A few weeks ago, my partner and I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and went up Highway 101 for about six hours to see America. There are three state parks and one national park located along 40 miles of Northern California coastline. It has stunning lagoons, rivers, and beaches, a rich array of wildlife, and some of the oldest and tallest trees in the world.
The James Irvine Trail is one of the best hikes on the west coast. The trail starts with a wooden bridge and goes into groves of huge trees. The trees are thousands of years old and taller than the Statue of Liberty. They are marvels of evolution and communication through root systems. They are able to survive fires because of their thick bark. The ancestors of the redwoods were traced back 160 million years ago.
The trail leads to Fern Canyon. It was chosen by Steven Spielberg as a location for The Lost World: Jurassic Park. We came face to face with a group of Roosevelt elk in the grassland. We gazed upon a rocky, forested coast jutting out into the sparkling Pacific Ocean after we bypassed the gang. This hike is too good to pass up.
The doorstep to this natural treasure, a treasure so valuable that the United Nations has declared it a World Heritage site, is gloomy. The name of the town is Orick. There are boarded up motels, ramshackle houses, rusted out cars, and properties that look like junkyards when you drive through the town on Highway 101. The setting for a zombie movie is found in parts of Orick.
Orick is a town that has gone through economic catastrophes and never recovered. The abandoned buildings in the towns are monuments to a more prosperous age. It's so strange that Orick is the gateway to the world heritage site. It's close to the park. The headquarters of the park is there. Orick is surrounded by parkland and is located near the ocean. It's a great jumping off point for a lot of outdoor adventures.
Why are all of its hotels closed? There are not many places for tourists to shop. Why haven't people invested in infrastructure? Orick, what did you do to him?
The tallest tree in the world was discovered by a team of scientists with the National Geographic Society. The tree was found in private logging land. The tree was named after the founder of the logging company. The tree appeared on the cover of National Geographic.
The coastal redwood forest, which used to cover 2 million acres, had been cut down to 300,000 acres. After World War II, there was a housing construction boom that led to a lot of logging. Orick was at his peak. It had four sawmills, good union timber jobs, a highway bustling with cars and logging trucks, a 350 seat movie theater, and a population of almost 3000 people.
One of the last remaining bastions of ancient redwoods was threatened by Orick's thriving timber economy. The logging industry was able to clearcut at an unprecedented scale thanks to technological advances. Floods and mud slides were caused by the ecological devastation. Environmentalists started a movement to create a new national park after they realized that existing state parks only protected 50,000 acres.
A new national park was hated by the logging companies and workers in Orick. In the area where the park was proposed, they cut down trees to make ends meet. In 1968 President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an act that protected 58,000 acres of the forest. There is a grove of old-growth redwoods in the park named Lady Bird Johnson grove. The area was dedicated by Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson as well as First Ladies Bird Johnson and Pat Nixon.
The battle between environmentalists and loggers continued after the park was created. Within a half mile of the park, timber companies began cutting down trees. There was a fight over proposals to expand the park.
The "Talk to America" convoy was organized by local loggers in 1977. Jimmy Carter was president by that time. He was given a nine-ton peanut carved out of redwood. They put a sign on it that said it was jobs to us. When the activist motorcade of 25 semi-trucks arrived in the nation's capital, they met with the president's aides and tried to give him a peanut. The aides wouldn't let it happen.
Donna Hufford is a businesswoman who has lived in Orick since 1970. It is here." We did not make a great icon out of it. It is in front of the gas station that we left.
The President signed an act in 1978 that doubled the size of the park. The Secretary of the Interior predicted that at least 1,000 timber jobs would be lost in the first year of the park's expansion, but he also predicted that these jobs would be lost anyway. Logging towns across the West Coast have a history of going bust once the trees in the area have been cut down. The timber industry had clear boogiemen, including the federal government.
When the national park took over, Hufford says, you could see the demise of logging. The people were fighting for it, and that was their main source of income.
Secretary Andrus, who came from a logging family, fought to include provisions to contain the economic impact of the park's expansion. The law expanding the park created a program to help timber workers who lost their jobs. An analysis by the US Government Accountability Office found that the program gave out more than a hundred million dollars to former timber workers. Only 432 workers enroll in retraining programs, according to the report. The benefits became a disincentive to work due to program delays and design flaws. The area didn't have a lot of great jobs to train for. In 1989 the last payment was made.
It was never meant to be a permanent solution to the collapse of the timber industry. Lawmakers and environmental groups sold tourism as a panacea for the economic hole. They argued that the national park would bring a lot of tourists to Orick and surrounding areas, above and beyond what is currently happening in the area's three state parks.
National parks give benefits to the local economies around them. According to a recent study by economists, parks have a significant effect on the economy driven by visitors. Is the national park different?
The numbers were crunched by Szabo and Ujhelyi, and they found that Redwood received less visitors than other national parks. About half a million people visited the park in 2019. Almost 4.5 million people visited the park in central California.
The park's numbers do not include visits to the area's three state parks that it is managed with. We contacted the National Park Service to see if they could give us an estimate. Many visitors report that they go to both the state and national parks, but we couldn't get a good idea of how many visited. The National Park Service is in the process of securing more accurate visitor data, as they are aware that they have been under counting visitors to the parks.
It's pretty clear that Redwood National and State Parks are less popular than most national parks. It might be because the parks are far away from large population centers. It might be because the region is cold and foggy. Maybe it's because people don't value old trees very much or they don't know how special certain trees are. People don't know how great this area is.
The management of the national park has been blamed by locals for not delivering on the promise of tourism. There is a grand lodge in other national parks. The state parks have an extensive trail system. It doesn't seem to invest a lot in marketing. People just blast through Orick on their way to the park, locals say. They park, pee, look at some trees and then go on.
One local official testified to Congress in 1995 that Redwood National Park isn't a park in the same way as Mt. Rushmore. It's a preserve. It's more about the preservation of the environment.
The hotel industry seems to be less important for the area than for other national parks. They said that while hotel income is growing in other national park areas, it seems to be flat around the area of Redwood.
Economic activity can be found in the national park. $32 million was contributed to the regional economy by the national park service in 2019. Most of the money created by tourists is not going to Orick. 26 percent of the town's population are living in poverty.
The federal government gave $13.4 million to fund infrastructure when the park was expanded. The money was used to create the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission, which provides loans to businesses that can't get money from other sources.
Most of the federal assistance never made it to Orick according to the executive director of the commission. A marina and an improved airport were created. Orick doesn't have any real political representation. There is no city council or mayor.
Local residents have been frustrated by Orick's lack of self- determination. It has been subject to the control of bureaucrats at the national park, the coastal commission, the fish and game commission, the regional water quality board, and many other outside agencies. It has no control over its own main street. The state manages that highway. Foster says that there is a lot of red tape in the area. He says the town hasn't pursued a smart development plan. He says Orick is an orphan.
Foster believes that no one has taken on the responsibility of helping Orick transition. There were a lot of promises made a long time ago that you're going to thrive because you're the gateway to the UNESCO World Heritage site. There has been no investment in the infrastructure to make that happen.
Orick's tourism industry was one of the few bright spots in the park's history. Hundreds of families would drive their RV up to the area and camp along "Freshwater Spit," a small stretch of land that sits between Freshwater Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean. They would eat and shop in town. The problem was that this was on the side of the road. The highway-side camping rankled many people. The new regulation prohibiting camping was the final nail in the coffin for Orick's struggling tourism industry.
Locals formed picket lines along the highway after camping on Freshwater Spit was banned. After a pipe bomb was found in an outhouse, the park service sent in a team to end the situation.
Many of Orick's businesses have fallen over time. The Palm Cafe, one of the last remaining restaurants in the town, was shut down by the health authorities due to a number of health code violations. The Palm Cafe had a motel next to it.
The Orick's Green Valley Motel was closed late last year due to a number of problems. The name Green Valley Motel was no longer a correct one. Transients who rented out rooms on a monthly basis were the main clientele at the motel.
Donna Hufford thinks the closing of the Green Valley Motel was a good thing. Drug dealing, broken down cars, garbage everywhere, no maintenance, holes in the roof are just some of the things that had gotten so bad there. It's not something you want to see in the main part of town.
Donna and her husband Joseph have been trying to get something done to save their town for a long time. After his father's death, Joseph took over his family's sand and gravel plant. The Huffords have invested in Orick in the past. The last remaining lodging business in Orick was created in the late 2000s. Donna was in charge of the cabins for over a decade.
There is a family that wants to live here. Hufford said that her husband's heritage goes back to the Indians. We would like to see Orick be all it can be.
The Huffords received a loan from the Economic Development Commission to purchase and rehabilitate a shuttered motel. They hope to open the motel next month.
Hufford's family has never lost hope that good things will happen here.
The Huffords' story is an inspiring one of hope and perseverance as their small town is devastated by deindustrialization. Not all residents in Orick have adapted to the area's economic struggles.
Drugs and alcohol are a problem for people who are so poor. There's tension because we have the park rangers with their guns and they have the same authority as a law enforcement officer.
In the next week's Planet Money newsletter, there will be a story about a black market that threatens the trees of the national park and the rangers who brought it down. Next week, in the Planet Money newsletter, there will be a story about the underground economy of tree-poaching. You can subscribe here
All Rights Reserved © 2024
