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North to South: A Pacific Northwest Travel Guide
for Forest Activists
Del Norte
County:
"The
redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in
a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary
to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in
massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other
timber woods of the world. Trees from ten to fifteen feet in diameter and three
hundred feet high are not uncommon, and a few attain a height of three hundred
and fifty feet, or even four hundred, with a diameter at the base of fifteen to
twenty feet or more, while the ground beneath them is a garden of fresh,
exuberant ferns, lilies, gaultheria, and rhododendron. This grand tree, Sequoia
Sempervirens, is surpassed in size only by its near relative, Sequoia Gigantea,
or big tree, of the Sierra Nevada, if indeed it is surpassed. The Sempervirens
is certainly the taller of the two. The Gigantea attains a greater girth, and
is heavier, more noble in port, and more sublimely beautiful. These two
sequoias are all that are known to exist in the world, though in former
geological times the genus was common and had many species. The redwood is
restricted to the Coast Range, and the big tree to the Sierra." --John
Muir, American Forests
The northernmost
extreme of the coastal forests is up in Jedediah Smith Redwoods
State Park. Up here redwoods mix in with forest species from the north. Red
Cedar, Western Hemlocks, Sitka Spruce, these trees that thrive further to the
north signify the start of the great fir forests of the PNW, they mark the
limits the last ice age put on the redwoods. This is where climate change
confined the redwoods. Further north the coast redwood forests shift into
coastal Spruce, one of the fastest growing trees. In this northernmost boundary
the rain and winds are more fierce, the redwoods have more resprouts from
broken branches and trunks. This is where the architecture of the redwood is in
its most dizzying wildness. On top of all this architecture is a soggy Oregon
coastal moss garden. Salal, Huckleberry, hemlocks, lichens, there are so many
epiphytes in this arboreal ecosystem. On really big branches these soggy mats
of moss and lichen get several feet thick and become aquatic habitat, which
allows Salamanders to live up here!
To get to Jed Smith
park you have the go north of Arcata, up past the Klamath river, past Redwood National Park Prairie Creek Redwoods,
Del Norte Coast
Redwoods State Park. This north coastal corner of California is so far from
the State's centers of power that is has escaped much modernization. Up here
the Smith River is the last major free-flowing (undamed) River in California.
The recreational popularity of this region has been growing and growing. Last
Spring Save the Redwoods League
and the state finally closed a $60 million 25,000 acre purchase, the largest
purchase ever for the League. It's a purchase that helps link up many of the
isolated parks in to one
continuous park.
Redwood National
Park:
One reason the forest
of Del Norte are far less exploited is because of the remote location and lack
of a sizable deep water port. It meant log hauling and lumber distribution
costs took a big bite out of the profit margin. It slowed the rate of cut in
this region. This all changed when the federal government stepped in and
created Redwood National Park. The first wave of protection came in this region
in the early 20th century. It wasn't
until 1960's that the Federal government realized it had something to offer to
left the Coastal Redwood Preservation movement. Lengthy delay, after lengthy delay, land was finally bought by
the federal government. It was a sweet heart deal that gave lumberman double
the value of the land plus all the old Growth trees they could cut until the
bill was signed into law and the land was transferred to the feds. As this
process inched forward there was an epic massacre in the woods. Whole hillsides
were felled just to get the trees dropped before the feds took possession of
whatever was left standing.
Years later when the
dedication ceremony in the Lady Bird johnson grove began, Dr. Robert Curry
worked with others activists to let the media and see the aerial maps of the
clear cutting. Curry and others proved
what a fraud the protection scheme was. Years later big storms and floods
proved Curry's point. Just as occurred in Humboldt Redwoods, the Feds were
forced to buy more forestland upstream to protect the biggest oldest trees
along the downstream floodplain.
Redwood National Park
is now 100,000 acres in size and most of it is cutover forest land that is
being restored in the Federal Park Service’s biggest Restoration effort of the
seventies and eighties.
Crescent City used to
sustain a huge salmon fishery. The way of life in this town was the Salmon runs
on the Klamath river. But farmers up in Oregon's have taken much of the
Klamath’s water, depriving the Hoopa Reservation of their ancesrtal rights, as
well as ending the fishing industry. Crescent City is a prison town now. The
majority of the town's population is in Jail at Pelican Bay State Prison. The
biggest employer in this area is, of course, the prison.
The seed of greater
things to come is local environmentalists
are rallying around issues of Smith River and Farm water runoff / pesticide
issues. In time there's no doubt that the still wild and mostly protected Smith
River will attract more interest and subsidy for its value as an ecologic
refuge and research tool. A place where the rest of the world can learn what's
it like to live light on the land.
Klamath-Siskiyou:
East of the Smith River
watershed is the Klamath National Forest, an interior forest in Siskiyou
County. It contains the Klamath River, the Salmon river as well as the Marbled
Mountain Wilderness. This forest in the interior of the coast range is a
mountainous land bridge that reaches east across the state of California.
Moving clockwise to the east the mountains turn into the Sierra Nevada range.
Moving counter counter-clockwise to the east the mountains turn into Cascade Range
This land bridge of
mountains between the cost and interior is called the Klamath knot. It is a
crossroad of flora and fauna
propagating and or traveling across the Northwest. Further north in
Oregon, at western center of this knot is the Kalmiopsis Wilderness
it’s where the PNW’s interior forest originated from after the glaciers receded
10,000 years ago.
The Klamath has always been
one of the top timber producers on federal lands in California. These timber
sales are mostly watched over by activists in Southern Oregon, as well as The Klamath Forest Alliance. One of
the most well-known timber sales to be contested in this area were the Dillon
creek timber sales, which were back in 1997. It resulted in outreach and
direct-action in a rural areas that had not ever seen much of environmental
protests. Public pressure helped to stop the worst parts of the sales but much
of the harmful salvage logging of the fire burned forest still occurred.