintiffs — Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild and Umpqua Watersheds — first brought allegations before Kasubhai that the agency did not properly account for legally protected old-growth forests in the Blue and Gold timber sales. 

Throughout the case, the two sides brought forward evidence with starkly different interpretations of the same maps and datasets. Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica published their own investigation, independently finding discrepancies between BLM’s estimates of tree age and what was actually on the ground. 

The dispute continued into 2025, and through Kasubhai’s May order. 

But all parties stipulated on June 10 to allow limited cleanup and removal of downed logs in sales like Tidy Bowl and Mean Mustard, while leaving the bigger legal fight unresolved. 

A month later, Kasubhai issued his final order, unwavering from his first. 

“The Court recognizes and is sympathetic to both the economic impacts on those companies and BLM’s mandate to harvest,” Kasubhai wrote in an opinion posted July 9. “However, these harms are insufficient to overcome the real risk of ecological disruption posed by BLM’s Plan to harvest those areas without adequately considering the presence of, and ensuring the retention of, ecologically significant old-growth trees.”

Lookout Eugene-Springfield reached out to the American Forest Resource Council — whose spokesperson Nick Smith previously said it could not comment on pending litigation — for an interview. Smith declined Lookout’s request again after the judge’s ruling.

“We are considering an appeal,” Smith wrote in an email July 31. “This case isn’t necessarily closed as far as we’re concerned.”

Attorneys have until mid- to late September to file an appeal.

Meanwhile, the BLM is evaluating its options for the Blue and Gold project, according to an agency spokesperson who declined to be named per guidance from the Department of Interior. The spokesperson also declined Lookout’s requests for an interview. 

“We have a statutory mandate under the O&C Act — as well as a responsibility to the communities of western Oregon—to harvest and sell timber in this area,” that spokesperson wrote. 

The agency interprets the O&C Act, short for the Oregon and California Railroad, as a law that prioritizes 2.5 million acres for timber harvesting. Named for that railroad, the O&C lands are concentrated in Oregon, with nearly 40% in Lane and Douglas counties.

But BLM is also governed by multiple other environmental laws, two of which Kasubhai found the agency violated in this case.

For a glossary of environmental laws related to the case, read Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s explainer of BLM’s Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan.

Conservationists and timber groups aren’t the only ones divided over what these laws mean for places like Blue and Gold.

 So, too, are some who have spent years inside BLM. 

‘Stumps never lie’ 

Erich Reeder started his decades-long career working in the forest running a chain saw and slinging plastic jugs of oil. 

He wore ear plugs as spinning steel teeth devoured trees. 

Then, one season, he got a job surveying the land — taking notes on tree species, their age and size — his hearing, unmuffled. He started noticing the sounds of birds. 

Wings beating. High-pitched vocalizations. Rustling branches. 

For 23 years, Reeder would map and evaluate wildlife habitats as a biologist science technician for the BLM’s Swiftwater office. His work helped planning managers design timber sales to reduce harm to endangered species. 

Reeder retired in 2024, the same year timber sales in Blue and Gold went to auction for the first time. 

Before Reeder left, he filed a memo flagging inaccuracies in the agency’s environmental assessment about the project — flawed data, he said, that showed forests younger than they really were. This included forests he had hiked and analyzed himself, such as the area that would become the Mean Mustard sale. 

On July 31, he walked through the Mean Mustard sale. Browned conifer needles and brittle branches snapped beneath his boots until he reached a large cut trunk. 

“There’s an old saying,” Reeder said. “Stumps never lie.” 

Reeder moved slowly across rugged ground through the woody remains of the timber operation.

At the harvest’s boundary, he crossed into an intact stand of trees in an old-growth forest. 

Grabbing thick fronds of knee-high sword ferns, he pulled himself up the hill. With each step, the land grew greener. 

Sprawling vine maple. Fragrant wild ginger. Stout woodland flowers. Huckleberry bushes. Carpets of moss. 

“There are very few forests like this in the entire world,” Reeder said. “The mass of living things, of life, is greater in these forests than anywhere else.” 

Reeder gazed at the understory, where a lanky Western hemlock stopped short of the Douglas firs that formed the canopy.  

“We call them old growth, but they are thoroughly alive, and they have all kinds of youth to them, too,” he said. “They’re a foundational part of the ecological community.” 

This community absorbs enormous amounts of water when it rains, storing it and keeping the forest cool during the dog days of summer like this July morning. Retaining water is an evolutionary trait that conifers here developed as a survival mechanism — one that has made these forests so towering and lush for centuries. 

But 60 feet away, in the recently cut stand, the moisture was gone. Heat radiated off dry dirt and logs. 

“What you’ve done here is you’ve really disturbed and disrupted the ecological community,” Reeder said. “A head-scratcher.” 

“This was an unlogged, little roadless area, Late Succession — well,” Reeder said, catching himself in agency-speak, “Well, old-growth forest, right?” 

A “Late Successional Reserve” is a land allocation within BLM’s Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan that manages habitat for threatened species such as the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet. 

These reserves are largely off-limits to commercial harvesting. 

While the stand in the Mean Mustard timber sale had old-growth characteristics of Late Successional Reserves, it was designated as part of the Harvest Land Base, lands the agency allocates for timber operations. Still, even within the Harvest Land Base, the plan protects from logging trees over 40 inches in diameter and older than about 175 years old.

Do we want to conserve the very last of our mature and old-growth forests … or do we want to put them on the back of trucks? Retired BLM biologist Erich Reeder

These designations in the Resource Management Plan have been the subject of contention since they were finalized in 2016, during the Obama administration. Now, the plan is up for revision under the Trump administration. The proposal nearly quadruples the harvest land base by taking forests out of their designation as Late Successional Reserves. 

 “Ultimately it’s the people that decide,” Reeder said. “Do we want to conserve the very last of our mature and old-growth forests for ourselves and children and grandchildren, or do we want to put them on the back of trucks, because we need the money right now?” 

An American promise 

Truckers in heavy-duty rigs frequently drive in and out of the Coast Range through Drain, where a castle is nestled in the hills. 

With brown paneling and chartreuse trim, the Charles C. Drain House, named for the state senator who lived there, represents an era of promised prosperity from the U.S. government. 

After displacing the Indigenous people from their ancestral homelands, including the Kalapuya, the government gave land to white settlers. And in this townsite, settled in 1847, houses went up quickly — so did stores, mills and public services. 

In the decades that followed, the federal government also granted land to the Oregon and California Railroad, which became rife with corruption. Congress intervened, in the absence of a fully built railroad, and the remaining land was returned to federal control through the Oregon and California Revested Lands Sustained Yield Management Act of 1937, and the land eventually fell under BLM control. 

Nearly two centuries later, the Drain House — also called the Drain Castle — stands tall as a national landmark. Around it, much has shuttered in Drain. Nearly 1,200 residents still live in the struggling timber town. Roughly 1 in 5 of them is a child, many growing up below the poverty line.

Drain relies on timber for jobs and funding, in an economic system largely managed by the BLM. For example, the contractor who bought the Mean Mustard sale — a business registered out of Drain — made payments to BLM for the trees there. That becomes revenue for BLM. 

Half of that revenue flows back into the county it comes from, in this case Douglas County, which includes about 728,000 acres of O&C lands. Last year, this system allowed the agency to distribute just over $6.9 million to the county, supporting the budgets of local schools and road projects. Similarly, Lane County, where about 277,000 acres of O&C lands lie, received nearly $4 million last year. 

But the amount of timber the agency logged on these lands in 2025 is a fraction of the historic average. BLM cites that decline as part of its reason to revise its resource management plans, in addition to advancing President Trump’s executive orders on timber production. 

BLM itself has admitted, however, to creating impossible targets on how much timber can come from this land, according to its 2016 Resource Management Plan. Despite that, in its 2026 version of the plan, its proposal focuses on economic output and meets only the bare minimum of environmental requirements. 

It’s a proposal that Shelley Snow, who lives in a yurt in Drain on 24 acres, is struggling with.

“You got to find the balance, and I don’t think the BLM is doing a good job at that, especially in the political climate today, and maybe even in Biden’s as well,” Snow said. “It’s big money.”

Snow’s two blue heelers run freely on her hillside property, which neighbors O&C lands as well as private timberlands owned by Sierra Pacific Industries. Surrounding Drain, the ownership of the land changes, mile by mile, in the Bureau of Land Management checkerboard.

Private timberlands. Public lands. Private residencies. 

Snow and her husband, David DeBlaker, inherited the land from a lifelong friend who died. She splits her time, half in the house in Eugene, half at the yurt in Drain. Over the last few years, they learned about the people of the town — and that logging there runs through generations. 

“Their dads, their granddads, their great-granddads, and on and on. It’s all they know. It’s where their skills lie. They don’t have other options,” Snow said. 

Snow knows what it is like to have limited options. While she never worked in logging herself, she grew up poor in Arkansas with a single mom. A family friend helped them get by until Snow was able to provide for herself, moving west and eventually working for the Oregon Department of Transportation for 22 years. Her time as a state employee instilled a strong sense of what it means to be a public servant. 

“What we do in government is not easy. If it was, the private sector would do it, right? That means what we’re doing is necessarily complex, so that requires a complex, thorough approach with no room for error,” she said. “My understanding is that the BLM failed in its jobs to help understand and explore, and discuss a complex issue, and that is a basic requirement of a government agency.” 

Snow has grown more outspoken about protecting old-growth forests in her retirement and is now a member of Cascadia Wildlands. She’s read through the hundreds of pages of legal documents filed in the Blue and Gold case — often at the yurt. Out her window is an industrial tree farm, as well as something small she planted. 

Grapevines, their tendrils curling across a trellis, are heavy now in September with a sweet, seedless fruit. 

‘The best we could’ 

Cool rain finally poured again in the Mean Mustard stand after a dry summer. It still wasn’t enough to dampen the fallen brick-red needles on the ground that had cured for months. 

Madeline Cowen pulled the measuring tape out of her backpack again this overcast morning, Sept. 4. She was here in May, as an organizer with Cascadia Wildlands. She documented what she saw and filed it as a declaration in court: several cedars cut that should still be standing.

After suspension notices went out for Blue and Gold, in compliance with the judge’s order to stop timber operations, Bochart, the BLM contract supervisor, drove again to the Mean Mustard to look at these cut cedars. 

The diameters of Western cedars aren’t consistent up the tree. Where the root system meets the surface, their trunks flare outward before narrowing toward the crown. Typically foresters consider measurements taken too low as an inflated diameter, and so they measure the diameter at their breast height. 

Bochart found several large cedar stumps that, at their stump height, measured greater than 40 inches. But in some cases, he wrote, the logs had been hauled away, so he couldn’t look at them. He turned to standing trees with similar stumps, winding a yellow tape measure around them. Only one came in over 40 inches, others coming in under, such as 38 inches, he wrote. 

Most of the cut cedars weren’t old enough to qualify for protection, Bochart concluded.

At a cedar stump in September, Cowen said she similarly followed BLM’s protocols in her measurements. 

“We did the best we could given the circumstances, even still, we were well above 40 inches above many of the trees,” Cowen said. “And even if the tree was 38 (inches), it’s still not a perfect science for telling the age of the tree, and it still has ecological integrity and value here, even if it’s not at the exact diameter that the agency needs in order to protect it.” 

Slash piles still lay unmoved along the road. Down by the creek, so did the burned trailer.

A BLM spokesperson wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire but said no further investigation was planned. Removal of the trailer, and the slash piles, is the contractor’s responsibility, to be handled when they return to finish cleaning up the site, the spokesperson said.  

With her measuring tape, Cowen crawled around the large Douglas fir tree that loggers cut. It wrapped around at about 50 inches, breast height. 

BLM concluded that the contractors were not in violation of the rules for cutting this tree. Despite its size, the agency said that cutting the tree was authorized, for safety reasons. 

In the clearing of the cut, a cloud of mist hovered over evergreens standing tall across the canyon. Cowen held back tears. 

“Unfortunately, the story of Blue and Gold doesn’t end here, with these new plan revisions,” she said. “There’s no way the agency can meet the targets that they’ve set forth without going into these old-growth stands with these big old trees, like what we’ve seen here.”

All video shot by Michael Sherman, Spring Fed Media.

This story has been updated to clarify that a stipulation allowed companies to access lumber in the vacated Blue and Gold project over the summer.