A sign blocks the entrance to the North Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain Trail at Oswald West State Park.

Two trail sections at Oswald West State Park, including a popular route up Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain near Manzanita, could be closed until 2023 because of damage caused by high winds last summer.

The trail closures come at a time when visitor numbers to the Oregon Coast continue to surge and more people are seeking outdoor activities during the coronavirus pandemic.

On the North Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain Trail, the damage is measured in trees down. On a short, less well-known section of the Oregon Coast Trail near Arch Cape, the damage is measured in acres.

The same east winds that knocked down trees in September also fueled the catastrophic Labor Day fires across Oregon. Smoke from the fires darkened the skies at the coast, but the fires never threatened towns or trees. The wind was a different story. It rushed through private timberlands at the back of state parkland and, with little to soften the blow, pummeled portions of Oswald West State Park.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said ranger Eric Crum as he surveyed damage on the Arch Cape Trail during a recent visit.

The trail, its entrance blocked by a closure sign, starts off normally enough. Coastal woods close around you. Salmonberry sends a riot of new growth over the trail. When Crum and another ranger went to scout out the damage, they hiked along for a short while, chain sawed through a few downed trees and thought, “This isn’t so bad.”

But as the trail climbed into the woods, suddenly there was daylight ahead, an entire sky where before there had been shadow-drenched forest. Fallen trees — giant Sitka spruce, hemlock, Douglas fir — piled on top of each other, masses of roots upended. Some trees still stood in the clearing, but the wind had snapped them in half.

Crum reported back: “The whole forest blew down.”

The winds also damaged a trail at Cape Lookout State Park farther south, closing down the entire North Trail that connects a day-use area to the Cape Trail, one of the most popular hikes on the North Coast, according to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

All three trail sections are impassable. The state expects to use helicopters to remove fallen and dangerous trees within 200 feet of either side of the trail. But these same crews are busy elsewhere in the state, cleaning up damage caused by the fires. The North Coast trails will have to wait their turn.

And the state is not even sure of the full extent of the damage on the trails yet.

“We don’t have the whole picture because we can’t get to some of the areas to assess the damage,” said Diane Navarrete, a spokeswoman for the Parks and Recreation Department.

‘We don’t have the whole picture’

While costs are difficult to tease out at this point, helicopter removal work will likely be the most expensive portion. A rough estimate of the work breaks down to a cost of $47,000 per acre. Trail repair and restoration work is estimated to cost $63,000 at Arch Cape, $297,000 at Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain and $89,000 at Cape Lookout. The parks department estimates that just under 200 acres were damaged across the three trail areas.

“Steep and hard-to-access topography is the main challenge at Neah-Kah-Nie,” Navarrete said. “The sheer volume of down trees at Arch Cape and Cape Lookout means more planning and expense to haul out all those trees.”

Until trees are removed, the state will not know if any trails will need to be realigned. The trails were already built in challenging terrain where reroutes — moving large sections of trail — are not feasible.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to reimburse 75% of the costs of the helicopter operation and other costs will be offset by selling marketable downed wood removed from the trails, according to Navarrete.

“We’re not sure of the exact makeup of the affected area, so we can’t speculate on how much money we could earn, but we can say it won’t be enough to offset the helicopter costs,” she said.

Some trees — like large Sitka spruce — may be left on site as nurse logs for habitat, or given to partner agencies for habitat, Navarrete added.

Though helicopter removal is expensive, the state ruled out using ground crews to remove debris — it would be unsafe and impractical and could cause more damage to the forest, Navarrete said.

Oswald West State Park is designated as critical habitat for marbled murrelet — a threatened seabird that nests in old-growth and mature forests — while Cape Lookout State Park is considered potential habitat for the bird. Both forests are considered potential habitat for northern spotted owls, also listed as threatened.

The state parks department is working with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out what environmental regulations apply and what work windows will be allowed.

Other options

Oswald West and Cape Lookout have a number of other trail options for visitors. Hikers can still reach the summit of Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain by parking at a trailhead farther south on U.S. Highway 101 and walking the South Trail.

Still, the trail closures could put more pressure on other trail systems and will impact the small trickle of Oregon Coast Trail through-hikers that rangers and park managers sometimes see.

With the Arch Cape and Neah-Kah-Nie trails closed, there are not great options for these hikers, said Ben Cox, Nehalem Bay unit manager for the Parks and Recreation Department. In this steep, cliffy area, hikers can’t simply drop down and walk along a beach to the next available trail section. The narrow highway shoulder becomes their only alternative if they remain on foot.

But trail closures due to natural disruptions have become a common concern in the North Coast’s more southern state parks. At Ecola State Park, landslides and stormy weather continue to cause seasonal damage to the park’s entrance road while, recently, an entire trail section between Ecola Point and Indian Beach had to be rerouted around a large slide.

“We’ve had to, unfortunately, be in this position for a quite a while,” Cox said.