Know Your Forest: Cow Heaven Addendum

While doing the Know Your Forest: Cow Heaven post of July 2^nd this year, several questions came to mind for me.

A few weeks after the post, later in July, I think, I ran into an old family friend. His family lived next to mine at the time of the Jackman, Cow Heaven Burn so I asked him about it.

He said that it did, indeed, burn in 1929 and it burned all the way to the valley floor on the Skagit River. Evidently the smoke and fire and heat were so intense that everyone went to the river for shelter. He said it was nip and tuck for a while and they weren’t sure that they would survive.

He also referred to the trail now exclusively known as the Cow Heaven Trail as the Olson Creek Trail. It’s a funny thing, the minute he said Olson Creek Trail, I knew exactly which trail he was talking about. This is what it had always been called by the folks who lived around here when I was growing up. I had just forgotten this name for it. Of course, it goes into Cow Heaven and not Olson Creek so the name Olson Creek Trail would undoubtedly cause a lot of folks not familiar with the area to think it went into Olson Creek. I still don’t know the reason the Olson Creek trail to Cow Heaven was built or when it was built.

My friend also mentioned that the part of Cow Heaven that the Indians burned was off the Rocky Creek Trail. Evidently the Rocky Creek Trail was the route used by the local bands of Skagits to access what we now know as Cow Heaven. So it is possible that this path is an ancient one, predating European contact by many years, maybe millenia. Or maybe it is a rather recent route. I don’t know.

Also, while talking to my mom about the old U.S. Forest Service road up Olson Creek, I relearned a very interesting story about the Olson Creek bridge. It washed out in a big storm in 1962. Evidently this was not during the more well known Columbus Day storm of that year but a different storm.

The story goes that there was a very heavy rainfall in a short period of time. In those days, during such storms, the Forest Service had people out looking at the roads for problems like plugged culverts which could be cleaned by hand, thus preventing expensive, damaging washouts.

A couple guys who had been out checking the Olson Creek Road stopped on the bridge. They got out of their rig, a pickup, and were looking around, assessing the flood when a big log jam above the bridge suddenly cut loose and slammed into the bridge. There was no time to get back into the vehicle, so they ended up running as fast as they could to get off the bridge.

The bridge, with the pickup still on it, with the headlights still on, ended up on the west bank of Olson Creek, several hundred feet downstream of the bridge footings. A very close call but evidently they managed to retrieve the pickup several days later with only minor damage.

An old growth Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) survivor of the 1929 Cow Heaven burn. This tree is near Backus Creek and its top is clearly visible from Ranger Station Road and the Ranger Station itself though I doubt many people even realize it is there. 

Looking up the trunk of the old growth fir. 

The old growth Douglas-fir top from Ranger Station Road. The top is actually three different stems visible on the skyline just a little left of center frame. The original top broke out of the tree so three limbs started growing upward (apical growth), creating what are known as castle tops. There are a few old growth cedars near this big fir but their tops are not visible, probably because they are down in a hole, making their tops lower than the surrounding trees or their tops are broken out. The tops visible to the right of center frame are second growth trees growing in high spots, making their tops stand out above the surrounding trees.