Cliff clutter cleanup

COTTAGE GROVE — It was born in Auburn Hills, Mich., sometime between 1979 and 1982. It died on the side of a mountain southeast of Cottage Grove who knows when, most likely shoved to its demise 150 to 200 feet below a rocky cliff by a car thief, a drunken youth or maybe even its last owner.

On Tuesday, the black Dodge Omni with the red POW/MIA bumper sticker — “Don’t let them be forgotten” — returned from the dead, hauled back by a high-lead logging system for a ghostly encore.

And in its next life?

“It’ll come back as a Lexus,” said Norm Maxwell, a forestry technician for the Bureau of Land Management’s Eugene District, cracking wise before driving away with the car’s remains.

The Dodge Omni, riddled with rusted bullet holes, is one of five cars that somehow got tossed off the cliff at the top of 3,012-foot Blue Mountain. Most of them have been there for years. Maxwell, who specializes in finding junked cars in Lane County’s woods and arranging for their removal, discovered the vehicles about a decade ago. He figured that they’d never be removed.

But last summer, he noticed that someone, probably a logger, had removed the front end and V-8 engine from the remains of a four-wheel-drive vehicle. That’s when he realized it was possible to remove the cars and other debris.

Earlier this year, the BLM hired logger Bob Bateman Jr. of Monroe, who runs Bateman Forest Management, to do the job. Besides the five cars, there’s a gasoline trailer, a metal oil tank, a large open-bed trailer, appliances, bike frames and tires in the mossy woods at the bottom of the cliff — kept company by plenty of empty beer cans and shotgun shells.

After a test run, hauling a string of old tires up the side of the cliff to see if the system he rigged would work, Bateman went to work on the Omni from inside his excavator. The car had been hooked to the end of a cable by a member of Bateman’s crew working below the cliff.

An old two-wheel logging arch was connected to the excavator, and a cable running through the arch from a yarder acted like a pulley system.

The most difficult part was the approach to the edge of the cliff, where Bateman made sure the arch didn’t tumble to its own woodsy death as he gently moved it with the excavator.

Once the crumpled car had been reeled like a fish to the top of the cliff by the yarder, Bateman jumped out of the excavator’s cab and made some adjustments to the arch before jumping back in and hauling the car over the edge, the vehicle tilting sideways as he dragged it all the way to the top. From there, he put the claw bucket on the excavator, picked the car up like a dinosaur snatching its prey and carried it to Maxwell’s flatbed trailer.

Next stop? Schnitzer Steel on Highway 99 in Eugene, where the BLM usually gets about $300 for a car’s scrap metal.

The BLM is paying Bateman $6,000 for his work, which he hopes to complete today or Thursday. The federal agency is using money from soil and restoration funds and garbage cleanup funds to pay him, said Cheshire Mayrsohn, a BLM botanist coordinating the Blue Mountain removal project. Some money could come from restitution in a drug case tied to the gasoline tanker, which was stolen from Bend Oil Co., and the trailer.

A crew from the Clean Forest Project, a nonprofit organization that combats illegal dumping in the woods, worked last week to gather garbage around the junked cars into cargo nets that Bateman was able to reel in Tuesday. The crew also is helping with the removal of the cars this week.

The BLM plans to block vehicle access to the edge of the cliff, which is reached by a long, winding gravel logging road off Mosby Creek Road.

“In our experience, garbage attracts garbage,” Mayrsohn said. “So our plan is to block the road. We’re hoping we can make it someplace where people can come and enjoy.”

They’ll just have to park and walk, however, if they want to see the breathtaking view.