The Gardens of Eden


The Bible tells us that in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.  Then he created a little seemingly perfect paradise on this earth and called it, The Garden of Eden.  Then he created Adam and then Eve and then apparently a wily snake that slithered and wiggled around this garden paradise hissing evil and temptation!   Then came the animals, two by two or maybe Im getting my biblical history mixed up and distorted a bit.  I know Noah and an Ark was in there someplace.

But fast forward a few thousand years to where I was today and this was no Garden of Eden!   This ash and char blackened wasteland I was walking through was far from being the paradise it had been, at one time, and not to long ago either.   Then something happened so devastating and so spectacular that armies of machinery, aircraft and manpower were quickly gathered and sent to Oregon by the fastest means possible.  A forest fire had broken out!  This one wasnt just any forest fire either; it gathered strength and momentum, sparked by lightning, whipped by the hot summer winds swooping up and over the Cascade mountain range and feeding the worst kind of fuel to the fire... Oxygen; it raged in its ghastly, blazing glory!   

Soon even the President of the United States was flying over this flaming, smoldering, devastated, wild wilderness area of the State of Oregon, burning  in ever growing numbers of acres that wiped out original old growth protected forests and wildlife alike.

The 2002 fire season was one of the biggest of the past half-century. By the end of the year, fires had burned across 7.2 million acres, costing over $1 billion to fight. Almost uniformly, the fires of 2002 were characterized as catastrophic

The Biscuit Fire began July 13, 2002 as the result of a widespread lightning event that moved across northwestern California and southwestern Oregon. From July 12 to July 15, 12,000 lightning strikes were reported in Oregon, resulting in 375 fires. Of these fires, four -- the Biscuit, Sour Biscuit, Florence and West Florence -- eventually burned together to form the large fire named Biscuit.   Difficult terrain and extreme weather hampered containment.   Approximately 73% of the Biscuit fire burned in wilderness and inventoried roadless areas.

Heres some Quick Fire Facts.   Location: Southwest Oregon, Northern California. 20 miles northwest of Cave Junction, OR.  (I have an older brother living in that town and its only 30 miles from where I live).  Cause: Lightning.   Area within fire perimeter: 499,965 acres.   Structures lost: 4 homes, 9 outbuildings, 1 lookout and numerous recreation structures.   Ownership: Privately owned land, State owned land and Federal land and forest; contribute 98% of the area in the burn boundary.   Landscape: This rugged area is predominantly a forest ecosystem, but interspersed are meadows, bogs, rock and talus, and riparian areas.  Fire Suppression Cost: $153 million. 

Now I stood deep into what used to be a rich lush rainforest and was now nothing more then a blackened field of dreams.  I was hiking this burned out wasteland just to get a feel for what it had become.  I owned a small piece of property close by that I had paid an arm and a leg for because of its one time pristine wild wilderness beauty.   Now I had returned to only find blackened burned tress and snags that wasnt even fit for logging.  The wildlife was non-existent and my dreams for the future in this area seemed to be crushed.

It was just as these morbid depressing thoughts were careening through my brain that I heard a sound!  It sounded odd in this vast wasteland of silent black burnt ravaged wilderness.  Everything looked the same, black charred wood all around me, but then came that odd sound again, carried in waves on the wind, lapping at my ears like the waves on a warm beach.  It was the sound of birds chirping and water falling!  In this silent wasteland this stood out like a mouse playing with a cats tail.

Then came a smell, a warm, scented, fresh, delightful smell of flower blossoms and green grass!  It was the combination of both of those sounds and smells that led me on trudging madly through a burned jumbled mess of fallen trees and blackened snags. That smell was driving me crazy, perhaps I was crazy!  How could I be smelling and hearing the wonderful sounds and smells of life when all around me was silent death?

I would have given up long before and hiked the long hike back to the end of a fire road where my 4-wheeel drive SUV waited patiently for my return.  But the sounds of birds, water and life kept me going forward.  The smell of a lush green area and the smell of water and flowers and ferns gave me the adrenalin rush I needed to press through and find the source of this strange turn of events.   I had hiked through here many times since the fire and never had I encountered anything like this.

Ash turned to grass spriglets; they turned to weeds and brush, all green!  Green moss and ferns appeared as if to laugh in the face of the fire.  Then came the trees!   Real green live trees, untouched by fire.  Then before I knew what was happening I crawled up and over a blackened log jam tumbled together between two steep rock canyon walls and stumbled into a land that time and fire, had forgotten!

There was to much all of a sudden for the senses to digest.  From whole mountain ranges of black quiet nothing to a sudden thrust into the heart of a Northwest Rain forest was simply overwhelming!  While standing covered in ash soaked sweat and grime I stared incoherently into a virtual Oregon green Jungle.  I couldnt see anything more then green, and lots of it!  Jumbled moss covered logs and ferns and greenery blocked my view in every direction, behind me lay a trail of black wasteland.

It was apparent and crucial that I climb at this point.   I needed to climb up the canyon walls and get to the rim of this canyon valley I had stumbled into, to get a better look around and see just what and how big this was.   I was way to old and waaay to far out of shape to be doing rock climbing but I had to see what I had discovered and my adrenalin combined with curiosity, kept me going.   Finally I struggled up over the last rock and stepped tired, sore and carefully up to the rocky rim that overlooked the valley below.

What I saw that day will always stay in my mind as one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my lifetime.  It literally took my breath away!  Spread out before me in panoramic splendor was a lush forest, green and teeming with life.  I could hear sand see waterfalls off in the distance, tumbling from the charred rim above to the lush rainforest below.  Everywhere in the valley were splotches of color formed by flowers and berries and water.  Lakes, streams, ponds, meadows, forest all perfectly untouched by a fickled fire that had found some reason from the wind or perhaps the water or perhaps God himself, to skip over this paradise valley and left it untouched, unscathed and from all that I could see, unknown by man.

As I left that day to return to my SUV and a waiting world of real life, I can hardly remember the climb down or the trip home.  My mind was filled with vivid visions of what I had seen and through it all I was weaving a dream, a dream of a garden a dream of many gardens in this Eden like, paradise valley I had found. 

I wont bore you with details of how I hiked the valley so many times I wore out three pairs of  expensive hiking boots.  I wont bore you with the details of how when I went to the land office in Grants Pass, Oregon, I found out that this entire area, including my hidden valley, were deemed uninhabitable and valueless since the fire had destroyed so much timber and displaced so many men and jobs in the forest industry that had been such a money boom to that area for so long.

I wont bore you with the details how when I told the forestry Service of the valley I had found that was untouched by the fire and how unconcerned they were about my discovery.  The head agent for that entire county simply told me that that valley was a private land area and they had no jurisdiction over it and besides, he said, he and many other officials had flown over the devastated land left behind the Biscuit Fire and though they did see various sized green spots where the fire had jumped, they were far and few in between and for all intents and purposes, generally, the land was worthless.

But I had intents and purposes that they didnt know about or even see coming.  I wont bore you with all the trips to the courthouse it took me to find out who owned this fertile valley.   When I did I was ecstatic.   It was owned by a huge mining conglomerate from the East Coast that hadnt got around to exploiting the valley for its mineral deposits.

I wont bore you with the many calls it took to find the man who could decide what to do with this land.  When I finally did, I discovered that they had all but written off this land as they were positive it had all been burned and was just not accessible or interesting enough mineral wise to be used to there advantage and yes they would consider selling it cheap to help recoup some of there losses in investments in this area..

Even though the asking price was ridiculously low for a whole rainforest type valley with huge amounts of water flowing through it, I didnt have that kind of cash available to purchase it although every fiber in me screamed to buy it.   I wont bore you with the details of how I turned to friends and family and mortgaged my house and sold everything but my wife and kids to buy this property and develop it the way my dream demanded.   But finally the investments were in place and looking as happy as a fat tick on a warm lazy dog, I marched triumphantly out of the Josephine County Courthouse with the deed to my valley and ownership to all that lay with in.

I wont bore you with the details of the town, county, state and federal meetings, permits to buy, departments, committees and meeting explaining how much the income and jobs generated from my dream would go a long way in helping out a community that was financially devastated by the fire.  I had to go though a lot to push my dream through and make it a reality.  But after many sleepless nights and days where I thought for sure the dream was dead, it finally did come true!  

 The call came at the end of Friday right before the week-end, just when I had given up almost all hope.  Your request has been reviewed and approved sir, you may proceed, he said!   I literally screamed my approval at the poor surprised clerk who had called me.   It was approved!  It was finalized it was a dream come true! 

I wont bore you with the details of finance and construction and development of my dream in that wonderful valley.   I would much rather finish making my dream a reality so that it may be turned into dreams of your own and the dreams of your children and theres also for many generations to come.

I am happy to announce that the dream has now been turned into reality.  The hard part is over, it is now time to come and visit and to play and to dream, in the gardens.   It is with great pleasure that I now cordially invite you to come to the Gardens of Eden in a place that time has forgot and dream some dreams of your own.

The Gardens of Eden. Now open for your pleasure Leave your troubles far behind, catch the next plane out.   Paradise and the Gardens of Eden are waiting for you come dream with me in the Gardens.

---Boomer---








