Trail Dedication

The weather was middle-of-the-road, not to hot or too cold, damp but not wet, threatening a rain shower one moment with nearly a sun break the next. The Saturday brought OSU Extension co-workers, those landowners that were impacted by her realm, relatives from other states and her family from Portland for the the Dedication.

As a group we walked through the woods that Amy took on as her own ‘playpen’ when she was surprised in 2014 by a bequeath to the School of Forestry for 183 acres destined to be a demonstration/research forest. With all the other tasks on her many plates, she dove into the challenge with gusto. The gift to the University was a blank slate when it was handed down, Amy had to dig into County records, interview neighbors, and spend many hours investigating the history of the land. She was able to find about the homestead, the fields that had been turned into forests, private roads that had been put in over time, and some of the plans that the family had put into place so the land could sustain them. She shared what she learned with the Small Woodland tract owners showing us how we could learn more about our own forest lands.

Amy’s fingerprints can be found in many areas of the Rubie Matteson Demonstration Forest. As a group we walked to some of the areas that were pre-commercial thinned in preparation for a future pole harvest in 20-50 years, it was right next to an area that was not thinned to see how the plot grows and produces next to the thinned acres.

Not too far away was a plot that Amy had marked to ‘cruise’ the stand of trees. Cruising the trees is made by making plots in the forest and counting the trees inside the plots to assess how many trees are growing per acre, the more plots made the more accurate the cruise numbers. By cruising the acreage to thin out those that are crowded as well as looking up to see the percentage in the open canopy, opening up the crowded areas allows the trees to grow unencumbered leaving the forest more productive and healthy.

Many of the small plot acreage that were logged areas have already been replanted with seedlings.

A pollinator garden was planted because of the work that Amy had been doing with the Bee Project. This is truly a working forest as well as an area for demonstrations, classes and research.

After our walk through the test areas we were treated to lunch along with wonderful conversations with many who had close ties with Amy.

After lunch we got to hear first hand from members of her family, her co-workers, her teachers and those who she reached out to about their own forests before heading out to walk the trail that had been in the making since her passing in 2019.

We witnessed the loyalty to the land that Amy had held with a fierce tenacity, and the openness she had for sharing what she was learning with a wide variety of groups. The day was not one for just thinking back and being contemplative, but for thinking forward about this property but also the land that we work and how we are managing it just as Amy had.