Supporting and Restoring Spencer Butte
By Ariel Burkhart
For six months Alan Ash, who has worked as a dry stone mason for over 25 years, labored to build a bridge in the wet forest on a sloping side of Spencer Butte. From October through March, he hauled over 80 tons of Columbia River basalt up a winding path to construct a dry retaining wall and bridge, designed to replace a deteriorating wooden bridge along the path to the top of Spencer Butte. The finished work fits as neatly into the side of the butte as any natural element.
Designed with two arches with classic keystone settings to let water and melting ice flow under and through, the bridge looks perfectly at home in the rocky, green bush. It is a structure that will sit soundly against the hillside for many years to come.
Since Ash moved to the Northwest in ’97 from West Virginia, he’s been adding personal touches to Eugene, Portland, and many historical sites in Oregon. Recently, he’s been working in Portland, where he moved 90 tons of Columbia River basalt to make a retaining wall that will prevent houses from sliding off an eroding hill. “What I’m building will far outlast any of those houses,” Ash says.
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One of Ash’s first dry stone mason jobs was in West Virginia, where he grew up. He was hired by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a death and grief research theorist who lived in a log cabin and needed a lot of stone work done in and around her house. Due to religious differences between Kübler-Ross and the original stone mason she hired on (she believed in reincarnation and he didn’t), the project was dropped and she had difficulty finding another mason.
“She had trouble finding someone, an established mason, to take over the job,” Ash says. Most masons wouldn’t attempt to take over a job that had already been started by another mason. Also, "a lot of people in that area shared his beliefs. She asked me if I thought I could finish the job for her and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’” Ash worked with the original mason for four months before he quit the project. “I was lucky to work with someone who was so good.”
Between projects in the U.S., Ash went to a vocational trade school in Kentucky to earn a teaching certificate in masonry. During the day he did stone masonry and then would drive an hour each night to take masonry classes. He also trained in Scotland, where he got his teaching certificate as an instructor for the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Brittan. Ash is one of three people outside Great Britain who teaches dry stone masonry. He uses the same techniques that have survived for thousands of years in examples like Newgrange, Ireland, which has a dry stone wall that has existed since 3,200 B.C.
Ash has worked in many national and state parks, and he often camps out on location. Spencer Butte, he says, is one of those beautiful locations where people would walk by every day, watching and complimenting him as the work progressed. For three months, Ash excavated bedrock to build the retaining wall; pushing the wheelbarrow up past the trail to move the heavy rock was a difficult task. He recycled rocks from the first retaining wall, then brought in 80 tons of rock to make a 65-foot-long bridge. Every linear foot weighs about a ton.
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During the bridge’s construction, Ash thought of the families who might be walking their dogs who would appreciate the pools of water that would collect and run under the path. “It’s such a good vibe up here,” Ash comments while on the trail at Spencer Butte. “It’s a place that’s so well loved by all different types of people.”
Dancers and singers shine in a musical only as much as their sets do. These three folks set the stage, literally.
Amy Dunn, Scenic Artist
Amy Dunn relishes the challenge of designing and building sets for musicals. For her first show at the University of Oregon, Stop Kiss (2005), she created a dining table that morphed into a detective’s desk, a medical examination table, and a hospital bed. Since then, she has created sets for some of our favorite local productions. For For the Lane Community College Summer Musical Theatre, she designed the brightly hued Hello Dolly (2008), and she built and painted the small-town charm of The Music Man (2007).
Her interest in design goes back to freshman year lighting projects at Sheldon High School, but during a trip to Lincoln Center in New York, the garden scene from a set for Madame Butterfly hooked her. “It looked so real that I almost expected to see butterflies and humming birds,” Dunn enthuses. Now she is Master Carpenter for Lord Leebrick Theatre, devising ingenious sets as real as the one that enchanted her in New York.
Since most of Dunn’s sets are built on-site, she gets to watch everything come to life, piece by piece. She likes it this way, “in case anything needs to be changed at the last minute.” She explains that the average set for a Lane Summer Musical Theatre production takes about six weeks to design, working with the director, choreographer, and carpenter—then another several weeks to build, with a full-time crew of five. It’s this collaborative effort “with very talented people,” she says, that makes her work “always different, never boring.”
Jerry Hooker, Scenic Designer
Jerry Hooker designed the “marvelously mobile” set for Willamette Repertory Theatre’s final production, Wild Oats (2008). When he is not busy as a UO associate professor, designing sets and teaching students to do the same, Hooker creates sets for summer musicals at the Oregon Festival of American Music. He was part of the team that brought a certain emerald-hued metropolis to life for The Wizard of Oz last summer.
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Hooker says the most interesting design problem he ever solved required creating a 10-foot-tall King Kong head for the play The Secret Life of Mildred Wild. The head had moving eyes and eyelids, and the production even required a “huge articulated Kong hand that came through the apartment door and grabbed the leading lady.” He says he considers designing sets for musicals even more difficult than this primate puppetry, because it is “all about movement—of actors, of scenery—the set needs to ‘dance.’” He explains, “All that movement and spectacle makes musical design more exciting—but definitely more difficult.”
“It always amazes me how much effort, forethought, research, and planning” go into creating each show, he says. “Nothing on stage is random, even if it looks like it was.”
John Elliott, Set Construction Supervisor
John Elliott has built all the shows for the Lane Community College Summer Musical Theatre since 2003. He also created Swordplay Unlimited in the early 1970s, a service to train actors how to fight realistically without getting hurt. He acts, too, most recently as captain of the guard in Man of La Mancha and the stage manager in Our Town.
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Some of Elliott’s favorite set-building challenges have included spanning long distances to hold the weight of actors, dancers, and fighters, creating realistic forests, making it rain onstage, and building a swimming pool. The costs for these technical slights-of-hand can run from $11,000 to a whopping $50,000 per show.
As a UO scenic design lab supervisor, Elliott advises young people to “learn to do all of it—box office, publicity, acting, design, lighting, technical stuff.” He says, “Do theater, then specialize.” To those of us who sit in the audience and enjoy the spectacle of a good fight on a bridge in the rain—oblivious to the designers, builders, trainers, choreographers, directors, and stage hands that make it all look so real—he says, “Support your local theater!”
From October through March, he hauled over 80 tons of Columbia River basalt up a winding path to construct a dry retaining wall and bridge, designed to replace a deteriorating wooden bridge along the path to the top of Spencer Butte. The finished work fits as neatly into the side of the butte as any natural element.
