2024: A Year In Review
For many years Applegate Siskiyou Alliance has worked to protect our public lands from the immediate threats facing our region. Day in and day out, we monitor public land management activities and advocate for the protection of our beloved wildlands. Our work includes thousands of hours on the ground reviewing federal land management projects, writing detailed public comments and objections, and if necessary, preparing for litigation. It also includes organizing local communities, leading public campaigns, hosting educational opportunities, leading hikes, engaging elected officials, and increasing awareness for both the threats to this spectacular region and its incredible biological values.
Throughout the Applegate and Siskiyou Crest region, we have become a strong, grassroots voice for public land conservation, and we are working to support a vision for the future that sustains wild landscapes, maintains biodiversity, and increases habitat connectivity.
In 2024, we built our capacity, stopped multiple timber sales, secured numerous illegal off-road vehicle closures, began campaigns to stop newly emerging threats, built the Tallowbox Trail, and organized the highly successful Siskiyou Crest Conifer Field Trip Series. Below are a few of our campaigns and other major projects undertaken by Applegate Siskiyou Alliance in 2024.
Protecting Habitat
IVM/Late Mungers Timber Sale
For the past four years, we have been working to oppose the BLM’s massive IVM Project which would have logged up to 20,000 acres and built up to 90 miles of new road per decade on Medford District BLM lands throughout southwestern Oregon. To make matters worse, this proposal focused on logging Late Successional Reserve (LSR) forests designated to protect old forest habitat for the northern spotted owl. The BLM also proposed to begin implementation of this damaging timber sale program in the Williams area with the Late Mungers and Penn Butte Timber Sales.
In 2023, we filed suit against this project, challenging the entire IVM Project and both the Late Mungers and Penn Butte Timber Sales, and in April of 2024, after a year of legal filings and preparation, we successfully took BLM to court along with conservation allies.
A month later, Magistrate Judge Clarke released his findings and recommendations declaring the IVM Project unlawful. Finding that the agency was “sacrificing habitat for timber production,” Judge Clarke found that the IVM Project was inconsistent with the public involvement and scientific analysis requirements in NEPA and violated standards that limit logging in LSR forests.
After four years of consistent effort and advocacy, we saved thousands of acres of forests across SW Oregon by challenging the IVM Project, and along with our conservation allies, saved the Williams Creek watershed from the Late Mungers and Penn Butte Timber Sales.
Cedar Flat Timber Sale
In June 2024, the Medford District BLM, Grants Pass Resource Area proposed the 3,222-acre Cedar Flat Timber Sale on the flank of Grayback Mountain, along the Grayback Mountain Trail, in the upper Williams Creek watershed and on the eastern slope of Holcomb Peak. The project targeted some of the last old-growth forests remaining in the Williams Creek watershed with heavy industrial logging prescriptions, including large tree logging to 36″ diameter, removal of significant canopy cover, and group selection clearcut logging.
Applegate Siskiyou Alliance responded by immediately monitoring all of the timber sale units across the entire timber sale area, and we publicized our findings on the Applegate Siskiyou Alliance blog. By fall of 2024, the BLM had canceled the Cedar Flat Timber Sale; however, we expect the agency to repackage, and propose the timber sale again some time in the New Year, and we have begun advocating to remove all mature, old-growth and primary forest habitats from any potential timber sale proposed in the future. We will continue working in 2025, to protect the forests of upper Williams Creek and in the former Cedar Flat Timber Sale area.
Siskiyou Mountain Fuel Break Project
In the fall of 2023, the Forest Service proposed a massive fuel break project targeting multiple beloved hiking trails and some of the most intact wildlands in the Siskiyou Crest region. The project included fuel breaks along the Stein Butte/Elliott Ridge Trail in the Elliott Ridge Roadless Area, along the Sevenmile Ridge Trail in the Big Red Mountain Roadless Area, and along the Split Rock Trail in the McDonald Peak Inventoried Roadless Areas, as well as what they are calling the O’Brien Creek Fuel Break, along the road systems connecting Star Gulch to Carberry Creek (1010 Road) and O’Brien Ceek Road (1005 Road).
ASA provided detailed comments, conducted extensive field work and met with Forest Service officials about this project, including field trips. Throughout the process we expressed our concerns with fuel break development in such intact roadless watersheds, and this past summer the Forest Service withdrew the most controversial portions of this project. The agency approved only non-commercial thinning on the O’Brien Creek Fuel Break, which follows existing roads rather than damaging roadless watersheds. This was a victory for the wildlands of the Applegate, but the Forest Service has now proposed the Yellowjacket Project which encompasses most of the Forest Service lands from the Little Applegate River to Applegate Dam.
Yellowjacket Project
The Yellowjacket Project sprawls across much of the Forest Service land in the Applegate, extending from the headwaters of the Little Applegate River to Applegate Dam. This project includes numerous important wildlands we would like to see permanently protected and would allow for both commercial and non-commercial thinning. Very little information has been released about this project so far, but we have been out on the ground with the Forest Service looking at potential “treatment areas” in the southwestern portion of the project area.
We are hopeful that the Forest Service will propose a reasonable and environmentally balanced project and we will continue encouraging them to do so. We will advocate for the protection and retention of mature, late successional and old-growth forests, roadless areas, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat. We also see very little, if any, benefit from commercial logging within this planning area.
ASA will be tracking this project in 2025 and working to ensure that project activities are sufficiently focused on the protection and restoration of important biological values and wildland habitats.
BLM “Salvage” Logging
This past spring the Medford District BLM clearcut large swaths of habitat, including both dead standing and living, green trees in the Lickety Split Salvage Timber Sale in the upper portions of the Little Applegate River. ASA worked to document and publicize the environmental impacts of these clearcuts, while generating both local and national media stories that highlighted our concerns with the BLM’s damaging approach.
This past summer the BLM also approved the Boaz Salvage Timber Sale on Cinnabar Ridge despite insufficient and inaccurate scientific analysis and a total lack of public involvement. The project proposes to log 250 acres of mostly living, green forest that was unaffected by the recent beetle mortality event. Additionally, in stands with significant mortality, the BLM proposes to log the majority of the living, resilient trees. The proposal calls for logging stands to 3.3 trees per acre, on average, across the entire timber sale, and will have devastating consequences for the forests at the lower end of both the Little Applegate and Upper Applegate Valleys.
In October ASA led a field trip for local residents to see the Boaz Timber Sale units. We led a caravan of cars and used walkie talkies between the cars to point out the timber sale units as we drove up the Boaz Gulch Road. Field trip participants got to see that the majority of the timber sale units in the Boaz Timber Sale are living, green trees, and not “dead and dying” as the BLM claims.
Finally, just this past month the BLM proposed the SOS Project — a massive, programmatic project that would allow up to 15,000 acres of logging and 20 miles of new road construction every five years. This project would allow heavy industrial logging, significant canopy removal, and virtual clearcut logging in stands that sustained as little as 10% mortality (i.e. if 10% of a stand is dead, it can be clearcut!). The project includes an over 840,000-acre planning area and a proposed 254,000-acre potential treatment area. If approved, the BLM could log anywhere it chooses within this vast landscape without adequate scientific review or public involvement opportunities.
ASA will be opposing these damaging, dishonest, and inappropriate logging operations throughout the Applegate and beyond. We have been visiting proposed units, including units directly adjacent to two of ASA’s board member’s properties.
Off-Road Vehicle Closures
For over a decade ASA has taken the lead in monitoring illegal off-road vehicle activity in the Applegate River watershed and across the Siskiyou Crest. We have been documenting the impact of illegal or inappropriate off-road vehicle use in our Siskiyou Crest OHV Monitoring Reports, and have been advocating for more effective protections. On Forest Service lands, we have focused heavily on protecting Botanical Areas from off-road vehicle abuse and have engaged both the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest and Klamath National Forest.
After over a decade of hard work, our detailed off-road vehicle monitoring reports, and our consistent, non-stop advocacy has begun to bear fruit! In the past few years, and in response to our advocacy, the Forest Service has approved multiple projects across the Siskiyou Crest closing illegal off-road vehicle tracks, and we are actively encouraging the Forest Service to do more to protect the vital botanical values, the scenic wildlands of the Siskiyou Crest, and the backcountry values of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT).
The Klamath National Forest closed numerous damaging off-road tracks near Bearground Spring and along the PCT, not far from the Condrey Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area. This past summer both the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest and Klamath National Forest worked to secure an important closure at the Klamath Meridan Overlook, a recreation site near the PCT in the Mt. Ashland/Siskiyou Peak Botanical Area. This project consisted of building pole fencing to block access to an illegal off-road vehicle route and dispersed vehicle campsite that has been impacting the Botanical Area, killing off native vegetation, compacting soils, and degrading scenic values. This illegal motorized route has now been physically closed and ASA will keep monitoring to ensure it stays that way!
We have also worked for many years to encourage other closures along the PCT in the Siskiyou Crest region, including the physical closure of illegal off-road vehicle routes that were crossing Sheep Camp Springs and the PCT, degrading habitat values at a key PCT campsite and water source. Off-road vehicle users had turned an important PCT backcountry camp into a large parking area, but this summer, the Forest Service physically closed the illegal route with a boulder closure that will begin the process of restoration for Sheep Camp Springs.
Additionally, a physical closure has been built using large boulders to block off illegal off-road vehicle routes crossing the PCT and impacting Mud Springs, a beautiful wet meadow and sphagnum bog at the headwaters of Dog Fork Elliott Creek. Located at the edge of the Condrey Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area, this wet meadow system contains numerous rare byrophytes, unusual plant communities, and provides an important water source and campsite for PCT hikers.
The Forest Service has also approved a significant new off-road vehicle closure on Big Red Mountain. We have been promoting this closure for many years due to the damage it has caused to bunchgrass meadows and serpentine rock gardens with rare plants in the Big Red Mountain Botanical Area
We are pleased the Forest Service has begun addressing these issues and will continue our monitoring efforts to support these closures and others in the region. Out goal is see the closure of all illegal off-road vehicle routes on the Siskiyou Crest, and we will continue advocating for these closures in 2025.
Building pride in place
Siskiyou Crest Conifer Field Trip Series
This past summer ASA led an exciting series of field trips to visit all 25 conifers found in the Siskiyou Crest region. These hikes and field trips led us to some of the wildest habitats in our area and into some of the region’s most spectacular backcountry. They also included some of the best botanists and ecologists in the region.
The series was an enormous success with 118 field trip participants on eight trips, including trips to Little Grayback/Acorn Women Peak, Left Fork Sucker Creek, Anderson Butte, Sundew Lake, Whisky Peak, Big Red Mountain, Dutchman Peak, Tamarack Meadows, Miller Lake and Mt. Ashland. Thanks to all who participated! We had a great time, enjoyed some incredible scenery, and some exceptional biodiversity. Huge gratitude goes to all our guest ecologists and botanists that accompanied us on our trips. This includes Wayne Rolle, Romain Cooper, Richard Callagan, Julie Spelletich, Scott Loring, Barb Mumblo, Matt Dybala, & Julie Kierstead.
Tallowbox Trail
In 2023 and 2024 ASA worked to build the Tallowbox Trail, a new 4.2 mile hiking trail on BLM lands in the Burton-Ninemile Lands With Wilderness Characteristics (LWC) in the Applegate.
The trail traverses open clearings high on the slopes of Tallowbox Mountain, beautiful oak woodlands, chaparral, and live oak stands, as well as mixed conifer forests in the Ladybug Gulch drainage. We are excited to open the trail to the public and encourage others to explore this beautiful area. Get out and enjoy the Tallowbox Trail — the views are incredible, spring and early summer wildflowers can be spectacular, and fall color a wonderful accent to the tawny grass and green forests of the Applegate.
Upcoming Threats
The biggest threat to our public lands nationwide, and here in the Applegate Valley, will be the Trump Administration and its corporate-industrial agenda. We anticipate a significant emphasis on logging, mining, grazing and other forms of resource extraction on federal lands during the upcoming Trump Administration. We also anticipate new attacks on existing environmental protections throughout our region, and across the country.
Yet, it is not just the threat of the Trump Administration and its new focus on public lands we must oppose. We also have very tangible and immediate threats that must be addressed, including the SOS Project, the Boaz Salvage Timber Sale, the new reiteration of the Cedar Flat Timber Sale and the Forest Service’s Yellowjacket Project.
ASA is the only conservation organization focused specifically on defending the wildlands of the Applegate, from the mouth of the river, up to the headwater basins on the Siskiyou Crest. We are also among the most passionate, knowledgeable, and dedicated advocates in the region. We need your help in 2025 to keep this region wild, to maintain the region’s world class biodiversity, and to build a grassroots movement for its long-term protection. Please consider supporting our organization with a generous year end donation!
Siskiyou Crest Coalition
Applegate Siskiyou Alliance continues to be the fiscal sponsor for the Siskiyou Crest Coalition (SCC), working to secure permanent protections for the Siskiyou Crest region. We are tired of fighting endless timber sales and damaging projects, and we envision a future where the Applegate and the Siskiyou Crest region are protected for their high ecological values. The Siskiyou Crest Coalition is growing, and more organizations, businesses and individuals continue to sign on in support of protecting the Siskiyou Crest. As a coalition we are stronger, and we plan to have a viable campaign to protect the Siskiyou Crest, with a strong coalition, as soon as a more favorable administration is back in place. Until then, ASA will continue to work with SCC to build momentum for the future.