Tillamook Forest Center

Tillamook Forest Center

With an advertising slogan of “find yourself in the forest,” the new Tillamook Forest Center tells the story of the Tillamook, an area once devastated by a series of fires in the 1930s and 1940s. Over 800 square miles of forest was destroyed and it took twenty years to replant in Oregon’s first major reforestation effort.

As the new forest grew, it took many years for recreation interest to develop, but as people began using the forest an obvious need to manage visitors emerged. The Tillamook is now heavily used by off-highway vehicles, campers, hikers, mountain bike riders, and others. The Tillamook Center took over ten years to plan and was envisioned as part of a larger recreation planning process for this state-owned forest area.

Doug Decker, the project manager for the center, spent a day teaching Fellows about the planning process to develop this new attraction, which opened less than a year ago. Doug shared his experiences in recreation planning using the “three E’s”: engineering, education, and enforcement. He discussed how vital each component is for successful management of recreation sites.

Developing interpretive themes and education centers is of particular interest to Zengwang Ma (China) and Cristopher Lopez Paniagua (Mexico), as their projects address minimizing visitor impacts in fragile ecological areas. The Tillamook story sparked much discussion and gave Ma and Cris some excellent ideas for application in their projects.

For photos visit: http://flickr.com/photos/18377428@N00/sets/72157594536442158/