End of the road

SOMEWHERE ON BLUE MOUNTAIN — Unlike that daring, angst-ridden scene of youthful bravado and stupidity in “Rebel Without a Cause,” the 1955 James Dean classic, it’s unlikely anyone was playing a game of “chicken run” and racing stolen cars to the edge of a rocky cliff high above the clouds up here.

But fly off the cliff they did, somehow, someway, these now-twisted pieces of metal surrounding Norm Maxwell some 150 to 200 feet below the cliff — most likely when someone put them in neutral and gave them a shove.

“I’ve known about them for years,” says Maxwell, a forestry technician with the Bureau of Land Management’s Eugene district, of the smashed vehicles that all tumbled to their deaths.

Until now, though, Maxwell wasn’t sure what to do about the “dead cars.” Then last summer he noticed that someone had removed the front end and V-8 engine from the remains of a four-wheel drive vehicle.

But how?

How do you lift a car engine out of a wooded area that’s hardly accessible by foot?

“Whoever did it must have had a 2,500-foot tower and the skills to go with it,” Maxwell says, referring to what he believes was a logger who hauled the parts out.

“So that made me think of how we can start doing this,” he says, referring of a way to.

Now, about a decade after Maxwell — who has specialized in orchestrating the removal of more than 700 junk cars from Lane County woods since 1996 — first discovered the hillside wreckage of cars here, a contracted logger plans to lift them out using a high-lead system, probably in June after a BLM botanist checks the plant life in the area around the cars.

The BLM will pay logger Bob Bateman Jr. about $6,000 to do the job, Maxwell says. “It should be easier than logs because cars weigh a lot less than logs,” he says.

Easier except for the fact that Bateman will have to pluck the cars from the cliff above.

An old gravel logging road off Mosby Creek Road, southeast of Cottage Grove, twists and turns on its way to the top of 3,012-foot Blue Mountain. It ends in a cul-de-saclike area where the remnants of a bonfire, burned logs and trash, are piled. Smashed beer cans and shotgun shells litter the ground above the nearby cliff looking to the west.

“We’re going to boulder off the top (off the cliff) so it doesn’t happen again,” Maxwell says, gazing out at the striking view of clouds and forest below.

Maxwell drives partway down the mountain, parks, and leads a reporter and photographer on a slippery, trailless, branches-smacking-you-in-the-face journey where humans normally don’t tread.

“Here’s ground zero,” Maxwell says after a breath-sapping hike. Old tires are everywhere in the wet, mossy woods, beneath towering old-growth Douglas fir. There’s a piece of bicycle frame and plenty more smashed beer cans.

And the carcasses of at least five vehicles, a gasoline trailer, a large open-bed trailer held up sideways by two skinny tree trunks and some sort of oil tank way down in the woods. How long have they been here?

Who knows?

There’s the destroyed skeleton of a maroon car, resting against an old, rusted refrigerator, that looks like it might be a Jeep Cherokee.

Two smashed cars down below look like they’ve been there for a long, long time.

There’s a black car that Maxwell guesses used to be better known as a Chrysler K car or maybe a Dodge Omni from the early to mid-1980s.

Nearby is a mossy boulder the size of a small house.

Maxwell believes the most recent things run off the cliff were the trailer and gasoline tanker, with the words Bend Oil Co. on it, probably a year or two ago. Maxwell called the Bend Oil Co. and confirmed that the white gasoline trailer was stolen. That and the large trailer have been tied to a property where a drug bust occurred, according to a special agent with the BLM. The agent referred questions to assistant U.S. attorney Jeff Sweet in Eugene, who refuses to comment on the case.

Part of any arrested individual’s restitution could be the cost of hauling all the vehicles out of the woods, Maxwell says.

“I have the budget to pay for it, but I’d rather do it on his dime,” he says.

After vehicles are hauled from the woods, Maxwell takes them to Schnitzer Steel on Highway 99 in Eugene, where they are shredded and sold for scrap metal. He gets about $300 a car on average, he says.

Many of them are stolen vehicles whose license plates and vehicle identification numbers have been removed.

Maxwell thinks some of the vehicles that met their death on Blue Mountain where probably pushed off by drunken youth.

“They probably have an audience down here with a case of beer,” he says. “We find lots of beer cans around here.”

The BLM plans to have the Clean Forest Project, a nonprofit organization that combats illegal dumping in the woods, and/or a road crew from the Lane County Sheriff’s Office help gather other trash and tires around the dumped cars. Then four helicopter nets attached to Bateman’s logging rig will “pull together like an old-fashioned purse” and lift the trash out, Maxwell says.

“It looks like crap,” Maxwell says of the cars and the trash.

“Admittedly, not too many people come around here, but some do,” he says, explaining why he wants to clean it all up. “This ain’t Arkansas.”