Tillamook Forest Center in Oregon on schedule for April opening

Work on the $10.7 million Tillamook Forest Center in the Tillamook State Forest off state Highway 6 is on schedule, and the center will open in April 2006, the Oregon Department of Forestry said last week.

The 13,500-square-foot center was designed by the Seattle-based Miller/Hull Partnership LLP and is being built by Portland general contractor Precision Construction Co. A 40-foot-tall replica of a fire lookout tower and a 250-foot pedestrian bridge that frame the center have already been completed.

When completed, the center will include a classroom facility, a theater, restrooms and a forest archive.

The site's location - 50 miles west of Portland on land scorched by wildfires in the 1930s and '40s - presented some challenges to contractors.

It took us four months to get a phone line in and three months to get temporary power, Precision President Troy Weller said earlier this year after his firm completed work on the bridge. It's tough, but that's what happens when you work in the middle of a forest. We started the job off with generators and one satellite phone.

A master plan for the project in 2000 won the Oregon chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects' Award of Excellence for Landscape Planning and Analysis. The Portland firm Walker Macy served as landscape architect on the project.

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