All posts by Jessica McDonald

A New Year

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Well, 2014 is a wrap! And what a year it was, this our 25th Anniversary. It was a time to reflect on the countless people who have made Greenbelt into what it is today, while outlining a future for the next 25 years. When Greenbelt began so humbly in 1989 amid living rooms and kitchen conversations there was never a lack of vision. You might think that a group that knew so little about nonprofit administration, the technical legalese of Conservation Easements or the art of grantwriting might have let that stop them from establishing far-reaching goals and benchmarks. Not Greenbelt Land Trust. From the onset our founders, Board, and supporters made a leap of faith in this organization, from protecting West Bald Hill within a year of the establishment as a nonprofit, to building connecting trails and identifying potential natural areas.

As we step into 2015, I leave you with words from Greenbelt’s early years from our two greatest champions, Charlie and Elsie Ross. These oft-quoted words continue to inspire me, and likely you, every day. They resonate deeply throughout Greenbelt, not just for who we were 25 years ago, but for who we are today.

Our Greenbelt Vision

We support the Greenbelt concept because it provides a happier way to live in cities large or small. Corvallis and Philomath are blessed with a most interesting and varied setting. Every dictate of reason and desire tells us to retain permanently some of the green fields and wooded hills where we can see them daily and reach them easily. Walking the footpaths and wooded trails of the greenbelt would become our most popular recreation, and a passionate pursuit for many. The healing hand of nature would lift the spirits of those burdened by the loneliness and disappointments of life. Everyone would enjoy a greenbelt, and none more than our myriad successors destined to trod its trails into the future.

Elsie and I believe that Nature is the greatest comfort of life. Therefore, Elsie and I wish for an ample, permanent greenbelt that grows as population grows, a greenbelt that does more than assure “livability”, but makes life here exciting and its future optimistic; a greenbelt that injects vibrancy into city life, provides stability for investments, and immunizes against downtown decay. Success, we think, hinges a lot on actions of this generation. The time is now for townspeople to accord the greenbelt purpose a special place in their charitable giving. Our family and others have been doing this for 10 years and longer.

We need to remind ourselves “In the beauty of the land lies the dream of the future.” We are challenged to keep that dream alive, and it might be Now or Never.

Charles and Elsie Ross

 

Certain Events

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There are certain events through time that have been transformative. Just to name a few …

  • The Big Bang —  from a singular point the universe began expanding about 13.8 million years ago, give or take a few hundred million years and resulted in the creation of 500 billion galaxies each perhaps containing 500 billion stars!
  • Big Splash –  the formation of the Moon after an apparent collision of the earth with a body the size of Mars about 4.5 million years ago and resulted in numerous biologically-rich eco-systems dependent on the ebb and flow of sea tides controlled by the Moon’s gravitational pull
  • Big Extinction –  Like the meteor strike 66 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico that ended the Cretaceous period resulted in the loss of 75% of all organisms on earth and re-set the trajectory of life…not so good for dinosaurs but perhaps fundamental to the rise of mammals
  • Big Ice Age or Missoula Floods –  between 15000-1300 years ago that resulted in massive waves of of water flowing through the Columbia Gorge, carving the gorge canyons and depositing rich thick topsoils on the Willamette Valley floor
  • More recently…the Big Willamette Flood of 1861 – the largest recorded flood in the history of Oregon that swept away towns, mills, houses and domestic livestock and transformed much of Oregon’s economy and how people lived with the river

An even more recent event was the arrival of Betty in Corvallis in 1968 in what we call the Big Griffiths which resulted in a burst of cosmic energy that transformed our community.

Betty Griffiths: Friend, Volunteer, Leader 1940 – 2014

The essential elements or chromosomes that composed the DNA Helix of The Big Griffiths included the attributes of :

  • Fierceness (what I call the Warrior Princess chromosome )
  • Indomitable Will (Tsunami chromosome- similar to that massive wall of water that swept through the Columbia Gorge-13000 years ago)
  • Passion (A gene that expresses an unalterable and deep love of this community)
  • Vision and Creativity (Rare and highly valued trait that constantly pushes one to strive to achieve a better community)

You mix these elements together (and grace it with Betty’s beautiful smile) and you have an irrefutable cosmic force that swept through our community for 46 years.  The results to name a few, are a community with:

  • More affordable housing,
  • Neighborhoods that retain their historic roots, culture and character
  • A rich and vibrant downtown and
  • A more sustainable environment with cleaner water and air, an abundance of natural areas and parks for healthier people and wildlife

If something of importance was happening in our Community, I can assure you that Betty was in the thick of it and often Directing Traffic … prodding, cajoling, insisting, asserting that indomitable, fierce will that revitalized our riverfront, created a progressive comprehensive planning framework for our town, protected our cultural and historic legacies, built an environmentally conscious community, and surrounded our town with an emerald necklace of green open spaces to connect people to nature.

Betty joined Greenbelt Land Trust’s Board in 2002 and was elected VP of the Board the following year and President the year after that. Aside from a term-limited hiatus of a year off she remained on our Board for nearly 12 years.   She was a passionate, unstinting ambassador for Greenbelt and its mission, and instrumental in the evolution of our organization as it grew and flourished.

When Betty joined the Board in 2002 Greenbelt had just acquired the first land acquisition to be held by the land trust, the 95 acre Owens Farm property. With this purchase it had protected 8 properties totaling about 330 acres since its founding 13 years earlier.  In 2015, we should be closing on our 31th land transaction and will have nearly 2800 acres of wetlands, oak woodlands, upland meadows and river floodplains under permanent protection.

After joining the Staff of Greenbelt in 2010, I soon experienced some of the Cosmic Forces from the Big Griffths.  I learned that the little beep on my cell phone at 10:30 or 11 pm as I was preparing for bed after a Board meeting was likely an email from Betty.  The email often included a single line “Michael, Please see just a few edits to the policy you presented.  Betty”   The few edits were often an entire page of bright red track changes.  I think it was about 2 years ago that the emails changed perhaps because she felt that I was a bit wary and not responding to her emails as quickly as she would have liked or perhaps she was mellowing a bit, wanting to soften the cosmic force . I started getting emails that said “Michael, Please see just a few edits to the policy you presented.” (with a Smiley Face emoticon at the end of the line). At the end of the day, if Betty signed off on something, the entire Board generally nodded their heads because they knew that every page, every paragraph, every word, every period had been reviewed and confirmed.

Just as the Universe is still expanding, the cosmic force that was unleashed in 1968 with Betty’s arrival in Corvallis still swirls through our community and will continue to expand…it is present and growing every time I walk through the grasslands on Lupine Meadows, the meadows of Bald Hill Farm, under the ancient oaks at Owens Farm, or among the rich floodplains of the Willamette River.

Michael Pope
Executive Director

* This post has been re-printed from a eulogy delivered at the memorial service for Betty Griffiths, 9/25/2014

River Towns

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I was born in Salzburg near the Salzach River at the edge of the northern Alps in Austria.  My two sisters, brother, mother and father shared rooms in the Hotel Bristol overlooking the river in downtown Salzburg when my father was stationed in the city with the American military in the early 1950s.  Salzburg is a river city and the birthplace of Amadeus Mozart.  Its old town is dominated by baroque architecture of such repute that it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Salzburg means “Salt Castle” and it is a city that derived much of its wealth, power and history from its location on the banks of the Salzach River particularly during the Middle Ages when tolls were collected from salt barges moving down the river.

Many communities along the Willamette River were geographically founded because of their access to the River, and the economic and social benefits of this connection.  Bands of the Kalapuya tribe collected along the banks of the Willamette River to harvest camas and wapato,  hunt deer, beaver, elk, waterfowl in its rich floodplains, and catch salmon and trout from the River and its numerous back channels and sloughs.  Gathering centers such as Willamette Falls were opportunities for tribal bands from the Willamette Valley, and other Northwest Regions to congregate with each other, exchange goods, and intermarry.

Fur traders and trappers from Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company established  trading sites such as the Willamette Fur Post near French Prairie (north of present-day Salem) along the Willamette River in the early 1800s.  Retired French Canadian-Metis trappers settled in the French Prairie area with Native American wives in the 1830s and built log homes, established wheat farms, and founded small river communities along the Willamette and Pudding Rivers.  Larger river communities, particularly near many confluence sites, quickly formed along the Willamette River in response to the influx of immigrant settlers into the Willamette Valley in the 1840s.  Agricultural goods such as wheat, fruit, corn, and livestock were grown on many small farms and needed to be moved to markets so warehouses were built in the towns and cities along river banks near landing sites.  The first steam powered boats to operate above Willamette Falls on the Willamette River, were the Canemah and the Multnomah.  They carried mail and grain to and from communities along the river starting in 1851.   The town of Marysville (Corvallis) had two steamboat landings in the 1850s that provided docking for the steamships.   The California Gold Rush and the need to supply pack trains journeying to the gold fields provided an economic boost to communities along the river and increased steamboat traffic.  Grain produced in the rich fertile soils of the Willamette Valley and hauled by wagons to the landing docks of many river communities was shipped by steamboats to Oregon City and Portland, and then carried on sailing grain ships to China, Japan, Hawaii, and California.

The Great Flood of 1861 dramatically changed the relationship of the Willamette River and many towns and cities built along its shores.  The river crested its bank in December 1861 after an intense period of rains and snow melting in the Cascade Mountains, and inundated over 320,000 acres in the Willamette Valley, destroying many river towns such as Oregon City, Linn City, Orleans, and Champoeg.  Warehouses, shops, docks, mills, houses and stores were swept away.  In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged channels, and built locks and levees in the Willamette River system to improve transportation between river communities and to mitigate for flood impacts.  By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, steamboat traffic could navigate most of the river from Willamette Falls to Corvallis and occasionally as far as Eugene, and daily carried goods and passengers between towns and cities.   By the early 20th century, most of the steamboat traffic along the river was over and towns were increasingly connected by developed roads or railroads.  The Corps constructed large flood control dams beginning in the 1930s in the major tributaries of the Willamette River and regulated flows so most towns and cities were protected from all but major flood events.

The forgotten era for the Willamette River started in the early 1900s and lasted until the early 1960s when many communities turned their backs from the river because it no longer was considered an asset except as a place to dump sewage and industrial waste.  By the 1930s the river was biologically unfit for most aquatic species and certainly not considered safe for recreation.  Federal, state, and local efforts to install sewage treatment facilities beginning in the 1950s and regulate industrial waste has greatly improved the quality of the Willamette River.  Many towns such as Independence, Harrisburg, Albany, and Corvallis initiated efforts to restore their downtown waterfront areas by building parks, encouraging the establishment of businesses, and providing recreational opportunities.   Every day I look out my office window and see many people walking, biking, skateboarding, and jogging along our Corvallis river front trail in many of the same sites that people collected 150 years ago to take passage on a sternwheeler traveling to Salem or load Willamette Valley wheat and corn to transport to Portland and beyond perhaps to Hong Kong and Sydney.

Michael Pope
Executive Director

Canis latrans

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Michael Pope

One early Sunday morning in late September, I was hiking the newly constructed Mulkey Ridge Trail between Bald Hill Farm and Fitton Green Natural Area.  I woke a sleeping coyote nestled in a thicket of grass beside the trail.  It bounded up and raced across the pathway heading down slope but not before pausing to look quickly into my eyes.

Most of us have encountered coyotes.  A map of their current distribution shows that they roam over most of North American and Mexico, and parts of Central America.  Their range has expanded and continues to do so with a likelihood that someday coyotes may be loping through the vast grasslands of the Argentine pampas and trotting along the shores of the Amazon.  They are native to North America, and evolved from a fox-like canid, Hemphillian Eucyon davisi, during the Miocene.  Pleistocene coyotes were more robust than modern coyotes perhaps because they sought larger prey and competed with bigger carnivores such as dire wolves and short-faced bears.  Pleistocene coyotes likely sniffed around the fire encampments of the earliest humans immigrants to North America after the small groups of hunter-gathers crossed the Bering Land Bridge 13,000 years ago.  Coyotes are very smart and seem, despite a one-sided (human) animosity, to like areas occupied by people.  Culturally, humans have depicted coyotes as untrustworthy and often tricky, and we have gone to great lengths to eradicate the species because of their dubious reputation for eating sheep, goats, cattle, deer, and small pets.  Apparently the federal government shoots, traps, or poisons over 90,000 coyotes annually to protect livestock yet they continue to thrive. In more natural systems, the presence of wolves seems to suppress coyote populations.  As wolf populations increased in Yellowstone National Park there was a decline in the numbers of elk, bison and moose, and a steep drop in the number of coyotes.

Verts and Carraway in their “Land Mammals of Oregon” say that coyotes are ubiquitous in Oregon; ranging from grasslands, shrub-steppe, boreal forests, and remote wilderness to highly urbanized areas.  For some reason, they were rare or not abundant in the northwestern part of the state until the early 1900s.  A number of food habit studies in Oregon point to a varied diet for coyotes depending on geography.  They consume brush rabbits, squirrels, mountain beaver, numerous species of rodents, quite often deer, snakes, birds, and berries (most any kind).  Average litter size is six pups.  However, the mortality of young is high, particularly during the 3rd-10th weeks of  life.  Coyotes are generally nocturnal, but I have frequently observed them hunting mice in farm fields or dashing across roadways during daylight hours.  They are mostly seen as solitary animals or in pairs, but may aggregate in packs if abundant food is available.  The yip and howl calls of coyotes are one of their most recognizable characteristics and have been categorized into 11 vocalizations that signify either greetings, alarms or contact calls.  I remember attending the Saturday afternoon matinees at Fort Bragg, North Carolina while in grade school when my father was stationed there in the early 1960s.  The feature films were generally grade-B westerns with manufactured backdrops and coyote calls in the background to provide western authenticity.

I haven’t seen coyotes near my home in downtown Corvallis, but deer frequent the waterfront park next to my office on 1st Street.  Last spring a beautiful, dark-furred mink ambled across the bike path in front of my office window.  Occasionally a possum or raccoon will climb one of my cherry trees when the fruit is ripe.  However, I fully expect that one early morning I will encounter a coyote perhaps wandering down the railroad tracks in front of my house.

Blog Writer: Michael Pope

Coyote crossing the fields at Bald Hill Farm

A Trail Through Time

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An Account of the Opening of the Mulkey Ridge Forest Trail:

From the metal file cabinet Michael takes out sheet after sheet of paper from the weathered manila folder, delicate reminders of decades of correspondence and of all of the people who worked to make the Mulkey Ridge Trail possible. There are notes scrawled on miniature notepads, holiday cards from trail enthusiasts, and finally copies of emails dating back to a time before Gmail. Most of these papers precede either of our tenure at Greenbelt. We lightly lift up each of the yellowed documents, understanding the weight that they carry. I try to decipher the various penmanship and authors, mapping out the conversations over time.

There’s an early letter from the woman who owned the Mulkey Forest property for decades, written from her home in California. I pull out another letter written by Margaret Martin (in sublime penmanship I might add – it is the school teacher in her, I later learn) with an impassioned message about the need for this trail connection. There are notes inscribed by Greenbelt’s founder, Charles Ross, about the property’s forests and possible trail routes.

This past Saturday I stood atop Fitton Green and took in the scene as we cut the ribbon on the new Mulkey Ridge Trail. Over a hundred friends and trail lovers lounged on the hillside in the September sun, listening to those whose work made the trail a reality. The crowd collectively chuckled as Andrew Martin talked about the difference between being stubborn and bull-headed, and groaned with sympathetic understanding as the trail coordinator spoke of volunteers surrounded by poison oak. And soon we were all standing, waiting for the ceremonial photo of the ribbon cutting, before breaking into applause as we giddily took our first steps onto the new trail.

As a ‘sweeper’ of a trail walk you are responsible for matching stride with those less interested in winning than in the view around them. On Saturday this turned out to be five children, a mixture of old and new friends. One carried a plastic gallon bag designed for picking up forest treasures, a pebble here, a pine cone there. Two girls found matching walking sticks and sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to the moss-laden trees. We tromped merrily on, these kids and I, excited to be together and on a trail on the crisp fall afternoon.

Eventually we emerged from the dense canopy into the sunlit pastures of Bald Hill Farm. A mandolin and guitar serenaded the line of hikers down to a farmhouse where we sat on the porch, snacking and laughing, legs happy but tired from the 2 mile trek. Adults outnumbered the children under three apple trees in the front yard, taste-testing until it was determined that the green apples were indeed the best of the lot.

The shuttle buses arrived to take everyone off, back to their cars and their Saturdays of home improvements and grocery shopping. Alongside staff I dawdled on the porch, not yet ready to say goodbye to the day. As I sat with the sound of Mulkey Creek trickling beside me, I couldn’t help but think back to all of the handwritten letters back at the office. I thought of all of the people who toiled over the planning and design of the trail, and I thought about the countless people who will enjoy it today, tomorrow, and forever.

Among the multitude of letters in that manila folder was one written by Charlie Ross, to whom we all owe so much. He writes that “a trail could wind through this property on the upper reaches and be a lasting monument for Corvallis. We will be leaving a connection for our successors, atop a vista spanning the Valley. This is the Greenbelt vision, and we will be there someday.” Charlie penned these words 22 years ago, and on Saturday I, alongside elders, children, parents, bicyclists, and trail runners … saw this dream come true.

Jessica McDonald