Author: Luke Ruediger

For many years the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest has proposed the Upper Briggs Restoration Project on the Wild Rivers Ranger District, and for many years Klamath Forest Alliance (KFA) has opposed the old-growth logging portions of the project. Located on Briggs Creek, a beautiful tributary of the Illinois River, the Upper Briggs Restoration Project was estimated to produce approximately 30 million board feet of timber in over 4,000 acres of commercial logging units. Ironically, after claiming in the original  Environmental Assessment (first scoped in 2016) that “untreated” stands were particularly vulnerable to high-severity fire effects, the entire Briggs Creek watershed burned at 82% low severity during the 2018 Klondike-Taylor Fire. In fact, nearly all units proposed for logging in the Upper Briggs Restoration Project underburned during the 2018 Klondike-Taylor Fire, demonstrating significant natural fire resilience, and ability to maintain their old forest canopy. Numerous...

Although the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was designated to protect and restore biodiversity, habitat connectivity, and ecological integrity at the critical intersection of the Cascade Mountains and the Siskiyou Crest east of Ashland, Oregon, the management plan currently proposed by the BLM looks more like an industrial logging and grazing plan than a blueprint for effective conservation. In 2017, a science-based expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was designated by President Obama, expanding outward to the north and east. This triggered the development of a new management plan and in typical fashion BLM has used the opportunity to undermine the monument by attempting to expand the footprint of commercial logging, maintain both the status quo and the habitat degradation associated with livestock grazing, and codify unauthorized and environmentally damaging off-road vehicle routes throughout the National Monument. Certainly not conservation based, the BLM is proposing...

The Monument Affirmed! On March 25, 2024 after years of litigation, the Supreme Court declined to take up the timber industry’s case against the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. The decision by the highest court in the land to not take up this case, in turn, upheld two appeals court decisions, finding that the use of the Antiquities Act on O&C lands in Western Oregon was both lawful and appropriate, thus upholding the designation of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Established in 2000 by President Clinton, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was the first national monument designated to protect biodiversity. Originally designated as a 53,000 acre monument, the Obama Administration expanded the area to its current size, 113,820 acres, in 2017. The monument currently includes the convergence of the Cascade Mountains and the Siskiyou Mountains, but fails to adequately protect the Siskiyou Crest, which acts as the axis for biodiversity on the West Coast, and as one...

Along the southwestern Oregon and northwestern California border is an incredibly lonely, starkly beautiful, and spectacularly wild landscape. The area is more reminiscent of the red rock deserts of the American Southwest, than the coastal rainforests and giant redwood groves that grow nearby. Known by geologists as the Josephine Ophiolite, the area is a rusty red mass of ultramafic rock cut by deep, rugged canyons, incredibly clear streams lined in Port Orford-cedar, stunted pine woodlands, chaparral, and broad ridges of coarse red stone that originated in the mantle of the earth. The red rock  found in the area has technical geologic classifications and gradations, including peridotite, serpentinite, dunite and other ultramafic rock types, but they are generally referred to colloquially and collectively as “serpentine” throughout the region. The region supporting these unusual rock types is a geologic oddity, a botanical wonderland, and home to some of the most stunningly...

Last summer the McKinney Fire burned on the Klamath River in the rugged Scott Bar Mountains. Apparently lit by downed powerlines in the McKinney Creek watershed on July 29, 2022, the region had been trapped in a ridge of high pressure creating a pronounced heat dome with extremely high temperatures and low relative humidity. In nearby Montague, California high temperatures had not dropped below 96 degrees for two weeks, drying out forest fuels and creating the conditions under which fire could quickly spread through parched vegetation. These conditions were made worse by high winds which reportedly toppled the powerlines on McKinney Creek and contributed to the fire’s initial spread. That evening with the fire at only 300 acres, dry thunderstorms developed, creating gusty outflow winds which fanned the fire to the north and east. These outflow winds produced extreme fire behavior and generated a massive pyrocumulus smoke plume billowing 50,000’ into the sky. When this massive plume...