Falls City to Silsetz via Valsetz, 6/6/21
Between the Pacific Ocean and the Willamette valley lie the mountains of the Coast Range. There are a number of east-west routes that run through the mountains. Highway 22 connects Salem to Lincoln City via Grand Ronde. Highway 20 connects Corvallis to Newport. Between these two highways, there’s a roughly rectangular area that has no major roads. The mountains aren’t too high, but the terrain is fairly rough and the area is populated only around the edges. The climate is very wet and not terribly cold, just about perfect for growing Douglas fir. So of course that’s what we do. It’s farming country of a kind and while there are no paved roads, there are lots and lots of logging roads. Our plan was to get to the coast by traveling through this area. We’d drive west from Falls City until we reached the site of the ghost town of Valsetz, roughly in the the center of the rectangle. From there we would make our way southwest in the direction of the town of Siletz. From there we could connect to Highway 20 and Newport.
Some of the land in the coast range is part of the Siuslaw National Forest and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, some of it is federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and the rest is owned by private timber companies. The patchwork pattern of ownership requires cooperation in the matter of road usage and some of the roads are open to the public, even when they cross miles and miles of private land. Recreational visitation on work days is discouraged–the roads are narrow and logging equipment is big–but on the weekends the loggers are gone and the roads are mostly empty.
We left Corvallis on a Sunday at 10:30 in the morning and by 11:15 we were in Falls City, where the pavement ended and the gravel began. As logging roads go, the first stretch of road west from Falls City seems like a major artery. It has only a few steep sections and is fairly wide–wide enough, in many places, for log trucks to pass each other coming and going. The day we were there, there was a fair amount of washboard.
In the years from 1919 to 1983, this was the chief access route to Valsetz, a logging town that was established by a lumber company called Cobbs and Mitchell. Cobbs and Mitchell was a Michigan company, but by the early 1900’s Michigan had no more old forest left to cut. Looking for new horizons, the company acquired large tracts of virgin timber along the upper reaches of the Siletz River in Oregon.
In earlier times, loggers had lived in isolated logging camps, sleeping in company-provided tents, eating company provided food, and being away from their families for months at a time. In 1919 that era was passing. To harvest the upper Siletz, William Mitchell built a rail line into the area and created a semi-permanent company town. In addition to setting up a sawmill, the company built individual homes for workers and their families, set up company stores, and established a K-12 school. A dam was built to create an artificial lake to serve as a log pond. A post office opened in 1920. Mill workers could walk to and from work and logging crews could make daily commutes to the harvest areas via the company railroad.
All of the land and all of the structures in the town were owned by the company. In 1924 Cobbs and Mitchell sold the entire operation to a new entity called the Valsetz Lumber Company. In 1959 the operation was sold again, this time to the Boise Cascade Corporation. Over the years the town’s population fluctuated between 300 and 1,000 inhabitants. In 1974 the Valsetz High School football team won an Oregon state championship.
By 1979, however, the old growth forest in the area was depleted and the company decided to shut down the Valsetz mill. After the shutdown all the structures of the town were removed and the area was replanted with fir trees. In 1984 the railroad was torn up and in 1988 the dam was removed and the lake was drained. Today, there is no obvious signs that the town ever existed.
We arrived at the Valsetz site at 12:30. Navigation had been easy so far, as we had had GPS location data on a forest road overlay of a satellite photo. The road to Valsetz is pretty easy to follow even without a map, but once we were actually in the area we found a couple of intersections where the GPS was helpful.
It’s still possible to deduce where the lake used to be. It is now crowded with ten and twenty foot tall trees, but the trees are clearly the product of natural reseeding, mostly deciduous and still not too large. The road splits at one point, with one fork going to the left going along the south side of the old lake and one fork to the right going along the north side. That northern road leads past the only obvious remnant of the project–the concrete and steel floor of the old sawmill.
Here are two maps of the Valsetz area. The first shows the old lake as it was and how the road coming in from the east gets complicated as it splits into northern and southern forks. The dam was in the narrow section at the north end of the lake. The town was lower down in the east side of the lake.
The next map is a relatively recent satellite photo of the same area. The rough outline of the lake is still visible in the form of the lighter color foliage that grows in the old lake bed. (The very lightest colored areas, though, are recent clearcuts.)
After touring back and forth a bit to get oriented, we sat down inside the old sawmill foundations and had our lunch. When it was time to leave, we had to choose our route out of the forest. Our GPS compatible map had been nice, but Valsetz was at its extreme western edge and no similar map was available for the next part of the route. We had some print maps and these showed two possible routes. The road on the north side of the old lake led northwest from Valsetz before it eventually looped back down to the southwest, which was where we needed go. The road from the south side of the lake seemed to more directly in a southwest direction, but in its lower reaches it also looked to be somewhat complicated, providing abundant opportunities for making a wrong turn. So off to the north we went, leaving Valsetz just at the spot where the dam had been, following the outlet creek. On our map, that creek appears to be the headwater of the South Fork of the Siletz River.
The road was very different from the one we had come up on, narrower and less well maintained. In the upper reaches it was quite beautiful, often cutting across forested slopes giving us glimpses of fantastic deep ravines. The road had a gravel base, but it was old gravel and there were potholes wherever the road was level. There were lots of unmarked intersections. We navigated by trying keep a sense of where the main stream must be.
It was a long, slow descent, basically just following the path of the Siletz River, which is shown below. At the top of the map the South Fork coming up from old Valsetz merges with the North Fork. (Only a tiny portion of the North Fork is visible.) Just past the confluence point, the river starts to turn down toward the southwest. There are dozens of small tributary creeks and the river becomes steadily larger as it flows south. The larger it got, the easier it was to see that we were on the right road. Eventually we passed through the Siletz Gorge and finally came out of the mountains at Upper Farm, which is in the bottom left corner of the map. At this point we were back on pavement and headed for civilization.
In the northern part of the route, the terrain is rugged and the trees are thick enough so that an occasional clearcut is a welcome change. Lower down, the Siletz Gorge is a potentially wonderful place, but these days it is marred by intensive recent logging. In the photo below we have stopped at a place where one side of the gorge is currently covered with young trees, maybe five or six years old. New clearcuts are of course much uglier.
At another wide spot in the road these stacks of logs had been piled up and then abandoned, some of them recently, some of them a long time ago.
Now that we know this route, we can take it over to the coast anytime, provided that we’re not in a hurry. It does add four hours to the trip.