One of my interests is railroads; I buy a lot of hostoric picture books. One should look at the pictures from about 1980-1920 or 30 in the Cascades. Not very many trees on the mountains around the lines.

have an article somewhere, i think, by a logging engineer. His thesis was that logging wasn't all that bad, especially railroad logging. Things went to hell when the trucks came in with dirt roads and bad culverts.

As bad as practices were, I think there were more fish back in the heyday of cut and run than there are now.

Like Rivrguy said, the roads may be a pretty big culprit.