When taken together, the wildlands of the Siskiyou Crest form an interconnected network of high quality wildlife habitat. Much of the landscape is roadless and relatively unspoiled, and should be preserved as close to that state as possible for generations to come. These are the areas that need the least management to provide climate resiliency, stable territory for imperiled wildlife and ecosystem services like drinking water and carbon sequestration.

However, much of the rest of the landscape between and around these relatively pristine pockets has been heavily impacted by decades of road building, livestock grazing, fire suppression, commercial logging, mining and ORV abuse. These areas are in need of active management to restore their streams, forests and soils.

Hundreds of miles of unmaintained roads built decades ago to facilitate industrial logging now languish, bleeding salmon-choking sediment into nearby streams. Mile after square mile of plantation forests await small diameter thinning projects to improve their health and resiliency. Whole swaths of the landscape are in need of treatments to reduce the hazards of uncharacteristically-hot fire after decades of misguided suppression. The vision for a Siskiyou Crest National Monument is not to “lock up” the landscape and leave it completely alone, but to work with scientists, Tribes, and land managers to implement science-based restoration projects where needed. Such activities will help to further enhance the ecological values of the Crest while also providing much-needed local jobs in the woods.

Approximately twenty percent of the proposed monument overlaps the ancestral territory of the Karuk people of the mid-Klamath. The Karuk Tribe has stewarded this land for millennia and they have developed a sophisticated and progressive approach to land management. The integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) for this region will be a key feature of the legal framework for the SCNM, particularly for the restorative components.

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