Forest tragedy leaves group grappling with price of ideals

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- Shrouded in the darkness of early morning, two men and one woman hiked down a logging road in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

After 45 minutes, they cut through the woods and stopped before a massive redwood stump. It was all that was left of a tree they had once called "Esperanza," Spanish for "hope."

Led by Brian Connolly, 31, the group picked through the tangle of limbs next to it, fishing out a piece of plywood and a length of climbing rope -- the only clues to the tragedy that occurred here a month before.

They gathered for a moment together atop the stump. No one spoke.

"Environmental activism," said Connolly later, "is about temporary victories and permanent losses."

They just never expected this kind of loss.

Ancient redwoods

Ramsey Gulch is tucked away in the southeastern corner of Santa Cruz County, about 20 miles south of San Jose. Two miles long, with slopes that drop 800 feet to a creek, it has some of the steepest terrain in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Anchoring the slopes are coast redwoods, the world's tallest living things. Ancient redwoods can exceed 300 feet, their trunks swelling to 15 feet in diameter.

Loggers cleared the majestic old-growth forest in Ramsey Gulch in the late 1800s. The trees that grew up in the barren land left behind are nevertheless more than 200-feet tall now.

Timber companies have long-coveted redwoods. Less than 5 percent of the 1.6 million acres of virgin redwood that once existed is left today, most of it preserved in state and national parklands. The second-growth forest in Ramsey Gulch, privately held, has no protection.

Three years ago, Redwood Empire, a San Jose-based company, began preparing to log Ramsey Gulch again. Clearcutting is now prohibited in Santa Cruz, so the company proposed to "thin" the forest, taking many of the biggest trees but giving others time to mature. Unlike a clearcut, a thinned forest still looks like a forest. Foresters didn't expect much opposition.

But a small band of activists, led by Connolly, took to the woods to stop them.

Environmental activism covers a spectrum. The moderate end includes organizations such as the Sierra Club, which lobby Congress and pursue legal action. The radical end is occupied by groups such as Connolly's -- part of a movement known as Earth First!

Local Earth First! chapters operate autonomously, eschewing membership rolls and hierarchy. Their slogan -- "No compromise in defense of Mother Earth" -- speaks to their approach.

The Santa Cruz chapter had dwindled in the 1990s, but the group felt it should make a stand in Ramsey Gulch.

True, these weren't thousand-year-old giants, but they represented hope for the future. The group also feared the logging would cause erosion and harm wildlife.

So, Dennis Davie, a 54-year-old software engineer and the group's putative leader, put out a call for help. From Oregon, where they had been defending a section of Willamette National Forest from loggers, Connolly and three other experienced forest hands responded.

A Georgetown University graduate, Connolly had spent four blustery winter months as a tree-sitter, transforming his perspective. He vowed to continue the fight elsewhere.

Tree-sitting became popular during the 1990s. Protesters, such as Julia "Butterfly" Hill, who spent two years in a thousand-year-old redwood in Humboldt County, become human shields.

In April 2000, Connolly and three others from Oregon hiked into Ramsey Gulch.

Connolly, who adopted a forest name, "Blackbird," helped create a network of inter-connected trees and platforms, covering an acre-and-a-half. If loggers approached any one of them, he could clamber over to protect it.

The protesters dismantled the platforms a year later after loggers moved on, leaving two small groves of uncut forest behind.

As the group pressed on with more tree-sits around the county, loggers worked around the activists, but encounters turned nasty. One protester claimed a logger shot at him; several tree-sitters reported death threats. For their part, loggers endured a stream of insults from overhead. One angry protester dumped a bucket of waste on a piece of equipment.

Haphazard training

To protect the trees, Connolly often resorted to soliciting young wanderers who camped out in area parks and streets. Training was haphazard.

Last April, news came from Oregon that a 22-year-old tree-sitter had fallen 150 feet to her death.

Still, as Redwood Empire prepared to log another portion of Ramsey Gulch in August, the group scrambled once again into the woods.

Connolly hiked in at night, carrying building materials. Built 125-feet up in a 200-foot-high tree, the platform consisted of two 3-by-6-foot planks, hung on opposite sides of the trunk.

They christened the tree, "Esperanza."

A week later, the group built another platform a half-mile down the road in a tree they called, "Fresco."

On the night of Oct. 8, Connolly was scrambling. Ayla, a 21-year-old homeless woman whose turn it was to go up, had showed up in tears. She was burned out.

Connolly knew the odds of finding someone at 10:30 p.m. were slim. But outside a coffee house downtown, he asked around.

A fit-looking man with a knit cap volunteered. Robert Bryan, 24, had never sat in a tree before, but he said he'd like to try. In July, Bryan suddenly left his hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah, driven by drug problems, according to a friend. He'd arrived in Santa Cruz in August and was sleeping on the streets.

Soon, the pair was in a car headed toward Ramsey Gulch. Connolly was elated. Bryan, who used the forest name, "Naya," could give his team time to regroup.

Ayla guided Bryan though the forest, a steep, 2 1/2-hour climb.

The plan was for Bryan to climb Fresco, replacing David "Just" Collinet, another homeless traveler. The platform was lower, just 75 feet -- a safer place for a rookie. Collinet would then move to Esperanza and replace the sitter there.

When they arrived at Fresco at 3 a.m., Ayla called for Collinet to pass down his headlamp, but as he tried to lower it, it caught in a snag. He suited up to rappel down, but hesitated at the edge.

This was taking too long, Ayla decided. The loggers would be showing up at dawn.

Switching off

They headed for Esperanza. Maya "Quiksilver" Ramnath, 29, a U.C. Santa Cruz Ph.D. student was waiting. Ramnath had been in the tree for three days, but she had class that morning.

Bryan climbed the tree in 20 minutes, fast for a beginner. (Tree-sitters climb with the aid of a harness and ropes.)

Ramnath showed him around and asked if he had any questions.

Should he leave his harness on even while sleeping? Bryan asked.

"Never take it off," she said before rappelling down.

After one last check to see if he was set, they took off.

At night, a treesitter has little sense of how high he is. But at first light, Bryan would have found himself high in the forest canopy, a maze of branches and greenery, silent except for the drum of woodpeckers.

Tree-sitters say the first peek over the edge is gut-wrenching.

Around noon, Bryan called out to a group of loggers working nearby. The debate that followed was friendly, loggers later said.

At 6 p.m., a logger tying off his last load of the night heard a crashing through the brush and then a thud. He paused to listen but heard nothing more.

A half later, Juan Mosqueda pulled up in his truck and heard a soft cry:

"Help me."

Mosqueda found Bryan on his back, one leg bent backwards, his nose bloody. He pulled out his cell phone and called 911.

As they waited for paramedics, other loggers comforted Bryan, who drifted in and out of consciousness. He thought he was "doing the right thing," he said. Now he just wanted to go home.

It was 45 minutes before paramedics struggled up the dirt road.

The members of Earth First! were at their weekly meeting in town when a reporter called, asking about "the tree-sitter who fell." That was how they got the news.

Ayla and Ramnath set out to search the hospitals. They learned the sitter had died in the ER.

A Redwood Empire climber, accompanied by a sheriff's investigator, dismantled the platform. He found several climbing harnesses and Bryan's backpack.

Authorities matched the name on the pack with a missing person's report that had been filed by Bryan's mother in Utah.

Two days later, Collinet came down from Fresco.

That ended the stand in Ramsey Gulch.