Beginning in the early twentieth century, forest managers recognized they needed to study Washington's forests if timber production was to be sustainable over the long run. The U.S. Forest Service formally established the Wind River Experimental Forest in Skamania County in 1913, inaugurating the use of forests for scientific investigation. At first, researchers focused primarily on growing trees faster so they could replant after logging. Their interests served practical purposes. In time, the Forest Service expanded its research work and other government agencies and private companies such as the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company offered their own experimental work. After World War II, research narrowed to find ways to maximize timber production, using whatever technology or genetic research scientists could deploy. By the 1970s, forest researchers expanded their vision to incorporate entire ecosystems and long-term impacts of logging. After a century of steady research, forest scientists have learned many unexpected lessons from experiments conducted in Washington’s forests.
Prelude
No one living in or visiting the Pacific Northwest has ever ignored the forests. They have provided sustenance since time immemorial. They attracted the attention of explorers and non-Native settlers, who arrived beginning in the 1790s and saw in the forests potential sources of wealth. The trade in trees began almost immediately. The abundance of trees, especially in Western Washington, meant few people thought carefully about how forests grew or the effects of logging them. The seemingly inexhaustible supply made it seem as though there was no need to consider conserving them.
The federal government established the first national forests in Washington in 1897 and the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company purchased 900,000 acres of timberland in 1900, events that looked to the future of trees as the pace of logging quickened. With government agencies and private timber companies owning millions of acres of forests, they confronted the need to manage their holdings and ensure they would remain productive. To do so, they nurtured research programs designed especially to assure their investment remained economically beneficial. That is, they needed to know how to make forests productive and profitable, which focused mainly on how to grow better trees as fast as possible. By pursuing that target, researchers helped answer practical questions and discovered more fundamental characteristics about forests. In time, these efforts expanded to consider forest ecosystems more holistically. The interaction between experiments for productivity and the scientific knowledge gained from them forms a crucial backdrop to Washington’s forest history.
Getting Started
In 1908, the U.S. Forest Service created its first experiment station in Arizona, the beginning of a much larger network. By 1913, the agency had started the Wind River Experimental Forest located between Mount St. Helens and the Columbia River near Carson in Skamania County. (Names changed slightly over the years for the experimental forest and the regional Pacific Northwest Research Station that administered it in cooperation with the Gifford Pinchot National Forest; for consistency, current names are used here.)
The experimental forest was established at a site where researchers enjoyed access to varied forest types. Some of it had not been cut, leaving remnant old-growth forest. Some of it had already been logged, allowing researchers to study cutover land and second-growth forest. Some of it burned in the Yacolt Burn in 1902, making it useful for studying the effects of fire.
Sometimes called "the cradle of forest research in the Pacific Northwest," Wind River Experimental Forest began teaching foresters things even before it was officially designated ("Wind River Experimental Forest," p. 1). The first work by the Forest Service at Wind River began in 1909 when Julius Kummel established a nursery. He started his operation by clearing the land so he could establish seedlings. The need was great. It took an estimated 1 million seedlings to cover 2,000 to 3,000 acres. The Yacolt fire alone scorched nearly a quarter-million acres. By 1915, the nursery was producing a million seedlings annually. Providing seedlings to replant forests, chiefly after fires, became the nursery’s primary purpose. To achieve that, it often took an experimental approach, including attempts at growing Eastern hardwoods and European conifers. This established a pattern where solving one practical problem led to experiments that increased researchers’ overall knowledge of trees and forests.
While Kummel got the nursery underway, Thornton T. Munger (1883-1975), a young Forest Service ranger, became the first director of the Pacific Northwest Research Station and began several projects. Munger’s approach was practical. "The forest experiment station is created to serve the industry for the public welfare," said Munger (Herring and Greene, p. 53). Foresters such as Munger understood their work as improving nature to meet human needs, a worldview that considered forests on an agricultural model with timber viewed as a crop. Despite this instrumentalist view of trees, Munger started important studies at Wind River to study Douglas fir, especially how they grew over the course of their lives. For instance, he established permanent plots that researchers returned to for decades, even into the twenty-first century, to track carefully how much the trees were growing. From this work, Munger and his collaborators established accurate growth tables.
Experimentation at Wind River was just getting started.
Support for Practical Forestry
The early work of Kummel, Munger, and others at Wind River took place within an evolving national context affecting forest research. Research occupied a complicated place in the Forest Service and its predecessor, the Bureau of Forestry, as well as among private timber owners. From the earliest years, the first forest agency chief, Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), emphasized practical research that focused mainly on producing timber products, not scientific understanding. In 1911, when the Western Forestry and Conservation Association published its small book, Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest, the analysis and recommendations focused on policies and management practices but drew from very little scientific work. Part of that was because not much scientific work was available, but part of it was because the primary interest was on timber yields, not the nature of the forests. Reflecting on the beginning of the Pacific Northwest Research Station, Munger said, "From the start, I was not interested in research for research’s sake, but wanted to see research put into use, and so far as I had any influence, we did all we could to get the results before the public" (Duncan and Miner, 1). This attitude suited organizations and agencies primed to support economic activities.
It did not take long, however, for foresters such as Pinchot to recognize that basic science helped answer practical questions. In addition, credibility was at stake. For the public to trust the Forest Service’s recommendations, those recommendations needed to earn scientific credibility. Management priorities could not be seen to be swaying research conclusions.
To support research capacity, the Forest Service and Congress helped. In 1915, the Forest Service established a Bureau of Research that would inform administrative decisions. Early on, the research was designed to solve local problems through the emerging regional research stations. In Washington, for instance, most of the early research investigated how to best reseed Douglas fir forests.
Because experiments and research on forests required long-term studies, finding stable funding mattered. By the mid-1920s, the Society of American Foresters had studied the problem and called on Congress to pass legislation. Ohio Representative John R. McSweeney (1890-1969) and Oregon Senator Charles L. McNary (18974-1944) sponsored a bill that became law in 1928. The McSweeney-McNary Act directed the Department of Agriculture to conduct "investigations, experiments, and tests" to figure out the best methods to grow trees, reforest lands, protect forest resources, and identify their best use (Dana, 225). The law authorized more than $3 million in annual spending, including at regional forest-experiment stations. These stations, such as the Pacific Northwest Research Station headquartered in Portland, already existed. But the federal appropriations helped solidify research as a legitimate, necessary, and expected part of forest management. Besides growing trees, worthy research questions clustered around problems in forests, such as diseases, insects, and fire, as well as longer-term issues of sustainability.
Universities also were involved. The forester Charles Lathrop Pack (1857-1937) donated 334 acres to the University of Washington near Eatonville. It became a place for faculty and students to collaborate on research over the years and has grown. Today (2025), the Pack Forest is 4,300 acres and focuses on demonstrating sustainable forestry and ecosystem practices.
Early Research
The Northwest timber economy kept growing, and that meant rates of deforestation climbed. It fell to forest researchers to determine how best to regrow forests after they had been logged. The first director of Wind River Experimental Forest, Julius Hofmann, took up the task of determining the best methods for reforestation. At the time, replanting seedlings was not popular with timber owners who found it too time-consuming and expensive. They preferred natural regeneration: allowing seeds left over from logging, or seeds remaining with so-called seed trees, to provide for the next generation.
Hofmann determined that Douglas fir forests grew from seeds left behind and stored in the forest duff, the needles and debris that covered the soil. Leaving two seed trees per acre would provide sufficient seeds to reforested logged lands. Neither the Forest Service nor timber companies needed to replant trees, Hofmann’s theory suggested, because the forest would grow back naturally from these seeds stored in the topmost layer of soil.
The only problem was that trees were not growing back on clearcut lands as Hofmann’s theory argued they would. Hofmann resigned in 1924 and his replacement, Leo Isaac, designed some innovative experiments to test Hofmann's theory. These included scattering seeds from an oatmeal box carried into the air by a kite, showing that wind-borne seeds carried much farther than expected – up to a quarter-mile, more than three times what they expected. By refuting Hofmann’s seed-storage theory, Isaac helped convince even the reluctant timber companies that natural regeneration would be insufficient. One of Isaac’s field assistants was Bob Marshall (1901-1939), who later authored sharp critiques of the timber industry and became a principal founder of the Wilderness Society.
Researchers accomplished other things during this time, too. Besides seed studies, they experimented with spacing between seedlings, finding that more space between them proved to be more effective than expected. This also was a common trend: surprising results.
As important as finding the best methods for regenerating forests was, other ideas were in the air. In 1926, Munger read pioneering ecologist Victor Shelford, who advocated for preserving areas as natural laboratories. Munger decided to set aside some old-growth forest at Wind River at a time when most foresters saw old-growth only as wasteful and without a role in good forestry practices. To understand how old-growth forests fit in the life cycle of forests required long-term thinking that Munger prepared the way for.
The backdrop to all this was growing criticism of industrial forestry. Too many private timber companies clear-cut land and left it, a practice that seemed wasteful. Forest researchers tried to convince them that Douglas fir could be grown as a crop, so that landowners would replant. Much of the careful measuring at Wind River created yield tables to help show foresters what to expect from Douglas fir growth over decades. The research had to demonstrate not only ecological potential but also economic promise.
Tree Farms as Experimental Forests
Private timber companies did not just wait for federal foresters to share their research. Weyerhaeuser innovated, too, in part to fight negative public perception. Part of the public had grown alarmed at the practices of some private timber owners. Some reformers aimed to curtail their actions. Bob Marshall published a book in 1933 calling for public ownership of nearly all the nation’s commercial forests. Given that apparently hostile context, Weyerhaeuser started a campaign in 1937 with the tagline "Timber is a Crop" to help the public learn and appreciate this perspective. If that operated mostly like an advertising campaign, soon the company launched a large-scale experiment on the landscape.
On land outside Montesano, Weyerhaeuser opened Clemons Tree Farm (initially called Tree Farm Number One). The site, some 120,000 acres that Weyerhaeuser owned and leased, spread over cut-over land where fires had compromised forest regrowth. The company hoped to recoup its investment by replanting seedlings, which it did successfully with Operation Rehab. With initial success, the nation’s first tree farm started with some fanfare on June 12, 1941.
Clemons Tree Farm dealt with real problems concerning reforestation and fire control. Timber companies preferred natural reforestation as the cheapest option. However, at the Clemons site and elsewhere, logged lands did not always regrow as expected (something Wind River had also discovered). Like the work being done at Wind River, Weyerhaeuser conducted research and experiments designed to identify optimal planting patterns. In time, these efforts expanded to study methods for fertilizing soil, preventing disease, thinning trees, and even some genetic experimenting at Weyerhaeuser's nursery in Longview. The company’s goals were to produce timber on an industrial scale and use these rigorous studies to ensure this happened.
Changing Research Emphases
The 1930s and 1940s were a transitional period. The typical management pattern had become: log, slash burn, and replant. Researchers worked to improve nursery practices and planting procedures. The methods developed at Wind River’s nursery were adopted across the globe. (When it closed in 1997, the nursery had produced 800 million seedlings.) Meanwhile, Munger started heredity studies which confirmed that samples from high-altitude stock grew best at high altitudes (same in reverse for low elevations). This may have been expected, but without experiments, no one would have been certain. When he began such studies, Munger expected them to last 40 years, another example of his long-term vision.
In the post-World War II period, research capacity and curiosity expanded significantly. The next several decades moved beyond basic science and toward production ends. A debate had occurred in the 1930s about the merits of selective logging as an alternative to clear cuts. But by the postwar era, such a debate lay dormant for decades as forest researchers, following the emphases of the timber economy and national forest administration, focused on "optimization – of harvest, of seedling germination, of growth, of production" (Duncan and Miner, 10). A shift occurred as research emphasis moved from "natural patterns of growth and reproduction of Douglas fir" to "new research focused on maximizing growth and controlling whatever interfered with optimum production" (Herring and Greene, 94).
This shift took several forms. To ramp up production, research often relied on technology in its experimentation. For example, for a short time, researchers tested and considered using alder to fix nitrogen in the soil to improve conditions for forests. They quickly turned toward chemical fertilizers instead.
Another indication of changes was the relocation of work. Wind River Experimental Forest lost its on-site researchers, and it was administered through a new Olympia Forestry Sciences Lab. This did not spell the end of field work, of course, but the rise of lab-based forest science symbolized a new era.
Some of the same methods continued. During the Depression the Forest Service set aside its first Research Natural Areas (RNAs) in Washington, including on the Olympic Peninsula, in the North Cascades, and at Wind River, which was later renamed to honor Munger. These RNAs were relatively intact ecosystems protected so that scientists could study forests as "a standard or baseline for comparison with areas influenced by man, as tracts for ecologcal [sic] and environmental study, and as reserves to protect typical as well as rare and endangered organisms" (Dyrness, et al., iii). In the 1950s, RNAs grew to include other federal agencies besides the Forest Service. The state created its own system of RNAs in 1972. By the 1980s, 70 RNAs existed in the state, mostly in forest ecosystems.
The explosive growth of logging on national forests during these years created opportunities and needs for further research. In 1957, the Forest Service created the Entiat Experimental Forest about 30 miles north of Wenatchee. The agency, which supported road development and timber sales, wanted to study how road building and logging affected watersheds, specifically water quality and quantity. Scientists gathered data on the Entiat until 1970, when a wildfire burned the watershed they were studying. Sensing opportunity, the Forest Service transitioned to studying the effects of fire on streams, followed by postfire rehabilitation studies. Researchers kept compiling data that still helps inform managers how their actions affect forests and water several decades later.
Experiments in Complexity
As more forests were cut and environmental legislation passed Congress with wide majorities, new incentives existed to investigate the full complexity of forest ecosystems. From the 1970s onward, experimental forests considered whole ecosystems and cumulative impacts, as well as a full range of species that depended on forests. Researchers understood this broader view in part because of the work they had done at experimental forests such as Wind River and their observations at the growing number of RNAs in the state.
Collaborative research between university scientists and foresters helped reveal new avenues of research that supported the broader needs of forest science. The center of much of this new work was Oregon’s H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, but many scientists who worked there, such as Jerry Franklin, conducted joint studies at Wind River. Franklin had grown up in nearby Camas. In 1977, he gathered researchers to Wind River to define old-growth forests. What emerged from the discussion was a set of characteristics – big trees, old trees, interlocking crowns, littered ground – not the production of board feet. A new way to think about forests opened up new ways to research in them.
Rather than productivity and simplicity, researchers considered biodiversity and complexity. Federal legislation, such as the National Forest Management Act, required the Forest Service to maintain viable populations of wildlife and engage in rigorous interdisciplinary planning. RNAs, such as the area set aside by Munger in the earliest years of Wind River, provided essential data in understanding diverse old-growth forests and what species required to survive in them. The sample plots he established had been measured regularly for a century, adding critical data.
Canopies, mostly ignored until recently, became a new focus for research. In 1995, the Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility opened. A crane, standing 25 stories high, allowed researchers a view into the crown from above. They measured and observed new species and processes in the interconnected canopy of Douglas fir forests. Here was another example of new technology allowing new questions to be explored. An in-house history of the Pacific Northwest Research Station summarized the work of scientists at the station: "[I]t has been technology in the hands of eternally curious people, people who want to know the next answer, to build the next brick, to leave the forests of the future in good shape" (Duncan and Miner, 70).
The station was not alone. In 1992, the Washington Department of Natural Resources created the Olympic Experimental State Forest, largely between the mountain and coastal units of Olympic National Park. There, across more than a quarter-million acres, the department deployed an experimental and integrated management approach. On the forest, some lands were logged and others left alone. It is managed toward a goal of having a "mosaic of forest ages" (DNR) where researchers can cut timber and study habitat. The first two-thirds of the twentieth century mainly focused on even-aged forest stands, so this mosaic approach was part of reorienting forest science research in the Northwest.
Beginning in 2009, the Olympic Experimental State Forest joined a network of experimental forests, becoming the largest site in this national network. This distinction encapsulates much of the history of experimental forests in the region: its scale was large; it was embedded in ecological, institutional, and human networks; it relied on collaboration at different levels of government and with university and other researchers. All of these have been hallmarks of forest research for more than a century.
