Business taps into nature for freshness.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fourth in a 10-part series about what goes on inside various local businesses. Today, McKenzie Mist, a water company.

BLUE RIVER - Back in the '80s, when I first learned that companies were bottling water and selling it, I thought it was some kind of joke. You know, like those cans of "Fresh Oregon Air" you'd see in the airport stores that you'd send to your friends in Houston and L.A. to make them envious of your state's lack of smog.

But before I knew it everybody was drinking water out of bottles. Even me. I'd be thirsty, open the refrigerator and, finding no bottled water, suddenly panic. Nevermind that I was four feet from a water faucet that would drain Clear Lake if I left the spigot open. Bottled water had become such a part of my routine that I couldn't imagine life without it.

So though I've re-established a relationship with tap water, I've always been intrigued with companies that sell the stuff, which is why I had to come here, to the source of McKenzie Mist. Maybe you've seen the company's store at Main Street and Pioneer Parkway East in Springfield.

"I'm the entrepreneur and my husband's the mountain man," says Molly Morris, referring to co-owner Gale Morris, a former Forest Service employee. The couple founded the business 12 years ago.

The source of their "naturally pure artesian water" isn't in Springfield; the store is just a distribution base. Instead, the source is up here, in the Cascade foothills, deep in the side of Mount Hagan between Finn Rock and Blue River.

I'd imagined a spring bubbling in a meadow shrouded with ethereal light and encircled by half a dozen little elves playing flutes and fiddles. Instead I found a 4-foot-tall holding tank in a production-facility room.

The real source of water is 280 feet beneath that tank, in an underground stream that's sandwiched between upper and lower levels of impermeable rock, protecting the well from surface contaminants, Molly says.

But even if it arrives by pipe, the water is a lot closer to being "naturally pure" than, say, Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani, which are nothing more than filtered municipal tap water. And, hey, Alaska Premium Glacier water is drawn not from a glacier but from municipal water pipe No. 111241 in Juneau, Alaska.

Give the Morrises credit: The atmosphere up here certainly befits the "McKenzie Mist" name. Doris Creek trickles down through the Morris' 16 acres of mainly undeveloped land. Birds flit around. The noise of nearby Highway 126 is long gone.

"Here," Molly says, "I'll show you our board room." We walk up the creek to a two-person bench alongside it, beneath a canopy of more kinds of trees than I could count. "This is where we make most of our major business decisions," she says.

The McKenzie Mist story began in 1994, a couple of years after the Morrises were married.

Gale, now 52, was expecting a layoff from his job with the Forest Service. Molly, 46, was looking for new adventure after years in the landscaping business.

The idea came gradually: the dipping of a cup into Doris Creek on the new land they'd bought. The "hmmm-this-is-good-water" discovery. The realization that the bottled-water business was going gangbusters.

Why not? they asked. They had the Oregon Department of Agriculture run its tests. Approved. They hacked their way through the jungle of Lane County permits. Approved. And, finally, McKenzie Mist was being poured into bottles, capped, labeled and sold.

"We're farmers," Molly says. "And water is the crop we harvest."

Good water, according to some. In 1998, McKenzie Mist placed first in the Berkeley Springs, W.Va., Winter Festival of the Waters competition.

"It's the only time we've been complimented for being tasteless," Molly quips. (Not that bottled waters are all superior. ABC's "20/20" did a taste test and, among five bottle waters, New York City tap water tied for third.)

From the beginning, McKenzie Mist has been a family run, do-what-it-takes sort of business that's involved the couple's sons, Colton, 15, and Connor, 14. At one point, the boys were home-schooled so Molly and Gale could stay close to the production facility. "I just took my first vacation in 14 years," Molly says.

Now, the business has nine employees, most of whom work at the production facility near Blue River and a few who work in the outlet store in Springfield.

The process, as Molly points out, "isn't rocket science." A three-person staff in a room the size of a small bedroom bottles the water. A machine fills six bottles in about six seconds, someone twists a lid on each, a label machine slaps "McKenzie Mist" on the sides and the bottles are packed in boxes and loaded on trucks.

A similar-size crew comes in late in the afternoon to do the three- and five-gallon bottles, which are popular with businesses.

Two truckloads a day leave Blue River, taking water into the Springfield distribution center or direct to customers, making about two thousand "drops" a month. Example: Last Wednesday, McKenzie Mist's driver was scheduled to make 69 stops, including to the Eugene Emeralds office, Down to Earth, doctor's offices and individual homes.

The Springfield distribution center is a remodeled tire shop. My favorite part is the music area where Molly keeps a guitar, piano and drums, should the muse hit.

The main board room here is plusher than the creek-side bench, but still was bought at a garage sale.

Indeed, if you somehow think the Morrises are a local version of the Clampetts of "Beverly Hillbillies" fame, folks whose "Texas Tea" is "Oregon Water," not quite. They live in a house that, at 880 square feet, is half the size of the production facility up the hill. And the couple seem far more interested in clearing out a good evening campfire spot on their land than creating some sort of monument to whatever wealth this is all creating.

They love the quiet. The sound of Doris Creek. The trees.

`When it rains, we think: It's recharging the aquifer,' Molly says.

Later, she asks a question that you get often when doing interviews, but takes on special meaning up here.

"Would you like a glass of water?"

How could I say no?

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at bwelch@ guardnet.com.