![]() ![]() In some ways, the story of bigleaf maple poaching starts with Carlos Santana. Now they were all dead, and for what? A few boards, heisted from land named after the Forest Service’s founder. They’d shaded streams, nourished and stabilized soil, sequestered carbon. They’d provided food and shelter for generations of flying squirrels and martens, finches and grosbeaks, elk and deer, even the imperiled Puget Oregonian snail - just about everything that walked, crawled or flew in Gifford Pinchot. Some of the leafy casualties predated the arrival of Lewis and Clark. Malamphy and Huff wandered the Slaughterhouse, snapping photos and jotting notes. And no region, perhaps, is more afflicted than western Washington. Forest Service documents suggest that tree thievery costs the agency up to $100 million each year. Oregon’s Malheur, Rogue River and Willamette national forests have all been victims of timber poaching. The next year, a Montana man was convicted of smuggling over a thousand trees out of the Flathead National Forest. Illegal loggers have lopped off so many redwood burls - woody protuberances that get carved into furniture - that desperate authorities shut down some California roads in 2014 to deter them. Caviar traders target Columbia River sturgeon, Arizona snake-nappers snatch rattlers for the pet trade, and hunters gun down bighorn sheep for their prized headgear. But natural resource crime is rampant in the American West, too. The word conjures militiamen hacking off elephant tusks, woodsmen slaying tigers in Russian wilderness. Poaching is not a problem that Americans generally associate with their own backyards. ![]() You must be blind, the informant said, before agreeing to personally lead Malamphy and Forest Service special agent Phil Huff to the site. Malamphy roamed the woods for a whole damn day without seeing a stump. The first time they met, the informant pointed out the cut sites on a map. A tip led him to an informant, a member of the gang who had run into unrelated legal trouble and hoped to cut a deal. Once, they messed with his brakes another time, they loosened his lug nuts.īut now Malamphy had a lead, a good one. to make sure his truck was in the driveway before hitting the woods. They’d cruise past Malamphy’s house at 2 a.m. The perps were like ghosts, if ghosts needed money to buy meth. He set up motion-triggered cameras and staked out fresh-cut sites. But he lagged one step behind his quarry. the way they stripped bark with an axe to search for premier wood, the telltale teeth marks left by certain chain saws when they pillaged maple stands. The tree poachers began showing up in 2001. Malamphy was a tough customer - he had an offensive lineman’s physique, and hands that could crack walnuts. In 2008, a Forest Service officer was murdered by a tree-trimmer down a remote road on the Olympic Peninsula. Everyone Malamphy met in the woods carried a gun or a knife, and usually both. In some ways, the job has changed little since the early 20th century, when Pinchot himself dispatched a ragged band of recruits to help a strange new agency called the Forest Service wrangle illegal loggers and miners. He cruised the woods alone in a Dodge pickup, inspecting meth paraphernalia dumps, checking hunting licenses, conducting traffic stops. His jurisdiction covered 575,000 acres - one cop, responsible for an area almost twice the size of Los Angeles. Forest Service since 2000, patrolled the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District, a rough triangle formed by Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Malamphy, who’d served as an officer with the U.S. But in Gifford Pinchot, the law’s arm didn’t reach too far. In national forests, however, protections on old growth keep the tree strictly off-limits. It looked, a federal prosecutor would say later, like a bomb had gone off.Ĭutting bigleaf maple is generally legal, with the right permits, on private and state land in Washington. A patina of sawdust coated the moss and ferns. The most valuable wedges had been crudely hacked out, the rest left to rot. A jumble of felled bigleaf maple, chain-sawed into rough chunks, littered the forest floor, heartwood exposed to the chilly air. When he pushed into the glade, he found the scene matched the moniker. Ron Malamphy first visited the Slaughterhouse on a damp day near the end of winter in 2012. ![]() The clearing that tree poachers call the Slaughterhouse lies in the northwest corner of Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest, concealed behind the wall of hemlock and cedar that edges Forest Road 25. ![]()
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