LUMBER GHOSTS: A Travel Guide to the...

LUMBER GHOSTS: A Travel Guide to the Historic Lumber Towns of the Pacific Northwest by Kenneth A. Erickson (Pruett: $16.95; 132 pp., illustrated, paperback original). During late-19th and

early-20th Century, dozens of small towns sprang up around the mills of the big timber companies in Oregon and Washington. Today, their crumbling buildings and bare foundations stand as the

timber industry’s equivalent of Ozymandias’s Colossus: fading monuments to vanity and greed. Erickson offers detailed maps and notes for six trips for travelers curious to explore ruins that

would still be habitable if their founders had practiced sustainable-yield silviculture.