On the Elliott Ridge Trail with the Forest Serrvice

    Keeping my eye on my goal to hike 800 miles before my 80th birthday in July, I did the 10-mile hike up Stein Butte the other day. As I climbed I remembered hiking along the Elliott Ridge and down the Stein Butte trail last fall with personnel from the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest, which had proposed some fire protection work along that route. 

    I was suspicious. So were three other Applegate residents who joined me and the six Forest Service employees on the hike.

    Before we set out, the four of us expressed our concerns—loss of botanical variety along the trail, damage to the special communities of plants, and the visual effects of their work on the trail. We were told they had permission to work—i.e., to cut and slash—for a thousand feet, probably meaning five hundred feet on each side of the trail.

Madrone trees along the trail

    I gasped, horrified.

    No, no, they said. That didn't mean that is what they would do. They had no intention of doing anything so drastic. Not to worry.

    At various places along the trail, I stopped and said, "What would you do here? What would it look like after you did your work?"

    They would cut these small trees, they said. They wouldn't touch the lovely big trees. They might trim the ceanothus bushes. 

    It looked reasonable.

    We talked about their plans for a spot of chaparral on the trail. Luke explained that in the past heavy thinning of chaparral in the Applegate watershed has degraded these habitats and spread noxious weeds and highly flammable non-native annual grasses, contributing to the loss of biodiversity, increasing fire risk, and damaging the area's natural beauty. The Forest Service people agreed that they wouldn't take such drastic measures here. 

    And so on.

    All in all, it sounded pretty good. They would do all the work along the trail themselves, by hand. Only the work along the road would be hired out to machines. They would respect the integrity and beauty of the trail while still giving firefighters means to resist a fire in the area. They would work downhill, off-trail, as much as possible. My fears about one of my favorite trails were allayed.

    "It sounds all right," I said. "But how likely is it to actually happen this way?" 

    The long pause before any response was answer enough. They glanced at each other. Theirs was not the final voice. Their plan would be taken up the ladder, from one supervisor to another, further and further from the people walking the trail with us, listening to our concerns and making adjustments in their plans. 

    Confidence crumpled. Who knows what the final instructions will be and what the trail, in the end, will look like?

The Siskiyou Crest from the Stein Butte trail