By Ty Walker, The Mountain Times
Longtime Mount Hood residents probably know Paul Keller. A resident of the mountain since 1974, he became a part of a close community of friends – young adults who moved there in the late 1960s and ‘70s with a strong sense of independence and freedom.
They wanted to live in the foothills, in the woods, by the peaceful waters and away from the big cities. Keller remembers forming friendships with others who shared similar outlooks. Keller counts himself a part of this group of rugged individuals who remain friends to this day.
“I’m so glad I moved up here when I did and there was this community of people my age who moved up here in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” Keller said.
The late David Rogers, known as the “Log Doctor” for his work restoring old log cabins, was a good friend of Keller’s back in the day. Keller said Rogers described best this sense of community on the mountain:
“In those days, the mountain community was populated with similar-minded individuals. I think we all wanted to be away from the city. We wanted to be up here in the mountains, near the rivers, walking in ‘intact’ forests. We were all young with shared interests and a mutual sense of freedom.”
Keller was 24 in 1974, when he moved into a one bedroom cabin near the Salmon River in Brightwood to be near his new job at the Sandy Post. He said he learned a lot in his four years as editor of the Post.
He founded The Mountain monthly newsmagazine in 1979 and built it into a successful 3,000 paid-circulation operation before selling it in 1984 for a sizable profit.
Not to be confused with The Mountain Times newspaper, The Mountain was a separate entity altogether. After Keller sold his paper, it changed hands three times in four years before going out of business years ago. Keller took on various newspaper positions around the region before settling down the past few decades to work out of his home as a technical writer and editor for the Mount Hood U.S. National Forest Service.
Keller is no sedentary journalist who just tells colorful stories. He has led an active lifestyle in between newspaper jobs. After graduating from the University Of Oregon with a journalism degree, he served for a year as a volunteer for the AmeriCorps VISTA program, giving aid to poverty-stricken people in Oklahoma.
When he left the Sandy Post, he got a summer job fighting wildland fires with the Zigzag Ranger District summit tanker crew.
“I fell in love with wildland fires. I loved it,” he said.
He got enough experience to join a hotshot crew, a self-contained unit specializing in fighting wildland fires for the U.S. National Forest Service. After four years of seasonal work in the woods, he decided it was time to get back to his writing career.
He had stints at the Milwaukie Review, the Gresham Outlook and The Oregon Journal, for which he was hired as its Mount Hood correspondent. (The Journal eventually became part of The Oregonian in the 1980s).
But the woods always called Keller back, taking him away from steady newspaper jobs. In 2008, he got the opportunity to write for the Forest Service full time, working out of his own home in Mount Hood. He has been doing that ever since.
The same year he moved to the mountain in 1974, Keller remembers well covering a story that caught the FBI’s attention. “J. Hawker,” as the extortionist called himself, bombed three BPA power transmission towers near Brightwood as part of a plot threatening to sabotage the Bull Run Watershed.
J. Hawker wrote letters to the FBI demanding $1 million or he would set fires aimed at Portland’s major water supply. Blowing up the BPA towers was used as a demonstration of the seriousness of his threats.
Keller remembers when FBI agents flooded the Mt. Hood area, searching for the suspects. Locals told stories about how there were all these people wearing new flannel shirts playing pool at the Whistle Stop Tavern. These were presumably undercover agents trying not to be conspicuous.
Ironically, J. Hawker and his girlfriend-accomplice were caught driving around Southeast Portland communicating with the FBI on his CB radio. Their location was triangulated using CB radios, the instruments the bomber used to communicate with the FBI authorities.
David Heesch, aka J. Hawker, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Sheila Heesch got 10 years as his accomplice.