The base camp sits at the end of a dirt and gravel Forest Service road in an area set to be logged as part of the Clark Creek timber sale. The year-old protest encampment is quiet except for the muffled sound of voices coming from somewhere up in the trees. It’s difficult to see the treesitters, but their voices echo throughout the forest. Midair walkways, made of rope no thicker than a child’s finger, stretch between the six trees that house protesters in their canopies 160 to 200 feet off the forest floor. From the ground, these homes of scrap plywood, colorful tarps, and yellow Polypro rope look like mangled kites thrown to the trees in a storm. But at treetop level, they begin to look less like kites and more like something a person might live in.

Climbing into the trees to reach the platforms, or treesits, is work. There are no ladders and no pulleys. Using special rock-climbing slipknots, the protesters haul their bodies up a rope that hangs from each platform. The whole process of climbing into the forest canopy takes about 30 minutes, although there is one “ewok” who can do it in seven.

Another treesitter, “Sorrel,” a 20-year-old activist interested in botany, has been at the Red Cloud Thunder camp for three months. It took weeks of hauling up supplies and perching precariously on high branches to build the doughnut-shaped treehouse in “Guardian,” an ancient Douglas fir named by the treesitters. Only a black line of climbing rope links his platform to the ground 175 feet below.

Most mornings, Sorrel wakes up cold and hungry. He burrows deeper into his sleeping bag and thinks about what he’ll cook for breakfast on his propane stove. His choices might range from oatmeal to bagels to scrambled tofu. Food and supplies have been kept in the trees since “freddies” (a code word for Forest Service law enforcement) dismantled the base camp in November 1998. Craig says the raid was devastating for the group. “They even took the dog food,” he says.
Left: Before loggers can get to the contested forests, they have to drive through a road occupied by protesters on another kind of platform. “Monopods” are designed to block vehicular entry into the woods. Above: At least one activitst has to remain on the platforms to defend the trees, while others work on the ground.“Shard” sits on a nearby logged-over site.
In the past decade, the tension between the timber industry, the law, and environmentalists has escalated as a new generation—equipped with cellular phones, walkie-talkies, and hidden surveillance cameras—has joined the war in the woods. This particular dispute is over nine acres of dense old-growth forest, home to rare 500-year-old trees and a number of threatened and endangered plant and animal species. With less than 10 percent of the original woods left in the Pacific Northwest, ecologists and biologists fear the loss of this biodiversity. Although environmentalists cherish the trees—and the ecosystems they support—the big timbers are coveted by the logging industry. One massive tree can equal dozens of smaller logs, and the wood is of higher quality. As government restrictions squeeze out available timber, the battles over the final tracts of old-growth forests become increasingly heated.

Traditional environmentalist groups attempted to stop the sale of the Clark Creek trees through the legal system. They failed. Red Cloud Thunder picked up where they left off. As long as activists sit in the trees, the lumber companies are effectively blocked from cutting. The Forest Service, faced with an illegal treesit and the potentially bad press involved in dragging protesters out of trees, left the activists there. The use of this strange and brazen tactic is testimony to the gridlock of American forest politics. The strategy sometimes works. In 1996, a group of forest protesters occupied a road near Warner Creek in northern Oregon for 343 days. Although the environmental activists were arrested and driven out, the forest was eventually saved by the Clinton administration. However, the difference at Warner Creek was that the timber hadn’t been purchased yet. The trees that Red Cloud Thunder activists occupy have already been sold to a lumber company.
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