When yoga instructor Olaf Kalfas and his wife, Nina, bought a wooded homestead in Jackson County two years ago, he had no idea how to use a chain saw. Kalfas, 41, certainly didn't consider himself a forester.
Now you can find him most days in a four-wheeler, Stihl saw strapped to the back, driving the old skid roads that crisscross his property. Or he might be running the 2,500-pound brush masticator they call the "death muncher" through a pile of manzanita and madrone limbs in his Bobcat.
"When we bought the place, we had no idea what having 280 acres entails," he said recently as Nina Kalfas, 37, served iced tea and sugar-free organic cookies in their home overlooking Jacksonville. "It was a bit overwhelming."
The couple, residents until recently of Mysore, India, are emblematic of a growing number of small woodland owners who buy rural property primarily for the beauty and lifestyle it offers, then realize just how much work owning an Oregon forest can be.
"We had no idea what we were getting into," Olaf said. "And if we had thought about it . . ."
"We probably would have bought a condo," Nina joked.
A recent survey of members of the Oregon Small Woodlands Association found the most common reason for owning forestland was to "enjoy the beauty or scenery."
"It's been a growing trend for the last 10 to 15 years," said Mike Gaudern, the group's executive director.
That trend is particularly noticeable in Jackson and Josephine counties, where diverse mixed conifer and oak woodlands near cultural centers such as Ashland and Jacksonville have become popular retirement areas for urban exiles and others.
Matt Epstein bought 10 acres of woodland in the Applegate Valley west of Jacksonville in 1994 after a career as an executive in the container shipping industry.
He had never owned timbered land before, and he was not particularly interested in the details of land management until lightning sparked a small fire not far from his home less than two weeks after he moved in.
Epstein spent the next five years doing fire suppression work on his property, and he took a master woodland owners course from Oregon State University. He's witnessed others walk the same path.
"I have neighbors that come into the area from urban environments, and I ask them, 'What are your plans for managing the forest?' And they say, 'I don't want to see it change at all. I like it just how it is,' " he said. "I tell them, 'Don't blink, because it's changing all the time.' "
After overcoming their initial shock, the Kalfases embraced the challenge. They enrolled in the Oregon Department of Forestry's stewardship program and hired a consultant to help develop a management plan for their land.
They also bought a lot of equipment, such as the death muncher. Now Nina Kalfas wears her poison oak rashes like badges of honor.
For now, they are focused on thinning undergrowth from around their house for fire protection. In the long term, they hope to improve the health of the overstocked and neglected landscape by more thinning and selective planting.
What they don't plan to do is sell their timber for profit, which also puts them in line with many of Oregon's newer woodland owners.
"In a lot of cases these folks are looking for a rural retreat, and they get out there and they are not particularly interested in marketing timber, nor do they need the income from timber," said Max Bennett, an Oregon State University extension forester for Jackson and Josephine counties.
Small-woodland owners have about 5 million acres of Oregon's timber, about 40 percent of private forests, according to the Oregon Forest Resources Institute.
They contribute about 11 percent of Oregon's wood output. But only one-tenth of woodland owners derived more than half their income from the timber, an association survey showed. A third got no income from the land.
And in recent years, the number of tree farms has decreased while the number of landowners increased. Small woodland plots are increasingly threatened by development and division.
"Losing forestland to development is a real risk," said Mike Cloughesy, the institute's director of forestry. "Much of Oregon's small woodlands lie on the outskirts of urban residential areas, and that land is highly desired for other nonforest uses."
The good news is that there are emerging, nontraditional markets -- such as carbon credits or biomass -- that small-woodland owners not interested in selling logs can take advantage of.
And with the timber market in a slump because of the slowdown in new home construction, there's not much of a market for saw logs even if owners of small woodlands wanted to sell them.
"All the people that I work with, I tell them just to not log now," said Marty Main, a private forestry consultant who has worked with the Kalfases and others in southern Oregon for more than two decades.
When he toured the Kalfases' land, he discovered a stand of healthy Ponderosa pines that he planted 25 years ago for the previous owner.
"That was great to see," Main said. "But I also felt kind of old."The Oregonian
