The Red Buttes Wilderness offers large trees, expansive wildflowers, and crystal clear creeks. Here, Conservation Director George Sexton shares a favorite trail in what was once known as the “Applegate Alps.”
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KS Wild, the Northwest Forest Worker Center, and Lomakatsi Restoration Project hosted “The Hands that Touch the Land,” a hike focusing on ecological forestry work.
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When the BLM uses taxpayer dollars to plan controversial public lands logging projects, like the Pickett West native forest timber sale, you have a right to know what they are up to. Transparent public lands management is at the heart of how government is supposed to function in our Democracy.
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The Klamath National Forest intends to remove 200-400 year-old trees and snags from the landscape to make room for dense timber plantations that offer sparse value to the forest ecology.
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The Klamath National Forest proposes to log over 1,200 acres of post fire forests on the Siskiyou Crest. Scroll through this story map for more details on post fire forests and logging in the Klamath Siskiyous.
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Guest author Pepper Trail portrays 278 years of life, based on the true story of a Ponderosa Pine as told through it's growth rings. Read the life history of this tiny pine’s world, a valley in the eastern Siskiyou Mountains.
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What have we learned since the 2002 Biscuit fire aftermath, and how will it affect land management decisions in the post-Chetco Bar burn area of southwest Oregon?
...with the passage of time it is now possible to look back more objectively at Biscuit fire and the political firestorm that followed in its wake.
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A forest after fire is not a tragedy; it’s simply a stage in the life of the forest. Post-fire logging is often framed as focused on fire prevention. In reality, important biological characteristics are removed from post-fire forests. Because of this, salvage logging acts as an unnatural human disturbance to the sensitive post fire landscape.
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Fire is so important to the world-renown forest diversity of the Klamath-Siskiyou that it is recognized as the keystone ecological process. Here in the KS, forests with fire are healthy forests!
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Following decades of fire suppression and logging that created dense young forests, a return to ecosystem resiliency requires thinning second-growth plantations, retaining large trees and forest canopy, and returning the role of fire to these fire-dependent forests.
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Increasingly timber interests, conservationists including KS Wild, scientists and federal land management agencies are coming together to focus logging activities on thinning previously logged plantations and in fire-evolved forest stands in which fire suppression has resulted in encroachment by less resilient off-site conifers.
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On August 5, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) signed a management plan for western Oregon, largely ignoring a formal protest from 22 conservation and fishing groups. The BLM plan eliminates protections for streamside forests, increases clearcutting in wet forests, and removes 2.6 million acres of federally managed public forests from the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan
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The 1937 O&C Act overhauled the timber management and revenue distribution scheme. It allowed the federal government to pay fifty percent of gross timber revenues directly to the O&C counties, plus twenty five percent (for unpaid Railroad property taxes) to O&C lands. In 1953 Congress directed 25% of the revenue to road building and other capital improvements on the O&C lands, leaving only 50% paid to counties. These payment schemes tied timber harvests to county revenues and made county government a champion of increased logging.
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The history of the 2.5 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in western Oregon dates back to how the west was settled. One of the biggest obstacles to westward expansion was transportation. Moving goods from one place to the next and encouraging people to move thousands of miles across a rugged, wild landscape was a challenge without the infrastructure and modes of transport we enjoy today.
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Among the many unusual endemic species found nowhere else in the world, there is a tree, carving out its existence on high ridgelines within these remote mountains. I was surprised the first time I laid eyes on the Brewer spruce, having never seen anything like it on my mountain walks. With its long weeping branching, it’s quite a forest char- acter and hard to miss. Not only does it stand out in a sea of Douglas fir, true firs, and pines, but its physical structure hints at origins from long ago. Brewer spruce remains one of the rarest among American spruce species.
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A suite of species depend on fire for their life cycles. Healthy stands of white and purple Ceanothus burst forth after fire and provide for a suite of pollinators. Knobcone pines love the heat that enables their cones to release seeds. Black- backed woodpeckers thrive by foraging amongst blackened snags. Fire is as necessary as water is to the local forest ecosystem.
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Today, the backyard forests of the Applegate are primarily managed by the BLM. The guiding document for the future of these public lands is the Resource Management Plan (RMP), which includes all aspects of land management ranging from restoration objectives, to fire prevention measures and logging plans.
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The Bureau of Land Management administers the public forests that surround communities in Western Oregon. These are our backyard forests! Places like the Wild Rogue River, the Applegate Valley foothills and rare plant hotspots in the Illinois Valley deserve our best conservation efforts.
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Environmental stewards can operate in a variety of ways: as practitioners, donors, and doers. Our staff works hard each day as practitioners, working directly with government agencies and stakeholders to promote best practices in the management of our public lands. Foundations and community members serve as vital donors, providing financial support for our work. The doers are all of you—KS Wild members, volunteers, interns, and partners—who take part in our work, voice your support for public lands, or even just get out on a hike.
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While most Americans cherish the idea that public lands belong to and benefit all of us, corporate timber, mining and grazing interests have long sought to privatize public lands in order to maximize profits to their respective industries. While subsidized logging, mining and grazing occur on the vast majority of public lands, these extremists bristle at the idea of there being any rules regarding their exploitation of our forests and rivers.
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