ANCIENT TREES FALLING VICTIM TO ILLEGAL DRUGS

OLYMPIC NATIONAL FOREST - The tree was massive, 7 feet across where
the chainsaw bit. The western red cedar had survived wind and
wildfire and the appraising squint of timber-hungry settlers for
perhaps 400 years.

Greed and a modern addiction dropped it in minutes, one of more than
40 ancient trees illegally chopped up for drug money and sold to make
roofing shakes or musical instruments, according to authorities.

Natural treasures such as these have taken an unlikely place
alongside families and communities victimized by the plague of
methamphetamine use in Western Washington's rural corners.

The case also lays bare the challenge facing custodians of the
nation's public lands. While the number of crimes and other incidents
on national forests and grasslands doubled the past five years, the
number of Forest Service officers and investigators has remained
almost unchanged.

"You know where bad guys go to do bad things?" said Jay Webster,
patrol captain for the Olympic and Mount Baker-Snoqualmie national
forests. "They go to the woods. Cause there's no cops."

Six men from Grays Harbor County were recently charged with first-
degree theft, accused of stealing cedar from several sites in the
Olympic National Forest as well as on state and Weyerhaeuser land on
the southern side of the peninsula last year.

Authorities also believe the men, along with others who were not
charged, culled wood from dozens of sites and felled at least 19 old-
growth trees in the national forest, often to feed their addictions.

In fiscal 2000, the U.S. Forest Service dealt with 285,000 incidents
ranging from car accidents to investigations of major drug cartels, a
98 percent increase since 1996. Drug-related cases are an increasing
part of the workload, though officials are at a loss to gauge the
extent of the problem.

"We really have no idea what's going on, just because it's such a
wide open place," said Dan Bauer, the agency's national counter-drug
program coordinator. Meth has become a particular worry as mobile
labs litter the forests, their toxic byproducts dumped into streams
and rivers.

Yet law-enforcement ranks in the national forest system were almost
static between 1996 and 2000: 700 officers and investigators to keep
the public safe on 192 million acres of forests and grasslands.

The trend is similar, if less dramatic, across the 2.3 million acres
of Northwest Washington's two national forests, where officers dealt
with 2,936 incidents in the past fiscal year, a 30-percent increase
over five years ago.

Few places offer so many unguarded temptations as Northwest woods.
Thieves gather and sell chanterelle mushrooms without permits and
harvest beargrass and salal without permits to supply Holland's and
Asia's demands for floral-arrangement greenery.

From madrona trees they chop burls, which appear as inlay in the
dashboards of luxury cars. Cascara bark is sold as a natural laxative.

Authorities can only guess the size of the theft. Losses on public
lands in Washington alone are at least a million dollars a month,
said Dennis Heryford, chief investigator for the state Department of
Natural Resources (DNR), which oversees more than five million acres
of state lands.

Stealing trees isn't news in Grays Harbor County. "We've always had
more money stolen with chain saws than with guns," said Rick Scott,
the county's undersheriff.

When logging was at its height in the Olympic National Forest,
authorities concentrated on large-scale theft by timber companies.
Illegal tree-cutting by individuals, though it occurred, seemed more
benign, said the Forest Service's Webster.

"Guys would steal it so they could buy their kid the G.I. Joe with
the Kung-Fu Grip" at Christmas, said Webster, or to sell as firewood
to feed their families.

Those days are long gone, said Kris Fairbanks, a Forest Service law-
enforcement officer. "I would say 99 percent of my thefts are
associated with drugs," she said.

In the early 1990s, people cut and sold old cedar to buy black-tar
heroin, Fairbanks said. Today, the drug of choice is meth, which has
become an epidemic in rural Washington, both in the number of addicts
and producers it has created.

As their toxic mobile kitchens are pushed from urban areas by law
enforcement, makers have looked for other places to cook up lucrative
batches of the drug. Rural areas such as Grays Harbor County are the
perfect hideaway, with its 1,900 square miles of anonymity, a large
hunk of which is public forest land.

Allure of the wood

On a recent afternoon, Fairbanks steered her rig up the Donkey Creek
Road of Pacific Ranger District. This is Fairbanks' window office, an
immensity of clearcuts and deep forest on the west side of Olympic
National Park.

The 640,000-acre national forest is wormed with logging roads.
Fairbanks and one other officer patrol 2,200 miles of road - enough
to stretch between Seattle and St. Louis.

It was a rare late-autumn day for the peninsula, blue-skied and
balmy, as Fairbanks turned onto one of those logging roads. Soon,
blue sky surrendered to dense forest and alders clawed at the sides
of the truck.

Fairbanks got out, followed a nearly invisible path and scrambled up
a steep bank.

A massive cedar lay on the ground where thieves had felled it and
left it dressed like a trophy buck killed out of season. It had been
gutted hurriedly at night and without care for waste, only the best
meat taken, from butt end to first branch. Piles of waste wood,
called spalts, were strewn among the ferns.

"They got quite a bit out of here" - at least five cords, said
Fairbanks, a woman of cheery suspicion who wears a quilted Forest
Service jacket and a sidearm. She stood atop the hulking stump with
her partner, a German shepherd named Hero, and explained the wood's
attraction.

The mature wood of an old cedar has a tight grain and oils that make
it valued as shakes and shingles. Few of the largest trees remain
standing except on Forest Service land. Officials rarely sell permits
to harvest even giant "windfall" trees, whose wood can remain
preserved for scores of decades.

"The ecological significance of these trees cannot be understated,"
said Kathy O'Halloran, ecosystems staff officer for the national
forest. In forests, marbled murrelets lay their eggs only in the moss
atop old tree limbs that are at least 7 inches thick, she said.

"The downed logs are used by small mammals; those are part of the
food chain for spotted owls," O'Halloran said. Both birds are
threatened.

With cedar prices high again, a pickup load of blocks, called bolts,
can fetch $400. A single tree can yield as many as nine cords of good
wood. "It's like these gold bullion bars just laying around the
ground," said Webster, Fairbanks' boss.

Between March and September of 2000, the six suspects allegedly
felled green trees or chopped up windfall trees in the national
forest, on Weyerhaeuser land and in Capitol State Forest west of
Olympia.

After more than a yearlong investigation by the Forest Service and
local authorities, Richard Dell Jr., 38, has been charged with five
counts of first-degree theft; Eugene Schmidt Jr., 33, and Luke
Haikkila, 36, three counts each. Curtis Vincent, 29, two counts;
Bruce Cedell, 36, and Daniel Davenport, 29, one count each. Schmidt
is still at large.

"There were far more sites out there than we were actually able to
charge," stretching back to the fall of 1999, said Anne Minden, a
special agent for the Forest Service who led the investigation. As
much as $500,000 in wood was stolen, authorities said.

The men have not been charged with drug crimes in the case, but
several have criminal records involving meth or other drugs.
Investigators also found coffee filters and other evidence that
matched statements by one suspect, now deceased, that at least one of
the men was making meth in the forest.

The defendants' lawyers did not return calls.

Dark of Night

To avoid detection, authorities say, the thieves worked deep in the
forest after midnight, running a hose from the chain saw's muffler
into a bucket of water to stifle the noise. They wrapped mallets in
rubber hose to blunt the sound. They posted a lookout atop Stovepipe
Pass with a walkie-talkie to watch for approaching headlights,
Fairbanks said.

To keep up with the suspects and to implicate shake mills that were
buying the stolen cedar, the government installed tracking devices on
some of the men's cars.

The thefts began to unravel in May 2000 after authorities found two
men sleeping in their pickup, cedar bolts in the bed. Inside the
truck, according to court papers, officials found drug paraphernalia,
trash linking the suspects to sites and labeled Polaroids the men
took of themselves as they worked.

Fairbanks drove to another location and hiked uphill. A blowdown lay
in a shallow ravine. Spalts were everywhere, dimpled with the cleat
marks of the logging boots that helped authorities track some of the
suspects.

Over a rise lay another enormous tree, this one recently felled by
chain saw. Three cords of wood were likely packed out.

"We believe this might have gone out as music wood," said Fairbanks,
referring to the highest-quality cedar that is used for stringed
instruments. "Fiddle back" can fetch up to $3,000 a cord. Old-growth
maple is similarly prized; a piece the size of a short ironing board
can fetch $35, DNR's Heryford said.

A small tin tag stamped "U.S." was nailed to the tree butt. "That
hasn't stopped people," Fairbanks said. "At four of the sites,
they've returned" to gather more wood.

Investigators had hoped to prosecute owners of at least two mills
believed to have knowingly bought the stolen cedar, using a 1985
state racketeering law.

But last December, a state appeals court ruled the law had been
unconstitutionally renewed, casting doubt over whether prosecutors
could secure convictions for trafficking in stolen property.

Webster, the patrol captain, said mill operators got the message -
for a while. "People are greedy."

Near day's end, Fairbanks parked her truck on another spur road and,
after swearing a visitor to secrecy, clambered uphill one more time.
Not far off the road stood the largest cedar she knows of in the
forest. It is a dozen feet in diameter, so tall its crown cannot be
seen from its foot.

"This one," she said, "would be a real shame."

But someone has already climbed 30 feet and sawed a basket-sized burl
from the cedar. And there is a ring of tamped earth around the great
tree's trunk where others have walked, looking up, counting a legacy
in cords.