Struggle over future of remote wildlands
Trump considers shrinking California-Oregon monument
CASCADE-SISKIYOU NATIONAL MONUMENT, Siskiyou County — There’s no welcome sign here, not even a marked road to the entrance. Just wide-open countryside.
But this little-visited stretch of protected hills and valleys that makes up California’s share of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is at the heart of a nationwide debate over the management of America’s public lands.
After President Trump’s recent decision to shrink two monuments in Utah, the administration is eyeing the 113,000-acre Cascade-Siskiyou site on the remote California-Oregon border for similar downsizing.
Established in 2000, the monument safeguards the crossroads of the ancient Siskiyou Mountains and the younger volcanic Cascades.
The juncture forms a land bridge that brings together an unusual mix of animals and plants, from desert snakes to salamanders to cactus to oldgrowth firs. Some have called it the Galapagos of North America.
The administration, though, has recommended more logging and cattle grazing here, an overture that brings Trump’s pro-development push from the more receptive Southwest to the deep blue West Coast. Already, all four senators from California and Oregon, as well as many in the state legislatures, are lining up with conservation groups to protest.
“This isn’t Utah,” said Dave Willis, 65, an outdoorsman who lives in a mobile home on one of many private parcels within the monument’s boundary and has spent much of his life advocating for the area’s protection.
But despite the resistance, many residents in this sparsely populated region don’t share the politics of the rest of their states, and they have little concern for the monument.
“Never heard of it,” said a woman working the Chevron food mart off Interstate 5, the only store at the exit on the monument’s California side. Several people stopping for gas said the same.
The subject was more familiar a half hour south in Yreka, the seat of Siskiyou County, where one of two remaining sawmills closed a few months ago and a historically booming timber industry has given way to high unemployment. Many said they can’t afford to put conservation ahead of commerce.
“Our concerns don’t come from a standpoint of having a pristine place because we have tons of them,” said county Supervisor Ray Haupt. “We’re a poor county, and anytime we look at a lockup of public property, it hurts us economically.”
The Trump administration has not said how much of the monument it wants to open up to private interests. Nor has the president indicated if he’ll sign off on the recommendation. Administration officials have said only that they’re listening to the wishes of locals.
On a recent afternoon, terrestrial ecologist Evan Frost, who co-wrote a scientific report that successfully argued for the monument’s expansion under President Barack Obama, trekked down an old ranch road on its California portion.
To the south, giant Mount Shasta loomed. To the north stood Pilot Rock in Oregon, an old volcanic plug that once guided wagon trains and serves as the monument’s defining landmark.
“I rarely see anyone up here,” Frost said, crossing through grasslands where feral horses grazed. “It’s really off the beaten track.”
The California side of the monument is just 5,000 acres, sitting alongside the state’s little-known Horseshoe Ranch Wildlife Area, which is roughly the same size and enjoys similar protections.
While small, the expanse is important, Frost said. It’s not as high as the more mountainous terrain across the border and offers sanctuary to lowlying oak and chaparral, which attract deer and elk from the north come winter.
The monument’s biggest waterfall, Jenny Creek Falls, flows in California. The series of cascades with drops up to 40 feet is hidden in a far-flung canyon where hikers commonly get lost trying to find the chutes.
The Obama administration added the California property to the monument in January of last year, part of a near doubling of the overall site. While monuments are similar to national parks, they don’t need congressional approval and are created or enlarged at the wishes of the president under the 112-year-old Antiquities Act.
Frost and others made the case to the Obama administration that the original boundaries weren’t sufficient to preserve the area’s biodiversity.
“Having this full spectrum of ecological change is very important,” Frost said. Now he stood beside a fragrant juniper tree, more at home in the dry eastern basins of Oregon than its perch on the grassy, California hillside. “We’re almost in a high desert here, but we go to a conifer forest in only a few miles.”
The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the monument, has yet to draft an official plan for the expansion. If the site survives Trump’s review, federal officials could add a few amenities for visitors, such as road signs and trails.
The site, though, is never expected to be built out in the fashion of more popular monuments like the Bay Area’s Muir Woods.
The spread of the CascadeSiskiyou monument was not well received by many living nearby.
When Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visited the region last summer to evaluate the Obama administration’s adjustments, the region’s logging and ranching communities opened their arms to the scrutiny. One resident greeted the secretary with a poster: “New Endangered Species: Rural American.”
As in the nation’s coal country, the natural-resource economy here has taken hits not only from stepped-up environmental restrictions but foreign competition, new material markets and an aging workforce. Far more jobs today are in health care, hospitality and retail. Many are holding out hope for a turnaround, even if unlikely.
“We’re just getting to where everything is coming down on us,” said Siskiyou County resident Lawrence Bell, 72, who supports the monument’s downsizing. “We got nothing compared to what we had.”
Under the terms of the monument’s creation, grazing is permitted, at least where the Bureau of Land Management thinks cattle won’t trample hillsides or pollute creeks. Logging, though, is being phased out in a bid to improve forest health.
The impact of the monument’s regulations is limited on the California side. Just two sites have been grazed recently and continue to be leased to ranchers, according to federal records. Logging companies have never harvested timber here because of the lack of trees.
Oregon is seeing a bigger fallout. While the government hasn’t forced cattle off the monument, some ranchers sold grazing leases to conservation groups, which in turn retired the rights. An industry group says monument rules make it hard for cattlemen to run their herds. About two dozen grazing areas remain active, records show.
As for logging, about 6 million board feet of timber is forfeited on Oregon’s side of the monument each year, according to federal estimates — a small fraction of the state’s production, but still troubling, according to some local businesses.
Both the lumber trade and a coalition of Oregon counties, which receive a cut of logging proceeds, are suing the federal government over the monument. Their attorneys contend the expansion violated a 1937 federal law designating most of the land for timber.
John Kessler, a forestry consultant in Siskiyou County, said the reasons to scale back the monument don’t end there. He fears damage from wildfires if timber harvesting ends, and the loss of logging roads popular with all-terrain vehicle users and snowmobilers.
Environmentalists dismiss such concerns, insisting that many of the hundreds of miles of dirt roads will remain and that logging isn’t the only way to reduce fire hazard. But Kessler’s arguments carry an emotional weight with local currency.
“I’m afraid we’re just going to see more problems,” he said.
Along Oregon’s Highway 66, where the core of the monument reveals thick pine and fir forests and plenty of snow in the winter, an emerging tension is clear in the competing signs that dot the roadside.
“No Siskiyou Monument,” reads one.
“We (heart) our monument,” says another.
Padraic McGuire, whose family runs Green Springs Inn and Cabins near the crossing of the Pacific Crest Trail, hung a banner in support of the site last year in anticipation of a nearby opposition rally.
“If this is how it’s going to be,” he said, “let’s wave our flag.”
McGuire, 35, appreciates the modest services the Bureau of Land Management introduced for visitors. Updated maps highlight points of interest, such as Hyatt Lake and Hobart Bluff, and a few signs show the way to destinations like Soda Mountain Wilderness.
McGuire’s woodsy resort has
benefited from crowds that come from nearby Ashland, Ore., a town known for its Shakespeare festival, where people have been largely supportive of the monument. He said hikers and climbers also have started coming from Portland and the Bay Area.
“It’s been cool to see people become more enthusiastic,” he said.
McGuire hopes the organized advocacy for the monument will win out. In addition to support from political leaders up and down the West Coast, businesses have been writing letters, and some national corporations are joining the fray.
Patagonia, the outdoor retailer, recently sparred with Washington over its website accusing Trump of stealing America’s public lands. The House Natural Resources Committee fired back in a tweet that the company was lying and simply trying to “sell more products to wealthy elitist urban dwellers from New York to San Francisco.”
Attorneys general from Oregon and California are threatening to sue the administration if the Cascade-Siskiyou monument is altered. They allege that while a president has authority to create such a designation, he doesn’t have the power to remove it.
That argument is already at work in lawsuits in Utah, where Trump in December cut Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly half.
The administration has rejected the legal challenges. In addition to the Cascade-Siskiyou site, Zinke is recommending reductions to Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument as well as management changes that could lift protections at a half dozen other land and marine sites.
In Siskiyou County, Anne Marsh, 78, said she’s no longer able to get out into these wild places because of her age, but she’s adamant that they shouldn’t be turned over to private enterprise.
“It’s not a popular opinion to have in this community. I’m considered a real greenie environmentalist here,” she said. “But for me, I have grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren on the way. I’d like to see them be able to use our country’s land.”