Two weeks before his retirement, Stan Hinatsu worked his way down a massive to-do list from his unassuming window-side cubicle at the U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Hood River. Dressed in blue jeans and a red Smokey Bear hoodie, the recreation staff officer looked more like a Forest Service intern than one of the most influential figures in the Columbia River Gorge.
If you’ve ever hiked a mountain, gazed at a waterfall, or strolled through a wildflower-strewn meadow in the Columbia Gorge, you’ve no doubt seen some of Hinatsu’s handiwork.
In his 31 years working for the U.S. Forest Service at the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, he oversaw the acquisition of new public lands and the creation of trails. He saw recreation areas through fires, floods and a global pandemic. And through it all he managed tricky relationships with local, state and federal agencies, as well as locals in the gorge – some of whom bristled at the federal government’s very presence.
At the end of December, Hinatsu at last retired from his final role as recreation staff officer, leaving his legacy behind on the trails he helped create and protect, from the wildflower trails of Coyote Wall and Rowena Crest to the waterfalls of Multnomah and Eagle creeks.
Stan Hinatsu poses on a suspension bridge crossing Eagle Creek in 1993, two years after he was named recreation manager for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Roger Jensen/The Oregonian
Stan Hinatsu works from his cubicle space at the U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Hood River, during his final weeks on the job in 2022. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian
GROWING UP IN THE GORGE
Hinatsu’s love of nature came young. Raised in Portland by parents who made it a point to take him and his three sisters outdoors, he grew up on the trails and rivers of the Pacific Northwest. His mother, Masako, taught physical education at Roosevelt High School and loved to hike. His father, Dan, an illustrator for Meier & Frank, liked to go fishing and camping.
Hinatsu’s parents, both second generation Japanese Americans, grew up on farms in the Portland area. Both were imprisoned at the Minidoka prison camp in Idaho during World War II, but didn’t meet until they made their way back to western Oregon after the war, he said.
Growing up, Hinatsu and his family were drawn to the Columbia Gorge. There, they waded up Oneonta Creek, biked to Crown Point and picnicked at Eagle Creek. Watching “Lassie” as a boy, he dreamed of someday making a career in the outdoors, helping other people spend time in nature, too.
“It really was about providing the opportunities I had as a kid to current and future generations,” Hinatsu said. “And it’s just fun, it’s just a fun career to be in.”
His first job with the Forest Service was an internship on the Wenatchee National Forest (now the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest) in Washington, during his sophomore year studying forestry at Oregon State University in 1978. He started off as a firefighter, then returned the next summer to survey timber stands. His third internship with the national forest saw him building trails through the Glacier Peak Wilderness in the northern Cascade Mountains.
“That was probably the best summer I ever had,” Hinatsu said, grinning.
After college, he got a full-time job with the U.S. Forest Service in Wenatchee, working with the timber industry. It wasn’t his dream job, but it taught him a lot about dealing with people and mitigating conflicts between the general public and the federal government, he said – a skill that would serve him well.
In 1991, when a job opened up at the newly formed National Scenic Area, he jumped at the opportunity. It was a homecoming for him and his wife, Sue, and a place where they put down roots of their own.
But, as he would soon learn, the Columbia River Gorge had changed a lot since he was a kid.
Mist covers Archer Mountain, seen through burned trees on the Oneonta Trail in the Columbia River Gorge.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian
Stan Hinatsu and Andrea Rogers, the former mayor of Mosier, talk about strategy during a wildfire in 2009.Stuart Tomlinson/The Oregonian
NAVIGATING CONFLICT
While widely considered a treasure today, when the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area was first established in 1986, it was an immediate source of contention. The designation preserved the natural and scenic beauty of the gorge, but it also severely restricted how people could use the land. Lawsuits challenged the new scenic area for years after its creation.
Having cut his teeth on managing conflicts between the Forest Service and loggers, Hinatsu was well positioned to manage conflicts with property owners on both sides of the Columbia River when he arrived on the job in 1991.
“I learned a lot about dealing with people, about myself and how I dealt with people, because it was pretty much a conflict every day,” Hinatsu said.
That only got more challenging as more people flooded in.
Between 2006 and 2016, Hinastu said the number of visitors swelled in the Columbia Gorge. It was an era that saw huge population growth in the Portland metropolitan area, as well as the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The scenic area was also highlighted in popular media campaigns like Travel Oregon’s “7 Wonders of Oregon” in 2014.
While technically a patchwork of national forest trails, state parks, local lands and scenic highways, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area can feel more like a singular national park. On U.S. Forest Service lands alone, which comprise 80,000 acres, 2.1 million people visit annually, Hinatsu said. That translates to about 26 people per acre, compared with about six people per acre at most other national forests.
“With social media, word of mouth became much bigger. So suddenly these nice hidden treasures are discovered by everybody, literally,” he said.
The agencies in charge of the national scenic area responded to overcrowding by issuing seasonal permits at sensitive natural areas, funding new public transportation on both sides of the river, limiting the number of cars allowed on the scenic highway in Oregon and, above all, simply encouraging people to spread out.
Hinatsu was tasked not only with making some of those decisions, but with managing the careful coordination between all the agencies involved.
Collaboration became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when the agencies, along with state leaders in Oregon and Washington, agreed to shut down all recreation areas in the Columbia Gorge – an unprecedented decision.
“This was paving new ground,” Hinatsu said of the decision. “A lot of hand wringing, a lot of meetings, a lot of discussion around what’s best.”
But those difficult discussions are where he thrives.
Kevin Gorman, who has worked with Hinatsu as executive director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge since 1998, said while the two men didn’t always agree, Stan always had a way of commanding respect, in large part due to his patient listening skills and his quiet persistence.
“He sat through a lot of tough, contentious meetings,” Gorman said. “He always figured out how to navigate turbulent waters.”
The ability to navigate those waters meant Hinatsu could do a lot within a bureaucratic system that Gorman said can be maddeningly slow. After three decades of working that system, Hinatsu became the man behind the curtain, quietly leaving his fingerprints all over the Columbia Gorge.
“He’s not singular but he certainly is one of the more impactful people in the gorge that you’ve probably never heard of,” Gorman said.
Lynne Burditt, who for 10 years served as forest supervisor for the U.S. Forest Service in the Columbia Gorge, said Stan has been a valuable asset to the agency, winning people over with his intimate, lifelong familiarity with the area coupled with a calm manner of communication.
“He’s a great listener, so he doesn’t feel the need to be the one who’s listened to,” Burditt said. “That calmness that he has allowed people to have a confidence in what he was saying.”
Nathaniel Brodie, trails manager for the Forest Service in the Gorge since 2019, said he was inspired by Hinatsu’s ability to be the “bedrock” of the national forest.
Working on trails alone, Brodie said he’s had to juggle the priorities of dozens of groups and organizations. The fact that Hinatsu has juggled much more, and has done it successfully, is nothing short of miraculous, he said.
“You’re having to keep so many balls in motion with so many different partnerships,” he said. “It takes a certain person, not just to navigate those partnerships, but to establish a respect and a position in a quiet way that garners respect.”
Stan Hinatsu surveys a landslide on the Eagle Creek Trail in 1998. The slide was one of many on the popular hiking trail during Hinatsu’s 31-year career with the U.S. Forest Service in the Columbia River Gorge. Brent Wojahn/The Oregonian
The Eagle Creek Fire burning in early September, 2017. LC- Mark Graves
IN THE WAKE OF WILDFIRE
When the Eagle Creek Fire exploded in 2017, Stan Hinatsu wasn’t in the gorge. He was 250 miles away in southwest Oregon, helping out on another blaze, the Chetco Bar fire, which had erupted two weeks earlier. When he got back, he found 50,000 acres of damaged forest and a community in grief.
The fire, though sparked by a firecracker tossed carelessly into Eagle Creek, was something he’d prepared for. Forests on the west side of the Cascades burn roughly every 200 years, he said, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. The human response, on the other hand, caught him completely off guard.
“It was a learning experience for me just to know how loved the gorge is,” Hinatsu said. “I always looked at it like, OK a lot of people come out here so they must like it, right? Or, it’s so close and easy to access, that’s why they come out here.”
For many Oregonians and Washingtonians, the Columbia River Gorge is more than a pretty place to go hiking; it’s a sacred place, a temple. A faithful Christian, Hinatsu said he’s able to find some spiritual connection in nature, but still he was taken aback by just how deeply connected some locals felt to the place.
There was pressure on the U.S. Forest Service to repair and reopen trails as quickly as possible, but under Hinatsu’s leadership they took their time, prioritizing more popular or less-damaged spots. More than five years after the fire, some places still remain closed.
Unlike many who grieved the loss of trees, Hinatsu took a more pragmatic approach to the wildfire. Even today, he shrugs at the damage.
“As a society we tend to think forests are static, they’ll just look the same forever. Well, that’s not true, the forest is a dynamic ecosystem, it changes all the time,” Hinatsu said.
The same could be said about the humans who come and go from those forests, never living long enough to see those changes come to bear. Hinatsu saw plenty of change in his tenure, but 31 years is nothing in geological time.
That’s something the old forester knows too well. When asked about his legacy, he uncharacteristically demurs. As much as he loves the river and trees, this job was always more about the people and the connections he forged.
“I’ll miss that part for sure, the relationship part,” Hinatsu said. “I mean it sounds kind of trite, right? ‘Yeah, I won’t miss the job, but I’ll miss the people.’ I mean everybody says that, but it is true.”
— Jamie Hale
503-294-4077; jhale@oregonian.com; @HaleJamesB
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