Tim McNulty (b. 1949), an award-winning poet, essayist, nature writer, and conservation activist, has lived on the Olympic Peninsula since 1972 and remains influential in the Northwest environmental community. In this May 2025 interview with HistoryLink's Jill Freidberg, McNulty discusses his early fascination with forests; how he helped start Olympic Reforestation Incorporated (ORI), a cooperative that planted millions of trees in Western Washington; his involvement in efforts to save pristine Shi Shi Beach on the Washington coast; and his dream summer job manning remote Sourdough Mountain Lookout in the North Cascades.
Heading West
Tim McNulty: I was born in Meriden, Connecticut, post-industrial town, pretty indistinct place to grow up except that an early industrialist dedicated 2000 acres of forested land for a city park, which was pretty unusual back then. It included a small mountain range, lakes, streams, hardwood forests. It was pretty magnificent, and I kind of got hooked on that place. My grandfather had a small farm nearby, so it was a big part of growing up, and it's probably where that the first hint of wide open, natural forest caught me.
My father, first-generation Irish, was a printer newspaper guy. Left school in high school when his parents died, and my mother, also first-generation, Italian ancestry. Her parents both came from Italy, and she was a secretary for the prosecutor's office and a court stenographer and was kind of tied into city government that way. Both of them were pretty active in politics, Democratic party, labor, you know. They met at a political fundraiser. My father was pretty active in his union, typographical union was kind of a radical union at the time. FDR people for sure.
I couldn't wait to get out of there and did. Went to college in Boston, Northeastern University first, then the University of Massachusetts at Boston. I was an English major. I began reading some of the West Coast poets that really caught my imagination. Kenneth Rexroth was one. Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, William Everson, Theodore Roethke. I wanted to see this place they were writing about – the forest, the coastlines, everything else.
So one summer in college, I was able to break loose and hitchhike west with a friend and go for some hikes and camp out and really got a taste of the place and decided that, when I finished school, I would come back out this way and find a place to settle, which I did. Ended up in Port Townsend.
Starting Olympic Reforestation Inc.
TM: Everybody was just doing whatever they could. I mean, bucking hay, remodel work, oyster shucking, cutting firewood, a lot of cutting firewood. That was 1972. And I met Mike O'Connor. Mike had grown up around here. He was living in Sequim. And he'd worked for the Forest Service. You know, he'd planted trees, he'd done trail work. We kind of connected over poetry. And he worked for a crazy old coot out on the West End called Hop Dhooghe. Oh, you couldn't make this up. "Hop" because, as a kid, Hopalong Cassidy was his hero.
So, Mike got me my first tree-planting job. It was right down here across the Dungeness River up on Burnt Hill. And I took to it. I loved it. It was fun, it was invigorating, got up high, and had these great views. There was nobody else around, could camp out.
Several of us who were working for other contractors decided we could be doing this for ourselves, setting our own terms, sharing the profits, working when we wanted to, where we wanted to. So it was pretty easy to just transition into forming a cooperative. We kind of just figured it out as we as went along. We did all right. We started winning work and heading out to the west end, usually every early spring, sometimes February, and for four months or so, that was our lives, nomadic, tree planters.
I ended up doing a lot of the cruising and bidding for the company. We were on the mailing list, and we'd get these packets from the Washington Department of Natural Resources, Forest Service, and private timber companies. We'd head out, look at the areas that had been clear-cut, we won some, we lost some. Sometimes we lost our shirts. Sometimes, rarely, we did really well. But mostly we did okay.
We had great adventures, lots of fun, lots of miserable weather. It's blowing in off the ocean. The President's Day Storm, of 1979, that sunk the Hood Canal Bridge, we were stranded amidst a bunch of blow down, up on Goodman Creek, on the west end. We had a lot of sideways rain and steep slopes, mud, dirt, swamps, stumps, slash, but we were all in it together. We either sunk or swum. Everybody just kind of knocked themselves out and tried to make it happen.
We were living on the units, camping out. For one thing, everybody had a great library. And, you know, there's no radio, no nothing. So there was a lot of reading going on at night. And then people talking about what they're reading, lots of ideas, lots of books, lots of poetry, getting together, drinking wine, reading poems, sharing drafts of the poems we're writing. On a rare occasion, we'd go into town and hit the bars in Forks and shoot pool and drink. Occasionally, if it was a weekend night, and there was music, we'd stay and get really drunk and dance and somehow or other drive back through the logging roads to our camp.
I can remember a handful of camps. One was up at a ridge overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, on Dan Kelly Road. We were up on DNR land, and the unit had logged right up to the top of the ridge, and down the other side. And a couple of the landings were right up on the top of the ridge. We could look down, and the sun's going down, out to the west, and the Strait is out ahead of us. At night the lights start twinkling from Victoria, and you turn around and there's the Olympics, the snowy peaks, because it's springtime and there's still snow on the mountains, and the stars come out, and it's just exceptional.
Maybe you're sitting in your hooch, reading and drinking tea, and you go out to take a leak and, my god, you're in the mountains, and at night the clear-cut disappears, but the stars and the big features are all there. The moon comes up. Just those magical times. It was really, really wonderful to be out and to be sharing those spaces with close friends. I do miss it. I miss it a lot.
Mowing Down Mountainsides
Olympic Reforestation Incorporated (ORI) was the name of the tree-planting cooperative operated by McNulty with a like-minded group of writers, artists, and musicians including Finn Wilcox (b. 1953), Mike O'Connor, and Jerry Gorsline. The work was rewarding but difficult and eye-opening.
TM: Some of the hardest stuff, I think was what was then the Shelton District of Olympic National Forest. They were just logging mountainsides. The Forest Service had a special arrangement with Simpson Timber Company, and they were just, they were just mowing down mountainsides out there, all old growth and no soil. I mean, it was rock. We'd be planting around these magnificent, huge stumps that were just anchored into the cliff side, trying to find a place where there's enough dirt to get a tree planted.
That was the most grueling. And the Shelton District had a reputation, West Coast-wide, for sure, as some of the most brutal logging abused land anywhere. I had to just stop and look at some of these stumps and imagine what the trees looked like, which was not hard to imagine, because right over there, the other side of the draw, there's the timber line, and there they are. It's beautiful old growth cedar, spruce, Douglas fir, hemlock, and these are what's getting mowed down. I can remember climbing up on a spruce stump, on the Clearwater, right down in the river bottom. Our hoedads had 3-foot-long handles, and just laying it down once, flipping it over twice, three times, and there's still this much stump left. I mean, you know, 10, 11 foot stump. So that all fueled me, as far as my conservation work.
Saving Shi Shi
Remote Shi Shi Beach is located along the Olympic National Park Wilderness Coast on the Makah Indian Reservation in Clallam County. Getting to the beach requires a muddy 4-mile hike from the parking lot but the rewards include abundant bald eagles and unparalleled views of the Point of Arches, "a mile-long parade of rocky sea stacks."
TM: I ended up spending a year out on the coast in what was a little cabin out south of Point of the Arches, Shi Shi Beach.
Driving out there, you're going through a lot of cuts, and they never sat well with me. But when I was out at Shi Shi, I was taking a hike up at Petroleum Creek, and I heard saws, which was terribly frightening. I followed the sound and got up at the edge of a very large clear-cut, and fallers were working, down in the creek gorge, the next tributary over. I could see trees going down. This was a fresh cut. It was green, on the ground, and that's what really snapped me to action. Like, holy cow, this place could really go. This was not far. I'd been hiking less than 45 minutes from the beach.
And then, I met Steve Johnson, who at the time was living in Neah Bay, and he had gotten involved in the early, early movement to try to see if Shi Shi Beach could be preserved. It was owned by a number of timber companies. There were a lot of different ideas about could it be a national seashore, could it be added to the national park? He was writing letters to everybody and anybody, handwritten letters. And you know, I knew how to write letters. I can drop into an office and talk to somebody. So I jumped in with him and started working with ... a number of conservationists in the state.
There was a Seattle-based group called Olympic Park Associates, and they were some of the premier conservation activists of the 1960s and '70s. These were some of the people that helped create North Cascades National Park, that worked for passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. They were tied in nationally. And I just kind of bumped into them. I went to testify at a national park public meeting, on the Olympic National Park's Management Plan for the next 20 years. They had a public hearing up at Peninsula College. Steve Johnson and Robert Sund – the poet, also associated with Shi Shi, had a little cabin there – and I went there, and there was all the OPA board people, and they were all testifying. I testified and they corralled me afterwards and took me out to dinner. And over the next couple of years, I became pretty closely involved with that organization. And I'm still with that organization, now called Olympic Park Advocates, 50 years later.
Then Governor Dan Evans worked out an agreement with the logging companies out there. And our congressman at the time, Don Bonker, introduced a bill, and it had pretty widespread support, and it passed and was signed into law. And so in 1976, Shi Shi was saved. Legally and congressionally, the park still had to get the money to buy out the timber companies, but I was like, "Wow. This is pretty cool."
Conservation Work
TM: I jumped right into the next issue and that was the east Olympics Wilderness Areas, the Buckhorn and Brothers and Mildred Lakes wilderness areas. And that was a bit of a long deal and involved a lot of lobbying, a lot of meetings, a lot of writing articles and letters, organizing a campaign. Mike O'Connor, Steve Johnson, Jerry Gorsline, myself, and several others formed a little organization, loosely, loosely structured organization called Ohode. Ohode was a Makah word that meant "all of us."
Jerry Gorsline really reeducated us in a lot of ways. He was reading Scientific American and following up on technical papers. There were scientific papers being published out of the Oregon, H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, where the Forest Service was doing all their research. Jerry Franklin, the great old-growth ecologist, was running that research program and doing some fantastic stuff about the nature of old-growth forests as habitat, as nutrient cycling, and that was being published by the Forest Service. Jerry was getting those articles, figuring out which ones were important, and sharing them with us. All of a sudden we are reading cutting-edge research on watersheds, on forests, on diversity, on ecosystem health. And so I was just drinking it up, gobbling up, as much as I can. But also I was kind of an understudy to Polly Dyer and Hazel Wolf and Phil Zelensky and all these Seattle conservation folks.
And finally in 1984, there was the Washington Wilderness Act that grew out of a few other federal conservation processes. And that really taught me a whole lot more about lobbying Congress. I went back to D.C. a couple of times and oh, one time, it came to a real crunch time. It was probably 1983, and there were committee hearings, congressional hearings, and I really needed to go back, but it was in the middle of a planting season, and we had a big forest service contract, with Olympic National Forest. A lot was on the line. I made my case that, "Hey guys, I hate to do this, but I gotta bail. I gotta fly back to D.C. I gotta do this thing." And everybody was supportive. They kept me on the payroll. I got paid for planting trees to lobby in D.C. and testify and go around to talk to congressmen. And that was pretty cool because that was hard-earned money that everybody was sharing on that one.
We all jumped in pretty heavily on the Forest Service wilderness lands, because the national forests were being logged to smithereens back then, roads being pushed up all the valleys. And the Forest Service got it in its head that they needed to get roads everywhere before Congress could make decisions on which Forest Service areas would be wilderness. So, we were really motivated. We had put together a proposal for the East Olympics and got most of the conservation organizations in the state to sign on to it.
When the 1984 bill passed, that was a pretty major sense of accomplishment. And we could see directly areas that we worked really hard for. The Gray Wolf River, the middle Dosewallips, the lower Duckabush, south fork Skokomish rivers were now congressionally designated wilderness. No roads, no logging, no development. It's like, wow. Fantastic.
The Spotted Owl Years
McNulty has written extensively about Washington's abundant beauty and natural resources. His book Washington's Wild Rivers: The Unfinished Work was published in 1990. He later wrote books about Mount Rainier National Park and Olympic National Park, and in 2023 published Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain: Washington's Olympic Peninsula. He also has published several volumes of poetry, often drawing inspiration from his adventures in the forest.
TM: By 1980, '81, the very early '80s, none of the agencies could sell their timber. Nobody was bidding on them. We went from 25 or more people on the crew down to just trying to find work for five or six of us.
I put in an application with the National Park Service thinking maybe doing trail work would be a little … you know. I was loathe to do it, because I had to give up my summers, and I was absolutely wedded to the idea of summers off, with unemployment checks coming every two weeks, and backpacking and climbing and roaming around here. That’s pretty much what I lived for. So it was tough, but I think it was probably '82 or '83, I started working for the Park Service. I was among the old-growth forests with the elk and the deer and the bear and the birds, and it was also hard work, also outdoors, but the environment was so much, so much better. On the other hand, it didn't have quite the camaraderie and the espirit de corps and the focus of we're all in this together.
Around the time that the spotted owl issue was brewing, I was working on a project, this would've been after the 1984 Wilderness Bill, and we had close to 90,000 acres of the Olympic National Forest designated as a congressionally designated wilderness areas. I and a couple of others realized that the next step was going to be wild and scenic rivers, to protect these critical salmon habitats and migration corridors, and so that became my focus. Pat O'Hara and I got a contract with the Mountaineers to do a book on Washington's Wild Rivers. We picked about 12 rivers that were representative of different potential Wild and Scenic Rivers in the state. Pat was photographing. We were doing river trips, we were hiking, I was meeting with wildlife and fisheries biologists. And meanwhile, the spotted owl issue took on a national constituency.
I had been to a couple of big organizing meetings on that. And one of them, down in Portland, was a big rallying cry. This is gonna be the next huge thing, if we're gonna save the old-growth forests, this is gonna be how we do it. We published the rivers book. It was well received. But the attention had shifted away from rivers onto the spotted owl issue. And at that time, I had gone to work for Clallam County, as a watershed educator. So I was working for the county and not putting a lot of time into the old-growth issue.
Around the Northwest, things got pretty pitched. It really felt like the momentum was building, and something was going to happen. Then when Clinton won the election, he had said, "I'm gonna resolve this issue, and it's gonna be scientific-based, and it's gonna save a good portion of the federal old growth, and it's gonna provide assistance and retraining for people, in the industry." And that all kind of came to pass with the Northwest Forest Plan. It was not everything that the environmentalists hoped to get, but I think, in retrospect, we did pretty well.
And then there was the '92 legislation on the Elwha, the Elwha Restoration Act. And we celebrated that in '92, not knowing there was going to be another 20 years of fooling around and nothing happening before the dams actually came out. And then, well, the goats were finally moved off, the non-native goats moved off the peninsula, and fishers were reintroduced here.
So, whenever you're just feeling like you're spinning your wheels and not accomplishing anything positive, some small thing happens to keep me plugged in and to rally the troops to celebrate and move on after that. I think looking back on this ecosystem, I think there's a lot of really good work that's happened in the last 40, 50 years that I don't take credit for any of it, but I was part of the small army that was working towards some of that stuff.
Sourdough Lookout
TM: There were a number of fires, 2003, I think, a number of fires in North Cascades National Park. They decided they needed to reactivate the old Sourdough Mountain Lookout, which is on the Skagit, up above Diablo. Incredible place. I got a call from my friend Russ Dalton, who I was on the trail crew here with. And he said, "they're looking for somebody to staff the Sourdough Mountain Lookout. I thought of you."
I said, "When's it start?" And he said, "Well, they're gonna need you there in two days." I called him back and said I could be there in three days. So, I got the gig and was up there for maybe six, seven weeks. It was fun. I loved it. It was really cool.
It was kind of a dream, you know? I had read Gary Snyder's Lookout Journal and Jack Kerouac's Desolation Peak, and I thought, god, that would be fun to do. But you know, I thought all these lookouts were gone now. And besides, in the summer, I want to go backpacking and climbing, and I'd probably go stir crazy, but this is incredible. Turned out, that was the 50th anniversary of Gary Snyder's tenure on Sourdough Mountain Lookout. So that was pretty cool. I kept a journal, wrote a little cycle of poems that I titled Through High Still Air, which was a line from his poem Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout.
