The story of the Ya’ Xaik (YAH-khite, gargled H) Trail began many years ago as a vision of Jim and Janice Gerdemann who owned and developed the Gerdemann Botanical Preserve (GBP), a spectacular 3.5 acre garden, even before Joanne Kittel met Jim and Janice in 1990. Kittels and Gerdemann were bound by mutual dreams, creating a public trail through their respective properties. At that time, Norman and Joanne Kittel were working with Oregon Parks and Recreation Department (OPRD) and the Siuslaw National Forest (SNF) on building the Amanda Tail though their property and down the north face Cape Perpetua, a thought-to-be impossible project put on the back burner years before. The Gerdemanns had been part of what is known as the 804 Ten (ten local residents) who initiated the fight to save that section of old county road for a pubic trail. It took a 10 year fight to the Oregon State Supreme Court but they won in 1990 with the help of Lincoln County and the Thousand Friends of Oregon; hence exists the 804 N. Trail today that countless people enjoy.

Jim and Janice’s dream was to have a public trail through their garden; a one-of-a –kind pristine garden filled with native, exotic, and Jim’s own creations of flora that excelled anything on the coast or in the northwest. That garden grew into 3.5 acres as the Gerdemanns bought adjoining lots. But it had no known trail access to the west except county roads and many private landowners, and no access to the east and south since that was SNF land.

In 2007, the new Yachats Trails Committee under the direction of Andrea Scharf organized a subcommittee to make the GBP trail and its connections a reality. Additional members then were Don Niskanen, Greg Scott, Elk Mountain Properties, LLC (Layne Morrill and Mark Doyle, who already gave permission for their property, called Fisterra, to have a public trail built through it,) and Joanne Kittel. This subcommittee formally asked the SNF to consider a placement of 422 yards of trail through SNF property to connect between the GBP and the proposed Fisterra development, total of 740 yards of new trail. After careful consideration, SNF said no siting for a number of reasons.

Janice and Jim never gave up, even trying to get the support of OPRD who cited the barriers of where and how the trail would safely connect. As Jim’s health grew fragile, friends worried what would happen to the GBP.

Jerry and Kathleen Sand were introduced to the GBP in 2007. They helped Jim and Janice with various projects like mapping the garden. With the extraordinary help of two more dedicated Yachatians, Nan and Greg Scott, and with the Gerdemann’s blessing, Jerry and Kathleen bought the GBP in 2008, and began working on keeping the garden vibrant and beautiful.

Jim died, but not his dream. Janice and the Sands saw to that as did the Yachats Trails Committee and View the Future.

View the Future, a local nonprofit committed to preservation of natural and scenic areas and supporting recreational value, stepped in and helped the Sands with obtaining a conservation easement and became the legal holder of the conservation and the proposed public trail on the GBP. The Lincoln County Land Legacy Program provided the funds to pay the costs to secure the conservation easement and public trail in perpetuity.

Sands, with volunteer help, built the public trail across the entire length of their property anyway. You build it, they will come. And by golly they did! The local and bordering property owners to the west were absolutely amazing. Drew Roslund, owner of the Overleaf Resort, said, absolutely. He would bequeath a public trail from 804 N. Trail that the Overleaf borders to the west through the Overleaf property and east to Highway 101. He built it at his own expense. Owner Steve Dennis of Earthworks Gallery on the east side of Highway 101 was approached and loved the idea. He along with Robin Mathews who owned at the time, Touchstone Gallery to the immediate south and had a small residential lot / home behind Earthworks and bordering the west end of the GBP, created an irrevocable trail easement at their own expense connecting their properties to the west end of the GBP. And all those segments were built!

Yachats Trails Committee now under the direction of the very experienced Lauralee Svendsgaard, member of the Yachats Parks and Commons Commission, along with the City Council and Mayor Ron Brean, endorsed resurrecting this project and re-constituted the original sub-committee. The subcommittee met again, in fall, 2010, including all the original committee members and new ones. That included Sands, Svendsgaard, Brean, and Phyllis Steeves, recently retired Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison with the SNF. This sub-committee met with the SNF again in January, 2011. City of Yachats, knowing how important the proposed trail was to the City’s recreational value and economic development committed $10,000 to the project and was willing to hold the liability on the trail. View the Future submitted and was awarded a $3000 grant from the Oregon Parks Foundation Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation for its construction.

With SNF’s renewed interest and requirements, permit application to the SNF was submitted in April, 2011. In September of 2012 the permit was given. Construction of 740 yards of trail began on the SNF and Fisterra properties on September 27, 2012. Angell Job Corps’ Urban Forestry Program students and instructors came out 9 times to conduct trail building as had the all-volunteer Yachats Trails Crew. The Urban Forestry students and Trails Crew have worked in excess of over 670 hours to build the new trail.

The Ya’ Xait Trail is spectacular – 1.15-mile loop that goes from the 804 N. Trail on the Pacific Ocean through pristine garden, magnificent forest, and back to the ocean. (The Yachats Comprehensive Trails Plan calls for the SNF portion of this trail continue south on the east ridge to downtown and connect to the 804 S. along the Yachats River and Bay. Yachats Trails Committee is working on the plan and access options now.)

Ya’ Xait is in the Alsea language. The Alsea People were a band of coastal Indians who called this area their home for thousands of years. Ya’ Xaik is the only recorded name of an Alsea Village located in the Yachats area. Robert Kentta, Cultural Resources Director and Tribal Council member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians gave permission to use the name for this trail.

None of this would have been possible without the SNF. SNF is strapped for staff time and money, but saw the value in this trail for so many, forever. Additionally, 5 private property owners came forward from the get-go and donated trail easements to make this trail a reality.

Jim, wherever you are, and Janice, your dream has come true. The 804 N. you have both saved is now connected to your lovely garden and beyond. Bless you both for your vision on behalf of all of us and for our future generations!

Interview with Janice Gerdemann
The Yachats Gazette was pleased to be able to interview Janice Gerdemann shortly after her 90th birthday.

TYG: Where are you from, originally?
Janice: East St. Louis, Illinois. East St. Louis is the other side of the Mississippi River.

TYG: How did you meet Jim Gerdemann?
Janice: Well, after I graduated from college, I worked for Procter & Gamble market research for three years, and then I decided to come back to the University of Illinois and then work on a Master’s degree, provided I could get an assistantship to provide my living expenses. So I came back at homecoming time, though I wasn’t a big football fan. I talked to a couple of professors I’d known, in fact the same one who’d gotten me the job at Procter & Gamble and told him I’d like to come back if I could get an assistantship. And he said, “Well, I’d take you on!” [laughs] So I said “Fine!” I was even a little confused at that point—I was a liberal arts, not a business major, and he was in the College of Commerce, so I quickly got transferred to things that he had in mind. But that was fine—we had a good time. He was looking for somebody to help him make surveys for the Department of Commerce. The university liked to be of service—if they’re of service to the state, they’re more likely to get their funding when the budget is passed. [chuckles]

I’ll tell you one incident about working for Professor Converse:
He wanted us to go down to—not Cairo in Egypt, but Cairo [kay-ro] in Illinois—it’s a city on the banks of the Ohio River. We were going to do a survey for the Chamber of Commerce down in Cairo. They have an institute of aviation at the University of Illinois, and they’ll supply a pilot and three more seats on an airplane to take you wherever you want to go in service of the University. So the pilot flew Professor Converse, and one male graduate student, and me, down to Cairo. Professor Converse went around and talked to the Chamber of Commerce, and the other guy and I made our little survey around town. We had a sample of people to talk to—it was supposed to be done semi-scientifically but we just got enough diversity of people in town and we would ask them what they liked about the business there, and how far they’d go to shop elsewhere—that’s what they wanted to know. We got that done in a couple of hours or so and came back and met Professor Converse and the pilot. It was pretty muddy on the banks of the Ohio River down there, and it had be flooded recently. The four of us got on the plane and we couldn’t take off—it was too muddy! So somebody came out from the office, and he suggested that he and the graduate student could take hold of the edge of one of the plane wings, and they would run along and the pilot would start the engine and see if he could lift out of the mud! So they did that, and it came out of the mud. The graduate student jumped back into the plane, and we had enough space to take off!

So the first year I was there, starting to work on a Master’s degree, I met Jim. I’d rented a room in a house across from where he was living, and we both went to the Unitarian Church, and that’s where we met. He lived in the basement of the Unitarian Church, and had just come back from Berkeley, California—that’s where he got his Ph.D. degree in plant pathology.

TYG: What was life like for you as a young adult, after you met Jim Gerdemann?
Janice: Well, we hit it off quickly. He was not very fond of the plains of Illinois, though. The people at Berkeley had suggested this job to him, because it was next to Missouri, where he came from. Well, Illinois isn’t like Missouri at all! [laughs] Illinois is a flat plain down two thirds from Chicago—the glaciers flattened the land. But Missouri, where Jim grew up, had a lot of woods and creeks and rough land—not crop land, like the corn and soy beans in Illinois. But I think he did like his job—the people were nice, he found out after a while.

To make a long story short, after about six months he said, “Well, I have to go back to Oregon as soon as this term is over. I don’t have three months’ vacation like the people who are just teaching. I have a teaching job with research, and it’s considered a 12-month job with one month’s vacation. I’m going to go to Oregon. Would you like to go with me to Oregon? If you would, we’ll have to get married.” [laughs] Because that was the custom then—you had to get married before you went traveling together.

TYG: That’s a weird custom.
Janice: Yes, right! [laughs] So I said, “I’ll think about it for a little bit.” But not for long. I really wanted to go to Oregon with him—I really liked him from the beginning. Anyway, I said, “Well, we have to go meet each other’s parents first.” So we hurried up and did that, and we got married at my parents’ house in East St. Louis, then we went back [to the University of Illinois]. Then some advisor said that it would probably be better if we lived together for a couple of weeks before we went camping back to Oregon. We thought maybe that would be okay, and we’d rented an upstairs apartment in the home of another professor who was retired, so we had that. Then we took off camping and went to Oregon. Jim earned his whole way through college by working in the forests in Oregon. In those days we didn’t travel as readily across the country as we do now. [Janice and Jim stayed in Urbana, Illinois, for the rest of Jim’s career, and raised three sons there.]

TYG: Were you interested in botany before you met Jim?
Janice: Well, the most interest I had in botany was one day, my dad told me there was a city-wide contest in East St. Louis for children up to 12 to have a backyard garden. They’d have judges coming around and judging for first, second, and third prize, or something like that. The bottom third of the garden had been fenced off for a little playground, and he said “Well, you could plant a little garden around the playground, and I’ll fence it off for you if you like. So I said okay, and I’d buy some packages of seed from the hardware store. So they had a packet of nasturtium seed that was “Guaranteed to bloom!” [laughs] Nasturtiums are great bloomers here in Oregon, you know. [The story ends up being interrupted by somebody asking for directions.]

TYG: So how did you end up in Yachats?
Janice: Oh, we loved Yachats from the beginning.

TYG: How did you and Jim establish the [Gerdemann] Garden?
Janice: He was really going to retire. Sometimes he [would attend] a Western Regional Plant Pathology meeting, and by that time our son was going to Oregon State University. When the meeting was over, he picked up that son (Steve), and had a weekend before he came back to his job in Illinois, and he looked at possible places to retire. Brookings is the “banana belt” of Oregon, so that was the natural place for him to look first. But he was put off at Brookings by the grocery store, and other downtown buildings, not planting any exotic plants that they had the climate for and could have made use of for doing something interesting, and they only had privet bushes around there—privet can be grown anyplace in the US! [laughs] So he said that Brookings wasn’t a very imaginative place. So then he looked at Gold Beach, and I guess he met with some real estate agents and looked at some properties and different places. We had done a lot of camping, and knew a lot about Oregon, mostly southern Oregon. We were fond of the Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon, kind of adjacent to the mountains in California—Cascades-Siskiyou. But the plant, Kalmiopsis, that the wilderness down there is named for, was originally thought to be a rhododendron, but then they decided that it was a separate species, a little bit different from rhododendrons as such. It was found by a botanist named Mrs. [Lilla] Leach. She had a pharmacist husband, and they lived in Portland. They did a lot of hiking and botanizing, they called it, in the Cascades-Siskiyou National Forest. She also discovered something related to nitrogen-fixing plants. Kalmiopsis leachiana is the rhododendron relative, and there are even two forms of it now. Jim was already growing it, I think, or he did shortly after we came to Oregon. On our previous camping trips to Oregon we had visited nurseries that grew rhododendrons and taken some back to Illinois. It was funny—sometimes big nurseries, like Van Veen’s—a Dutch family that came over here. They would sometimes give us something to take back to Illinois on condition that we give them a report back on whether it survived, how hardy we would find it to be. Oregon is a huge nursery for the rest of the country: the nursery business in Oregon is the biggest crop they have. So it’s big business to them: they sell to the East out here. So [Jim] would get donations to take back and try. So... where were we in this conversation? I go astray...

Oh, so Jim looked at this piece of land that he liked in Oregon—the guy [selling it] was getting divorced. They needed to sell two-thirds of their property at the head of Forest Hill Street in order to split the money between them. He was going to stay on the land—in fact, he was in the business of buying and selling land working for somebody else. So Jim put a down-payment on this piece of land, because it was right next to the forest—that was more important than the view of the ocean. That was just on a business trip during a weekend, and he told me about it; when the [school] term was over we would go back out and look at it, and I could have a good look at it before we bought it for sure. So we camped on that piece of land and looked around.

We had some friends in Waldport, at Sandpiper—they came out after three days and said “You’ve been out here in the boonies by yourself long enough, you’d better come and sleep on a bed inside for a while. But for the first part of our stay we camped there and went down to the Adobe for Jim to shave and me to wash my face or whatever and we’d do breakfast down there, and cook dinner on our stove at the campsite, on that land which we ultimately bought. So I had a few reservations, but I gave my approval to the site anyway. Jim had an answer for all of them. There was sort of a rough dog out there—Jim was pretty sensitive to barking dogs at night, but he said, “Oh, I can make friends with that dog!” [laughs] You see, he was eager to do it! Somebody else was making illegal shingles from cedar trees; we suspected he hadn’t paid the Forest Service for going up there and helping himself to [the wood], but [Jim] said, “Well, that’s a very temporary thing.” [laughs] And he was right! So, we went back [to Illinois] and hunted for a house plan, and I made a cardboard model of it, and we came back and built it.

TYG: Cool! So, what are you doing these days?
Janice: Well, we spent 30 years collecting plants from our trips to South Africa and New Zealand that were related to Jim’s profession, really. So what am I doing now? Jim has died, and I live in assisted living, if you want to know. [...] I’d like to move back to Yachats, but there are difficulties in a town with not very many facilities if you don’t have a car. My friend Gerald, Gerald Stanley, collected bus schedules. He showed me how I could easily get [from Albany] over to Yachats on two buses. After I broke my leg they came over to see me—a number of people did. But I still have way more friends in Yachats than anyplace else. But I am going to a yoga class that is separate from the continuing care facility where I live now, and I walk there. And the people in their golf carts wave at me. Everybody knows me because I walk with my walker down the streets that are restricted to 25 mph. [...] But I always wonder if those could be used in Yachats—you should be able to cross 101. I come over to Newport sometimes, because I can come and go in one day, like for Milo [Graamans]’s play at the Visual Arts Center. I can do that in one day. Milo used to be my computer helper when he was in high school. He would come over once a week. We were friends, and I was always snagged on something on the computer and needed somebody to help me once a week, and he did. So I’m very fond of Milo and other people around here—many people. Although lately the turn-over seems pretty great. I go into the Green Salmon and I’m lucky if I see one or two people I know. [...] But thank goodness for friends and buddies!

TYG: Well, thank you so much for your time!
Janice: Thank you!

Dear Dale,

I’m sitting here in our dining room for the one meal a day that we eat in our nice dining room.

It’s not really a social occasion. There are 12 tables set up, but only one person can sit at each table  —- unless they’re a married couple. and they already have all day long to talk to each other! With this arrangement, staff has to clear the tables to reset