Northwest Oregon Operator of the Year for 2025, Winner - Quality Excavation, Inc.

ODF Stewardship Foresters Craig Sorter and Bryce Rodgers co-nominated Quality Excavation for Operator of the Year for the Northwest Oregon Region. Sorter said, “Small culverts installed in the first half of the 20th century before current rules were in place often blocked fish passage, preventing fish from spawning in upstream habitat. When landowner Lewis and Clark Timberlands wanted to log a parcel in the Coast Range, they knew they would need to upgrade the road to allow hauling and replace the old culvert beneath it. So their timber management company Nuveen called on the highly experienced firm of Quality Excavation.”

With an eye toward the future of the company, Quality Excavation’s founder Jay Bergeson entrusted the work of replacing the failing culvert on the North Fork of the Necanicum River in the Coast Range to his 28-year-old son Cole. Cole, who had been learning the business alongside his father from a young age, and a Quality Excavation crew, replaced the culvert with a massive new one. They then rebuilt the logging road over it to allow the landowner to harvest trees beyond that point.

Sorter said Quality Excavation had to divert the stream during the project through hundreds of yards of pipe, then dig out the old culvert, including old-growth logs that it had been placed atop. Cole then had to dig a new bed and place the larger, extra-long new culvert at an angle and level that would allow stream flow and fish passage through it. Then he anchored it in place with stone quarried on site, building the haul road back up to grade.

“Quality Excavation did an excellent job, even hiring a bobcat to lay a natural bed of rock in the pipe to make fish passage easier,” Sorter said. “No sediment got in the stream during the work and now fish are able to get to habitat upstream that was previously blocked.”

For more information about the Oregon Department of Forestry, please visit https://www.oregon.gov/odf.