Awesome to see.

That is amazing. I also know that I spent half of a short summer indoors due to wild fire smoke. And firefighters lives were endangered due to a lack of forest management.

Loggers realized they were out of trees and had to give it a break.

You can really see how the area around Mt. St. Helens has recovered. Also interesting to note on the "Cascades" photos, most everything you see between St. Helens and Adams is the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

The entire mountain range from Northern California to southern British Columbia is called the Cascade Range.

While they've recovered you can also see the spots where they've started taking from in the 2020 versions. The upper left of the Cascades pictures shows a good contrast of that. East of the Cascades also turns to dirt more quickly than 84.

The part east of the Willamette and Puget sound is yes. The coastal mountains are the Coast Range.

Not so much on the loggers deciding, it was mostly the federal government. I'm not sure about the coast range, but most of that land in the "cascades" photos are US Forest Service property. They stopped logging those areas in the 80's to protect habitat, mostly for the spotted owls.

Yes, the private and DNR lands are still heavily cut over.

Damn. We def missed our chance to find Sasquatch back in the 80s

It's not just the federal government.

Demand has also fallen as population growth has slowed, waste has decreased, wood heating has decreased, and other materials have increased in use (concrete, steel, and composites).

Also, Canada has been making up an increasing share of North America's timber supply.

You been around the local lumber mills recently? They're absolutely gorged with timber. Production has really picked back up the past few years.

The mills that are still operating, you mean. I don't doubt they've seen business pick up, but the mill capacity doesn't even exist to match what was being harvested before the turn of the 21st century.

For most of the post-war era, Washington timber harvests ranged form 5-7 billion board feet per year. The record year was 1973, with 7.8 million board feet.

The federal actions in the late 80's pushed it to mostly below 5 billion board feet. By 2000, the 5-year average was 4.2 billion board feet per year. The overall average going back to 1900 was 4.9 billion board feet per year.

The latest year state data are compiled for is 2017, at which point, the total was 2.8 billion board feet - just over 1/3 of the historic maximum, and a modest bit over 1/2 the previous century's average.

https://www.dnr.wa.gov/TimberHarvestReports

The timber industry has estimates out up through 2021, which also came in at 2.8 billion board feet:

https://data.workingforests.org/doc/WFPA_Industry_Econ_Impacts_2021_b.pdf

Washington is genuinely harvesting far less timber than it has historically, and the trend in Oregon has been similar.

I used to vacation on the peninsula and remember being in high school when that decision came down. Forks was fit to openly rebel. I guess they have Twilight now though, so... fair's fair? 😉

And yet no one will ever see Washington’s old growth forests ever again.

1984 image shows how over logged the area was and the 2020 image shows a more sustainable logging industry. There will always be spots like this as long as we use wood products.