Scott Swanson
It’s a rainy November morning and U.S. Forest Service staffers Joan Schmidgall and Autumn Metz stand with a visitor on a hillside in the Quartzville drainage, looking over a stand of 36-year-old trees that may soon be cut.
But not all of them, because these trees are in the Quartzville-Middle Santiam management project, a plan to thin nearly 90,000 acres of overgrown forests, create firebreaks and open spaces, and maintain and reconstruct nearly…