Photo courtesy of Sage Van Wing and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB)
Written by Marcus Axford, 9/7/23
George Arthur Atiyeh was born on April 16th, 1948 in Portland, Oregon to his parents Richard and Mary-Allice Atiyeh. Raised in the Portland area, George spent most if not all of his summers at Opal Creek. His great uncle, a man by the name of Jim Hewitt, founded Jawbone Flats as a mining town in the area where Opal and Battle Ax creeks meet together. The town boasted 27 buildings that included a cookhouse, community hall, showers and an infirmary, and ever since then Hewitt defended his claim from takeover efforts by the U.S Forest Service using mining laws and blocking tactics.
This would be the world that George would grow up in, and as a young boy George would explore the area extensively, in fact one time he went past the boundary lines the adults had set for him, stumbling into Cedar Flats which was a grove of giant trees thousands of years old. As of writing, I have tried to find if the flats survived the blaze, however satellite imaging, if I am seeing correctly, shows that sadly almost nothing survived.
George described witnessing the grove as a “spiritual experience” and as the years went on he only fell deeper in love with the landscape. It’s a love I can deeply respect, I can’t tell you how much time I have spent at Silver Falls State Park. Every spring or fall, and some years both, my mother and I would camp in a tent or a cabin, hiking the entire seven plus mile trail multiple times. Sometimes my grandmother would accompany the two of us camping, and the memories I have of the place are in the hundreds, if not thousands.
He graduated from Beaverton High School and from there he went on to go into the Army Reserves, taking classes at University of Oregon and traveling before finally settling into the Opal Creek area sometime in the late 60s and early 70s. For the next year or two he began to wage his own war against the Forest Service which started surveying the local timber, using his own tactics to hinder their progress. What were these tactics? Well the list includes pulling survey stakes, putting snow in the gas tanks and stealing lunches. Eventually his antics got him arrested, he wasn’t charged but he also realized at that point things needed to change.
He decided to use the same tactics I imagine he no doubt learned from good old uncle Jim, it was time to think smarter and not harder. In 1972 , he founded Shiny Rock Mining Co. with an investment from Hawaii newspaper owner Thurston Twigg-Smith. Smith wanted to help ensure the survival of Opal Creek, and wasn’t alone, but we will get to that here in a little bit.
From here, George went to work moving enough material so Shiny Rock could gain ownership over mining claims around Jawbone Flats under the General Mining Law of 1872 which states that all citizens of the United States age 18 years or older have the right under the 1872 mining law to locate a lode or placer mining claim on federal lands open to mineral entry. If you listened to episode 5 of our podcast, Striking it Rich, you’ll remember that lode mines are hard rock mines used to find larger deposits of minerals, usually gold, and placer mines are gravel or silt based, sifting through sediment to locate minerals, once again usually gold. These claims may be located once a discovery of a locatable mineral is made, which include but are not limited to platinum, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, uranium and tungsten.
Basically it meant that as long as the land was being used, no one could go in and log, and ultimately the success of Shiny Rock also ensured the success of Opal Creek's protection. As George continued to fight to protect his beloved forest, he did something incredibly puzzling… He logged it himself, mostly likely because he used to think that the forests were endless so cutting down a few here and there couldn’t possibly hurt anything. In the late 70s, he partnered with his close friend Tom Hirons, the two founding the logging company North Fork Logging.
Beginning as nothing more than a clean up crew to clear out wood debris from sites that had already been logged, the two began the slippery slope of small-scale logging. This would prove to be too much for George, he and Tom began fighting over whether to cut or to preserve, and ultimately their friendship fell apart because of it. In 1978, Hirons bought out George’s half of the business and the two went separate ways, the road ahead for George would lead to his greatest challenges.
Three years after he quit logging, and after a lengthy review process, the Forest Service moved ahead with the Opal Creek Timber Sale, which would include building a 7 mile long stretch of road and harvesting over 12 million board feet of timber, which if you’re curious amounts to about 700-800 homes. The threat became even more real when boundary markers started appearing in the forest, George realized he would have to escalate the fight, without resorting to old tricks of vandalism. He and several other conservation groups banded together and turned to the courts for mercy. Local attorney Mike Swaim, who would later go on to being Salem’s mayor from 1997 to 2002, took on the case, filing an appeal against the timber sale and while it did work, it was merely a stalling tactic, but as with a forest it takes time and perseverance to win the day, and George was a fierce contender.
While they would inevitably lose the court case, something else happened, George was becoming recognized in the political sphere and people were taking his cause seriously. It is worthy to note that he was the nephew of then Governor Victor Atiyah, 32nd Governor of Oregon from 1979 to 1987. It’s very possible his uncle helped his cause, though I can’t find any record of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me considering Victor’s policies and what he did for the state with things like working towards the designation of the Columbia River Gorge as a national scenic preservation area as well as establishing a statewide food bank, which was the first of its kind in the nation. It seems like Victor was quite the good fellow himself.
Whether his uncle helped George or not, he still had powerful allies, including as far as I can tell Rep. Mike Kopetski and Sen. Mark Hatfield, who included Opal Creek in the first draft of the Oregon Wilderness Act, although it unfortunately got deleted off the bill in 1984, opening the threat of logging to the area yet again. George was not backing down, not when he was making some amount of progress, and personally I feel he would rather have been torn to pieces by logging equipment along with his precious trees than live to see the area decimated.
George turned to his very own plane for assistance, you see to add to his menagerie of talents he was also a pilot with his own plane, he even crashed it in 2014 at Boone County Regional Airport in Harrison, Arkansas and was taken by life flight to a hospital in Springfield Missouri where he recovered after being in a coma. Seriously this man is more of a legend than most people could imagine, and he used that plane to take news media and politicians from his little airstrip in Lyons high above the decadent landscape of the cascades to showcase the difference between logged terrain and the emerald jewel that was Opal Creek.
In 1988, George and a group of activists blazed the first trail up Opal Creek, what is known today as Kopetski trail, likely named after Rep. Mike Kopetski who as I mentioned before helped George in congress, putting forth a federal bill that would create a wilderness at Opal Creek, a bill that unfortunately also came up short. George, friend and environmentalist Michael Donnelly, and then Lane County Commissioner Jerry Rust flagged the route to allow public access to the various scenic places. This move was technically illegal and the Forest Service district ranger at the time, David Alexander, had a bone to pick with the group about it. George simply said to him his famous line “I don’t know who built it, but I did see a bunch of bears carrying chainsaws, maybe they built it”. From that day forward the builders called themselves “The Bears”.
Unfortunately, George’s efforts were coming at a cost, he was making great friends, sure, but he was making greater enemies, particularly among some of his neighbors and the logging community as the threat of job loss and timber industry decline loomed great, to them George was the problem, but to George no cost was too great, as I said he probably would rather have been torn to pieces by their equipment than see harm come to Opal Creek. Eventually it would all pay off, in 1996 Sen. Mark Hatfield finally pushed the legislation through and Opal Creek was deemed safe once and for all, finally after giving most of his life to his childhood home and making endless sacrifices, those trees would never see the ax… However our story doesn’t have a happy ending, I wish I could say it did, but you probably already knew that.
For over 20 years George and everyone around him would enjoy this amazing place, including my wife Jessica and I, who went there as our first day trip together when we first started dating. We still have pictures of the place. On September 8th, a firestorm of unspeakable horror roared through the Santiam, leveling everything in its path, including poor George, who took up the fight one last time. His daughter, Aniese Mitchell, explained how she last talked on the phone with him Labor Day night as the winds started picking up. Like the old man of Mt St. Helens, whether George knew what was coming or not probably wouldn’t have changed his mind in what he had decided to do, which was to stay thinking there was no way he would be in any danger.
I can’t even begin to imagine what his final moments of life must have been like, what he was thinking, if he regretted his decision to stay, but one thing is absolutely certain: George Atiyeh spent all 72 of his years making a difference in the world. Yes, he stumbled, he made mistakes, but we are only human and he even said so himself that he strayed from his principal's one time or another, but he always tried to do the right thing. There’s something to be said about the poetic nature in his passing, he died with his beloved forest, and while he may not return in the same way that Opal Creek will one day, his legacy will live on for decades to come.
Thank you for your dedication George, rest in peace and let us take it from here.
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He lived just down the road from us. He at beginning of “Narrows” and we at the other end. So tragic. Good neighbor and good friend. Richard, his dad, was a great too. Lost a friend and our house on river. RIP George
Back in the Golden Age of Republican Politics. A party no longer. Thank you George for protecting one of Oregons beauty spots for as long as you could.