Gallon-a-Day Huckleberry Limit Meets Resident Who Predates the Forest Service

TROUT LAKE — The Gifford Pinchot National Forest will authorize no commercial huckleberry harvest this year and has capped personal picking at one gallon per day, three gallons per year — a limit rangers concede is difficult to enforce against a resident who has picked the same slopes for roughly ten thousand years and has never once filled out the form.

The resident predates the Forest Service, the forest’s current name, the permit system, and the gallon.

“We manage the berries for everybody,” a district ranger said, selecting each word individually and at no point saying the word “jurisdiction.” “Everybody we can issue a permit to. Which is a subset.”

Rangers estimate the resident’s daily harvest at “well over a gallon” but note that no officer has successfully measured it, or him.

Enforcement is further complicated by Skamania County’s 1969 ordinance, which protects the resident from harassment. Rangers who reviewed the ordinance concluded that it cuts both ways, and that both ways favor him.

The resident could not be reached for comment, as usual.