BLACK BUTTE RANCH – From wagon wheels to the first automobiles to off-roading ATVs, the Santiam Wagon Road has stretched the span of Oregon’s history, but some are concerned that legacy could soon come to an end without proper preservation.

The Santiam Wagon Road, which once stretched from Albany to Ontario, is one of the the original east-west Oregon highways, U.S. Forest Service staff said.

These days, however, the trail is scarcely known by most Oregonians and has become a mish-mash of overgrown footpaths and wide and rutted ATV trails or has been obliterated altogether by state highways, local roads and fire-fighting, said Don Zettel, archaeologist with the Deschutes National Forest-Sisters Ranger Station.

”It’s gone through a lot of changes,” said Zettel, who spends a few days a year working on issues related to the old road, which is also called the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Military Road.

Some parts of the road, like a 30-mile section west of Fish Lake in the Willamette National Forest and a several-mile-long section east from the old Cache Creek Toll Station to Black Butte Ranch in the Deschutes National Forest, are still fairly well preserved.

But threats to the preservation of the road are growing: a stretch of road near the top of the Cascade Range has already been destroyed by off-road vehicles and people who want to restore it are concerned that damage in the area may already be too great and that Willamette National Forest officials will allow off-roading to continue.

Efforts to preserve the road on this side of the Cascades by installing trail markers and interpretive signs have also been delayed by funding concerns and a lack of time or energy put into the project, Zettel said.

As a result, the future of the trail on both sides of the Cascades is uncertain.

”It’s rather unsettled in a lot of ways,” Zettel said. ”But there are a number of people wanting to do more about getting the message out about the wagon road and preserving it.”

SUBHEAD: History of the Santiam Wagon Road

There is no question that the road is one of Oregon’s most historical routes.

The trail was determined to be eligible for a spot on the Register of National Historic Places in 1983 and is included in a list of the 16 major Oregon trails in Oregon statutes, said Ann Rogers, the current chairwoman of the Oregon Historic Trails Advisory Council.

”We have a lot of antiquities in our country and state and it’s one of the major ones,” Rogers said.

The original need for the road sprang up quickly in the mid-1800s as settlers in the Willamette Valley found they needed an easier route back east over the mountains than the way they came on the Oregon Trail, said Zettle.

The pioneers in the Willamette Valley found an agricultural paradise when they began trickling into the valley in the 1830s and 1840s. Their crops grew amazingly well and their cattle, sheep and horses loved the grassy terrain, Zettel said.

But by the late 1850s, available pasture land was becoming more scarce and people were looking for a larger market for their fruit, vegetables and grains, Zettel said.

A few enterprising young men from Lebanon realized the lucrative potential of a road heading back east and in 1859, the same year Oregon became a state, they struck out into the Cascade Range to find it.

By climbing trees and looking into the distance, the men eventually picked their way through meadows, lava fields and towering mountains spotting the route that would soon become one of the state’s major east-west thoroughfares.

After a few years of starts and stops on the road, a 1862 gold rush in Idaho pushed the market for an eastern road over the top and investors began to get serious about the Santiam Wagon Road, Zettel said.

The road over the mountains was finally completed in 1865 and hundreds of travelers began taking it to Central Oregon and beyond.

People began herding sheep and cattle over the mountains to graze in Central Oregon for the summer, and brought them back to the valley in the winter, Zettel said.

Richard Spray, a Bend resident with a strong interest in preserving the wagon road, had grandparents who were sheep herders. His grandparents spent part of the year in John Day and Cottage Grove. He suspects his own grandparents were some of the ones that made the annual journey.

”They hauled produce or wool back and forth over that wagon road,” Spray said.

It likely took travelers like Spray’s grandparents several days to make the trip, which likely became fairly routine over time, Zettel.

”They probably thought of it very similarly as us driving over to the valley today … it just took them five days.”

Theft appears to have been uncommon on the road and major dangers were weather or wagon breakdowns, Zettel said.

”It was a rugged, rugged trip,” said Spray, who tries to envision what the trip would be like each time he leads a hike on the trail for Bend Parks and Recreation or Central Oregon Community College, which he does almost every year.

After wagons came the first wave of automobiles. In fact, the first car trip from the east to west coasts in 1905 used the Santiam Wagon Road to cross the Cascades, Zettel said.

It was a 1904 Buick Curved Dash Runabout named Scout that made the trek, Zettel said.

How the old cars made their way across the mountains is a mystery to Spray, whose father also made the trip in a Model A in the early 1900s.

”They carried extra tires like you couldn’t believe,” Spray said.

It was the advent of the automobile that eventually sounded the death knell for the Santiam Wagon Road. The dirt or wood tracks and the old bridges just couldn’t stand up to the heavier vehicles, Zettel said.

In 1920, the forest service began looking for a main road across the mountains for vehicles.

By 1939, Highway 20 was completed and the Santiam Wagon Road officially closed, but portions of the wagon road are still traveled regularly by vehicles where Highway 20 crosses a part of the old route near the entrance to Black Butte Ranch. And an alternate portion of the road is still plainly visible on sections of Black Butte Ranch as well.

SUBHEAD: PRESERVATION

Members of the Friends of Black Butte Ranch, a civic group of Black Butte Ranch residents, said their primary concern for the road is the off-road traffic near Big Lake.

”There has been huge concerns because where they have done that, they have terrible rutting and basically the road gets destroyed,” said Jean Nave, who helps lead that organization and the Sisters Country Historical Society.

An area of the trail between Big Lake and Sand Mountain has been open to off-road vehicles for more than a decade, Spray said.

The vehicles have used the area so heavily its impossible to tell where the original wagon trail went, Spray said.

”The wagon road is, gosh, multiple widths wide there. In places it’s 100 feet wide from the digging wheels,” he said.

The Willamette National Forest – McKenzie River Ranger Station is currently considering limiting off-road access in the area only to some designated trails, said Mary Allison, district ranger at the McKenzie River Ranger District.

But about five miles of the Santiam Wagon Road would be included in the designated trails, she said.

Allison and Zettel said that appropriate use of the wagon road can actually help to preserve it.

And one off-roader said he believes there is plenty of space in the Big Lake area for everyone.

Art Waugh, who lives in Lebanon and is part of the Whatever 4 off-road vehicle club, said the proposed plan will limit the area his club can use and would direct some efforts to restore the Santiam Wagon Road to its original condition.

”There’s good and bad,” he said of the forest service’s proposed plan. ”But I’ve seen the bikes (and) what they’ve done for the last several years – in reality what historical integrity that part had is had.”

The ranger district is currently coming up with some alternate plans for the area besides off-road vehicle use on the wagon road. Those plans should be done this fall and a decision made this winter, Allison said.

Whether the trail between Big Lake and Sand Mountain is restored to its original condition, some Central Oregon residents would still like to see greater efforts to add trail markers and interpretive signs all along the route, Zettel said.

Zettel himself would like to do more to preserve the historic road, but there are many constraints because of the trail spans both the Deschutes and the Willamette National Forests and funding is tight.

What will become of the wagon road is uncertain, but preservation advocates hope more will be done soon.

”One of the things that some of us really are concerned about is that, actually, we don’t have that much historical stuff out here,” Nave said. ”We’ve got to preserve what we’ve got.”

Erin Foote Marlowe can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at emarlowe@bendbulletin.com.