A bulldozed fireline built across the PCT in the Soda Mountain Wilderness during the 2018 Klamathon Fire. As you can see the fire never reached this fireline and it played absolutely no role in fire containment. With fire season fast approaching, federal land managers and local politicians are promoting aggressive, industrialized, backcountry fire suppression in our most intact, wilderness landscapes. Many residents in the region are concerned that the landscapes we know and love will be damaged in that process. Being generally rugged, remote and far from human communities, wilderness firefighting is often inappropriate, unnecessary, ineffective, environmentally damaging and extremely dangerous for fire crews. Last year, fire managers in southwestern Oregon and northwestern California authorized the use of bulldozers in the Soda Mountain Wilderness east of Ashland, the Kalmiopsis Wilderness west of Cave Junction, and in the Siskiyou Wilderness between...

The snow pack is beginning to melt in the high country of the Siskiyou Crest. With the snow beginning to melt in the high country, Klamath Forest Alliance (KFA) is preparing for our upcoming field season. Each season activists with KFA travel across the region monitoring federal land timber sales, grazing allotments, and illegal OHV trails. We roam the backcountry from the Pacific Coast to the interior mountains of the Klamath-Siskiyou. We drive bumpy backroads and hike hundreds of miles both on and off trail, through steep and rugged terrain. We climb mountains and traverse canyons to document proposed project activities and identify potential impacts associated with federal land management projects.  Bolander’s lily We pack our supplies on our backs, often deep into the wilderness. We sleep on the ground and in the cold. We endure extreme heat, smoke-filled skies, electrical storms, and gully washing downpours. We trip, we fall, we sweat, we bleed;...

The northern spotted owl is an iconic species of the Pacific Northwest that is currently declining at a precipitous rate throughout most of its range. The Northern spotted owl is an iconic species of the Pacific Northwest and a habitat specialist utilizing late successional and old growth forests from western British Columbia to northwestern California. Although inquisitive and gentle in its demeanor, the Northern spotted owl has become fiercely controversial throughout its range, and the old forest habitat that it depends on has been in steady decline. Between 1950 and the mid-1990s, the timber industry and our federal land management agencies liquidated the owl’s ancient forest habitat across the West Coast and throughout its range. During this period of widespread clearcut logging, on both public and private land, the once-vast tracts of ancient forest in the Pacific Northwest were dramatically reduced, creating islands of complex forest habitat in a sea of...

The 2018 Taylor Fire burned in a productive mixed severity fire mosaic in the rugged mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon. Before the smoke finally cleared in the fall of 2018, political rhetoric and misinformation had spread throughout the region like a crown fire fanned by 30 MPH winds. The political firestorm was still raging as the weather shifted, and the fires smoldered themselves out in the backcountry of southern Oregon and northern California. Unfortunately, since the smoke has cleared, the misconceptions surrounding wildfire and its affect on our forests have continued to grow. Klamath Forest Alliance has been busy exploring the fires of 2018, studying their ecology, documenting their effects and analyzing the suppression response. We have also recently worked with our partners at Applegate Neighborhood Network to prepare a detailed policy paper intended to broaden and inform the current debate around forest, fire and smoke management in southern Oregon. In...

The Miller Complex burning in the Middle Fork of the Applegate River Watershed in August 2017. The Miller Complex Fire burned roughly 36,000 acres on the Siskiyou Crest and in the mountains of the Applegate River and Klamath River watersheds in 2017. Much of the Miller Complex burned beneath a dense smoke inversion, dampening fire behavior and creating large swaths of cool, understory fire. Near the ridges and on south-facing slopes, the fire burned with more intensity, creating mixed severity fire effects, with significantly more vegetative mortality. The fire was diverse, dynamic and had profoundly positive ecological effects. On September 1, 2017 as the fire reached Cook and Green Pass, crews from the Klamath National Forest lit large backburns, under high winds and extreme weather conditions. Quickly their backburns backfired, and fire intensity increased. The fire quickly burned over prepared firelines on the Siskiyou Crest and began backing aggressively into...