on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Tree Cop

Don’t trash the Six Rivers Forest, or you’ll be answering to Bobby Phillips

(Jan. 28, 2010)  If you saw Bobby Phillips out of his uniform, you’d probably guess he’s a cop. Shaved-bald noggin. Stern-lip mustache. Solid stance, action ready. Alert eyes. And if you’re one of those people who leans toward the wink-wink side of the law, he might make you fidget.

As you should. Phillips is a federal law enforcement officer (a “LEO,” as they say), deployed to the river-cut mountainous domain of the Six Rivers National Forest’s Orleans, Lower Trinity and Ukonom districts (the Ukonom’s part of the Klamath National Forest, but is administered by Six Rivers). And he takes his job seriously.

Illegal wood cutting is rampant on the Six Rivers National Forest. Many get away with it. But if Bobby Phillips catches someone cutting wood without a permit, he’s apt to make him unload the wood on the spot, and of course cite him. Photo by Heidi Walters

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Too seriously, say some of the fidgety folks out on the Six. He’s been shaking things up out there for two years now. Before him, there hadn’t been a full time forest cop for years.

“Every time he comes to Orleans he probably writes three or four tickets,” grouched one man who didn’t want his name revealed. “For mushroom collecting without a permit, for not tagging their wood, for riding quads on the wrong roads, for no helmet. I know two gals who got a ticket for no helmet. They were in the snow. And he [Phillips] actually was stuck in the snow, and they rode past him on the quad and he flagged ’em down and he wrote ’em a ticket for no helmet. A hundred and fifty dollars. One of the gals said something smart to him, and he wrote her up for another $50.”

So?

“We’re so far out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. He paused, then added, “The guys before him never hassled people.”

But what really ticked the man off, he said, was the time that Phillips drove down to his house looking for his son. Someone had set a fire on the side of a road, and somebody had implicated the man’s son. Turned out the son had an alibi — he was off fighting a fire elsewhere, ironically.

“I called Bobby at his office and told him it was really rude to go to my house without my permission,” said the man. “He told me he was a federal officer and he didn’t need to ask me for permission to go to my house.”

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