It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Jim Allen has no place to be.

For 39 years, his weekday destination has been a state forest, the last 22 in Yellowwood or Morgan-Monroe. His last day managing both properties was Jan. 12.

Since then, Allen, 62, has been learning how to retire. He’s just now learning how to sleep in a little bit, which means 6:30 a.m.

He’s also making plans to launch a new business. In retirement, he wants to manage forest land and control invasive species on properties for out-of-county landowners — pretty similar to the jobs he’s been doing his entire career.

This time, though, he’s planning to spend less time behind a desk and more time in the woods.

Ironically, it was his years of working alone, marking and inventorying timber and checking forest boundaries, that motivated him to go into property management.

“I enjoyed doing it, but you’re out there by yourself almost all the time. It started getting a bit old,” he said about his work as a resource specialist at Clark State Forest.

Seeking more variety, he was hired as assistant property manager at Morgan-Monroe State Forest, then did the same job at Owen-Putnam State Forest before moving to Yellowwood. Within a year after taking the Yellowwood post, he was put in charge of Yellowwood and Morgan-Monroe — 50,000 acres in all, plus 14 employees — not to mention the signatures, reports, overseeing of contractors, and public relations work that went along with both properties.

“It sounds like a great job, and parts of it are great, but you still deal with all the bureaucracy and employee issues. Employee issues are the most difficult ones. I’m glad that part of it is over,” he said.

Roots and branches

Allen grew up in Brownsburg, but he spent many weekends playing in the Brown County woods, fields and creeks and fishing at Lake Monroe. His grandfather, James Hendricks, pastored Harmony Baptist Church. Allen still owns family property in the southeastern corner of the county.

He counts the time spent at his grandparents’ place as a big influence on his future career.

He started studying engineering and forestry at Purdue University, then branched into resource management through taking chemistry and statistics classes. Statistics are helpful in taking inventory of a forest, because foresters don’t measure every tree, he said; they take samples and estimate based on that data.

Allen earned a bachelor’s degree in forestry. His first job was with the Young Adult Civilian Conservation Corps.

It was rare back then for forestry graduates to actually get jobs in forestry — and it’s even more rare now, he said. His class had about 100 forestry graduates; now, there are about 10, he said.

Pay has a lot to do with it. “I’ve lost a lot of my assistants over the years to taking jobs in other states because of the pay differential,” Allen said.

Still, he feels fortunate to have stayed.

“What really motivated me was when we’d get comments from people using the property, about how they loved their stay there and really enjoyed their weekend. … I was always trying to look out and see what people were having trouble with or didn’t like about the property, and where we could improve or make it better for them.”

It’s been a balancing act over the years to weigh people’s wants with the property’s purpose.

“Yellowwood was kind of rustic for people. It was mainly built on the environment rather than built up. I think that was what I really liked about it,” Allen said.

There are no swimming pools or shower facilities, just a lake and campsites and trails.

A multi-year strategic plan by Indiana Department of Natural Resources lists some changes coming to the property. Some, like adding shower facilities, are based on what people have asked for, Allen said.

Back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, the campground would be packed on weekends. Over time, people have gone away from those types of activities, he said. Baby boomers — he and his wife included — are more likely to camp in RVs with electric hookups than they are in tents on the ground, he said. And it doesn’t seem like as many families are getting out and exposing their children to primitive activities.

“I don’t know what it is, maybe just that there’s so many more opportunities for people with kids, like sports. And of course, all the technology has taken over,” he said.

Campground guests also asked for better cellphone coverage and a WiFi signal, he said. Those things aren’t mentioned in the strategic plan.

The future of the forest

How much input property managers have into the DNR’s strategic plans has varied year to year, depending on who’s in charge of the division and what that person’s vision has been, Allen said.

Allen supports the kinds of changes that are likely to bring more visitors back, like adding “very basic” camping cabins and showers.

Some of the DNR’s plans for Yellowwood — especially its timber harvests — have drawn pointed opinions from the public.

Coming from a forestry background, Allen has been more on the side of tree “management” versus tree “retirement.”

He doesn’t support the idea of “set-asides” — making a certain percentage or area of state land off-limits to timber harvesting. “Looking at Brown County, and looking at all the areas that are already set aside, and looking at what the Department of Forestry was set up to be — which was to be an active, working forest and to set an example for private lands — I don’t see the need for it in this county,” he said.

A bill that recently died in an Indiana Senate committee — SB 275 — proposed that 30 percent of state forests be off-limits for timbering, preferably in 500-acre blocks.

Allen believes that periodically cutting timber allows for a more diverse forest. It creates younger, shrubby habitat that gives animals more protein to feed their young; it allows space for oaks and hickories to grow without so much crowding from beech and maple, he said.

The older oaks and hickories were able to grow here because they could take deep root in farmed, abused soil, and could weather droughts, fires and other natural disturbances, he said. Without some type of management, the forest will revert to beech and maple, and he fears that will change a lot of species in the area.

Staff do regular inventories of forest areas before they do any kind of “management” of them, mainly of tree species and some wildlife, he said. Inventories on other forest plots are done every five years, he said.

A much greater documentation of plant and animal species is ongoing in a 100-year experiment area, studying the effect of different kinds of harvests on all of those species. It started in 2006. One piece of data so far is that as the overstory, the more mature trees, are lost, more beech and maple are growing in instead of oaks and hickories, he said. That’s a concern of his.

“Ever since I’ve been here it seems like I’ve been battling people who want us to become a nature preserve and not do any kind of management,” he said. He hopes that the current management strategy can continue despite political pressure. This area has “the finest, most diverse timber in the country” and he’d like to see it stay that way.

“To be able to work here and manage those resources really has been quite an honor and a privilege to do. At a lot of other places, their species lists are very small and there’s not a whole lot of variety like you have here. It makes it very interesting.

“That’s one thing I really loved about my job — not just variety in that job, but variety in all the jobs that encompass my job.”

Though much of his work was done from behind a desk, he could still be found fixing water lines and battling invasive species, like kudzu, that have crept into forest land.

Under Allen’s tenure, Yellowwood has grown by 282 acres with the acquisition of the former Camp Belmont; Morgan-Monroe has grown by 1,500 acres with the purchase of Ravinia Woods; 20-some miles of trails have been developed to link Yellowwood with Brown County State Park with the help of the Hoosier Mountain Biking Association; and the 42-mile Tecumseh Trail was built to link Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood with the help of the Hoosier Hikers Council.

Last year, the Hoosier Hikers Council installed a bench on the High King Knob above Yellowwood Lake to thank Allen for helping to get the Tecumseh Trail project in motion again and completed.

Allen and his wife, Teresa, plan to take some time to travel and camp in other parks, including Yellowstone National Park, which she has never seen and he hasn’t visited since he was 11. But their home will continue be here. There’s no place like it.

“Of all the outdoor recreation areas everywhere in the state, this is probably the best place for people to come,” he said.