AUDIO:
"The EcoNews Report," Nov. 22, 2025.
The following is a rough machine transcript. Click the words to skip to that point in the audio.
Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. You know, I'm welcoming you on a little journey to a part of the world that you may not have been to before, the Siskiyou Crest. I have probably the best person to talk about the Siskiyou Crest here with me, Luke Ruediger.
Luke is a conservation director for Klamath Forest Alliance, operates the organization's Siskiyou Field Office, which monitors public land activities across the Medford BLM, the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest, and portions of the Klamath National Forest in Southwest Oregon and Northern California. Luke is also the executive director of the Applegate Siskiyou Alliance. Luke is also an author. He wrote a book, 2013, The Siskiyou Crest, Hikes, History, and Ecology. Luke lives out in the area that he works to protect with his wife Susie, has a business too where they collect native seeds for sale for you to go and restore native plants to your gardens.
So Luke, welcome to the Econews Report.
LUKE RUEDIGER:
Thanks for having me.
WHEELER:
It seems that your whole adult life has been circling around this area of Northern California, Southern Oregon. What is the history to you? Why do you love this area so much? Why are you so invested in this place?
RUEDIGER:
Well, I've spent my entire life in Southwestern Oregon and Northwestern California, exploring the Siskiyou Crest and the surrounding Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains. So some of my motivation really just comes from this deep relationship with these lands, from spending countless days in the backcountry, from sleeping out under the stars, and waking up every morning just appreciating the beauty and the biodiversity of this incredible region. In my younger years, I literally spent about 100 days a year in the backcountry, biking around and just getting to know the place.
And so a lot of my work is kind of motivated by that strong sense of place and a sense of responsibility to that place. So yeah, for me, it's just I've spent a lot of time out in these areas. I grew up here, I've spent my whole life here, and just learned to really appreciate the place and understand that it's my responsibility to be a voice for this place. It's the only home I've ever known, and I believe strongly in defending my home.
WHEELER:
I love it. So, Siskiyou Crest, let's position us geographically. Where are we talking about in just a broad overview, what is the Siskiyou Crest? And then we can start to dive into all the ways that it's a spectacular place that's worth defending and being obsessed with as you are.
RUEDIGER:
Yeah, well, the Siskiyou Crest is this unique geographic feature on the Oregon-California border that runs, it's kind of an east-west tending ridge system or a transverse range. So it connects the Cascade Mountains to the coast range, which is really important from a connectivity standpoint. But the area that we're talking about, as I said, it lies along the border there, Oregon-California border. So it's partially in Jackson County and Josephine County, Oregon. It also extends over the border into Del Norte, Humboldt, and northern Siskiyou County. So the southern boundary of the region is essentially the northern bank of the Klamath River from Cottonwood Creek near I-5 all the way down to, say, like around Blue Creek, where it starts to hit more of the coastal mountains. And then, you know, the area kind of encompasses this area in between, say, Ashland, Oregon and the Rogue Valley there from the west side of the valley and extends west out through the Applegate River watershed, the headwaters of the Illinois, a good portion of the Smith River watershed. And as I said, it drops down to the banks of the Klamath River.
So we're kind of looking at that geographic area right along the Oregon-California border and extending out over across into multiple different counties and states and also multiple national forests and administrative units in terms of who's managing that land. So you have three national forests in the area. You have the Klamath, the Smith Rivers, the Six Rivers, and the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. And you also have Medford District BLM lands in there and a little sliver of National Park lands around the Oregon Caves National Monument. So it's managed by a whole variety of different entities. And in a lot of ways, that leads to a lot of inconsistency in management and sometimes often contradictory management strategies, which can lead to some unfortunate impacts. But the area is in that region right there around the California-Oregon border.
WHEELER:
It's overwhelmingly public land. As you said, it's managed by a bunch of different agencies, but it is thoroughly public, which means it's all of our inheritance, it's all of our responsibility. So it is also, as I understand it, a relatively wild place. And wild, I think it's kind of a word that's falling out of use in the environmental community because obviously it might suggest some idea of wilderness that excludes indigenous people who have been on this land for time immemorial. But it is a place where nature fundamentally shapes the processes, the things that occur in this area. Why is it so wild? Like, what is the history of the area or the reasons why it's been so underdeveloped?
RUEDIGER:
Well, the area is really quite rugged and that's a lot of what's kept the development and the resource extraction to relatively minimal levels compared to other areas. Certainly there's been impacts in this area in the past, but relative to a lot of other areas, it's just very steep, very remote. It's kind of lies right there at the border. So it's sort of a forgotten part of California and a forgotten part of Oregon, and it's sort of an underappreciated region in terms of the values that it represents. So the reason that a lot of the land out there remains in a, in a relatively intact state is largely because it's been forgotten and largely because it's difficult to exploit the resources in that area and that leads, that's led to a lot of areas where there's been no roads put in and things like that.
So there's a significant concentration of wild and scenic rivers in the, in the Klamath-Siskiyou mountains. And then there's also quite a few and fairly well-connected roadless areas that extend across the Siskiyou crest that connect into places like currently protected areas, like say the Red Buttes Wilderness or the Siskiyou Wilderness or Oregon Caves National Monument. But in between those areas, there's just a lot of really intact, really beautiful lands with high biological values and just incredible biodiversity that had been kind of forgotten by a lot of folks in the region, including to a certain extent, some of the conservation communities. So we're trying to bring this to the attention of people and trying to get people to understand like why this place is so important, how beautiful it is and what it represents from a conservation, connectivity, biodiversity standpoint.
WHEELER:
Have you ever reflected on the kind of humor of what you need to do, which is to protect this area, to ensure long-term protection, you need to have people know about it. You wrote a whole book extolling the place. You are the chief evangelist for the Siskiyou Crest. And yet the history of its protection has largely been because it's been forgotten. Is there ever a tension in your mind between telling people about this really wonderful place and then also a worry that telling people about it might result in overexploitation or inappropriate recreation use?
RUEDIGER:
Yeah, I mean, that's a concern. I mean, obviously when I came out with my book, there are certain places that I did not highlight for, for good reason. For fear of those very issues over use and just seeing these wildlands turned into a Disneyland for hikers or something where what we really value is the wildness of the area. The contradictory there is that in the modern era, nothing's really safe. The technology is allowing for the exploitation of resources on all kinds of really rugged remote landscapes.
And so in my view, what's going to enable us to protect these lands long term is folks relating to them, folks falling in love with them, folks understanding what's out there and why it's important. And so we're just trying to really bring a highlight that and bring that to people and, and say, what we have honestly is a national treasure in our backyard. What we have is one of the most biologically diverse landscapes on the continent. And protecting it to some extent means acknowledging what's out there. Loving it and turning that love into a passion for its protection. And so that's what we're trying to do.
There are trade-offs there. I mean, when I came out with my book, I was told by one environmentalist that there was a special place in hell for hiking guide offers, but in the years since I've published that book, I have not seen a huge increase in use out there on the landscape that's been detrimental to these intact areas. What I've seen is an increase in appreciation for the place. And so that's, that's kind of what we're focused on is increasing that appreciation and getting people to understand how important and how incredible some of these areas are that we may take for granted that are right, right in our backyard.
WHEELER:
So as you said, this is a biodiversity hotspot for both flora and fauna. Can you give some sort of kind of relation or frame the biodiversity or how biodiverse is it relative to other areas? It's a biodiversity hotspot. I feel like when you talk to environmentalists, every place is a biodiversity hotspot. But this one I think truly has like metrics to back it up.
RUEDIGER:
Yeah, I mean, the thing about the Siskiyou Crest is that it is and has been acknowledged for quite some time as a world-class biodiversity hotspot. Some of that is due to the area's geologic complexity. It's a really interesting area in terms of climate, where things are kind of transitioning. So you've got the Great Basin moving in from the east and these arid high desert environments. You've got the Pacific Northwest merging with the California Floristic Province and that Mediterranean climate. And then you have this temperate influence coming in from the coast. And the way that the Siskiyou Crest connects together these mountain ranges, it essentially provides this corridor for species to migrate back and forth from the coast to those more high desert-y type environments.
And so you get this incredible blending of ecosystems in the Siskiyou Crest region. And some of that is due to that connectivity between mountain ranges. Some of that is due to these other climactic factors and geologic factors. But by lying at the convergence of these different ecosystems, you end up with tying together these plant communities in a really interesting way. And so, like I said earlier, one way that that's expressed is through what we call range extensions or disjunct populations. And so the Siskiyou's are really known, widely known, for having a lot of what we call disjunct plant communities or plant species.
And so what those are are species that are existing within the Siskiyou Crest in these little microclimates or in these unique habitats that are outside of their prevailing range and are essentially surviving in areas that are outside of their tolerances. And it's the complexity of the mountain range. It's the complexity of the topography and the terrain and that blending of ecosystems and that blending of climates that allows for these really incredibly diverse plant communities to kind of mingle and create assemblages that you won't find elsewhere in the West.
And so I think that's one of the really, botanically speaking, that's one of the really interesting things that you might find. And that's what the area is kind of known for. But there's also, you know, a lot of times it's not, it's kind of underappreciated for also its diversity of wildlife. So for example, you have quite a few species that come into the area that are endemic to the region. So in the Siskiyou Crest, one of the more interesting species is Siskiyou Mountain Salamander, which is a lungless terrestrial salamander. It lives in mossy talus habitats with old forest canopy. So it has this really narrow microclimate that it lives in. And it also has a really small geographic range. Up until the time that they found the Scott Bar Salamander down there on the, down towards the mouth of the Scott River, it was thought to be the smallest geographic range of any salamander species in the world. And the Siskiyou Mountain Salamander is found only in the Applegate River watershed and has been isolated in that watershed and evolving in that watershed for thousands and thousands if not millions of years.
And so part of that diversity is botanical. Part of it is that there's a lot of different and unique wildlife that's endemic to the area. Some of it's not the charismatic megafauna that drives conservation in a lot of areas. So for example, the Siskiyou Crest has 80 different species of mollusks, which is a huge diversity, but is not overly compelling to a lot of people in terms of protection. So what we're trying to do is just really highlight that this biodiversity is really important, whether it's a mollusk, whether it's a beautiful wildflower, whether it's a salamander that nobody ever sees that lives in the talus and hardly ever comes up to the surface, or whether it be protecting some of these more common species that are abundant in the region. Like for example, the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains are known to have some of the biggest black bear and cougar populations in Oregon and California.
So there's everything from robust populations of common species to rare, endemic, and unique species. And then there's also this important blending of habitats that allows for just a wide variety of species to call the Siskiyou Mountains home. And it's very distinct as a feature in the Siskiyou Crest is that biodiversity. And that's kind of what defines the place is complexity, biodiversity, this kind of mysterious, unknown mountain range that has these incredible values that folks have acknowledged for a long time, but has been sort of underappreciated and underprotected for a wide variety of reasons. And we'd like to change that and see this area better protected so that we could maintain that biodiversity and that connectivity going forward into the future.
WHEELER:
You are listening to the Econews Report. I have probably the best person to talk about the Siskiyou Crest. Luke Ruediger, Conservation Director for Klamath Forest Alliance, operates the organization's Siskiyou Field Office, which monitors public land activities across the Medford BLM, the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest, and portions of the Klamath National Forest in Southwest Oregon and Northern California. Luke is also the Executive Director of the Applegate Siskiyou Alliance. So what is the role of fire in the Siskiyou Crest? How does fire kind of interact with the landscape, maintain ecological communities, or disrupt ecological communities?
RUEDIGER:
Well, fire has definitely become a...
WHEELER:
Yeah.
RUEDIGER:
... a very dominant feature in the Crest and in throughout the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains. I mean, anyone that lives in Northern California or Southern Oregon has kind of gotten accustomed over the years, recent years, in the last, say, two decades or so, to a lot of wildfire out there on the landscape. And some of that is because these are just fire-adapted landscapes. We get a fair amount of lightning ignitions every summer in this region. And some of it is because of the really rugged remote terrain that's out there that makes the typical kinds of fire suppression that folks do out there on the landscape that minimizes the influence of fire. It makes it really difficult because there's just a lot of really tough, really inaccessible terrain. And so what that means is that we are seeing a fairly active contemporary fire regime playing out across the Siskiyou Crest and throughout the larger Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains.
And that's certainly impacting some values out there and benefiting others. And so, you know, for example, the biodiversity piece, it's kind of a mixed bag in some ways. You can see how, in some places, fire could be a threat to some of these rare species. For example, we have a lot of southern range extensions that come from the north and are found in these little isolated populations in the Siskiyous. And what those are doing and what they've done historically is survived in these fire and climate refugia.
And so there's concern on some levels that as the climate warms and things and the fire become more active, that we might have some, we might lose some of these populations. At the same time, there's been quite a few fires burning through some of these red-lit conifer populations. And we're seeing kind of mixed results. We're seeing a lot of places where fires burn around these fire refugia habitats or where they burn very moderately within them and maintain those habitat conditions.
We also see places where even under things like high severity fires, like a lot of people demonize these high severity fire effects. And they can be problems if they're occurring across whole huge vast landscapes. But they're also drivers of biodiversity. And so, for example, after the Slater Fire, which was a big hot fire that burned down a lot of forest and had a lot of human impacts in the Happy Camp area and such. Two years later, what I saw in that area was the most incredible super bloom, fire-induced super bloom I've ever seen in my life. And the diversity of flowering species was just off the hook. The pollinators were fluttering around in heaven from flower to flower.
And so there's, and there are some species that thrive in that kind of fire environment. So, for example, we have ... one of the rarest trees we have in the Siskiyou, Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains is the Baker's Cypress, which is found in only 11 places worldwide. And one of the most healthy populations is on Syed Creek, up above Syed Valley, West Fork Syed in the Syed Baker's Cypress Botanical Area. And that area burned in the 1950s. It burned in 1987. It burned again in 2013. And portions of it burned again in 2017. And these overlapping fires have triggered regeneration.
And so there was a researcher named Oliver Matthews that went into that canyon in the 1930s and said, yeah, there's a few hundred Baker's Cypress in the canyon. Well, now after these repeat fires that were episodic and came through with enough time to allow for regeneration in between, that canyon's filled with tens of thousands of healthy Baker's Cypress. So we need to look at fire as a natural process. And we need to look at the pros and cons. A lot of people focus on the impacts, but there are also benefits. And we're also seeing that these fire regimes are starting to moderate themselves back there in the back country, where fire footprints are starting to moderate the way that fire behaves and the extent at which it burns across the landscape.
So fire is a natural process. It's vital to these systems. It's coming back whether we like it or not. And in a lot of places, the more we have fire on the landscape, the more fire tends to behave in more characteristic patterns. So that's kind of how it's interacting on the crest, is that it's creating a self-reinforcing pattern of fire. And that's augmenting diversity. It's altering plant communities. It's altering habitat types. And it's having both positive and sometimes negative effects on the landscape scale. All right.
WHEELER:
Before we move into kind of management considerations of what's going on and what's going wrong, briefly, what is your favorite spot on the crest or what is the area that would be your go-to place or the place that you would want to be buried theoretically?
RUEDIGER:
Well, you know, I would say there is a reality that there's some of my favorite places I didn't share in my book for a while. I'm trying to get them out of you right now. But I think that the thing about the Siskiyou Crest is that it's a very unique area with a lot of different characters throughout the range. And so you can go see different things in different places. So some of the more intact areas are say the Siskiyou Wilderness, which is more close to the coast. It's on the Western end of the range, you get these lush forests, and then you get these incredibly rocky, rugged habitats, high country habitats. And so I would say that one of my favorite locations to hike and to explore is the Siskiyou Wilderness. It's big, it's lonely, there's not a lot of people out there, and you can really explore some very spectacular areas, but it does take quite a bit of effort on some of those backcountry trails that are not overly maintained and such.
I live at the base of the Red Buttes Wilderness area, and I spend a lot of time in the Red Buttes. It's also a wonderful area. It's about a 25,000 acre wilderness, but it's surrounded by about 100,000 acres of roadless area. And so there's a really nice interconnected trail system in the Red Buttes Wilderness area that you can access either from Syad Happy Camp area on the Klamath, or from the upper Applegate area. And that's kind of at the central part of the range.
And then further to the east, you have the Pacific Crest Trail that runs through the top of the Siskiyou Crest, through the highest peaks in the range. And those peaks are more influenced by plant communities moving in from the Great Basin and such, and from the high Cascades and from the high Sierra. And so you have a different character over there with big, broad meadows and spectacular views, and a lot of relatively easy access along the Pacific Crest Trail in that area.
So depends on what you're looking for. Honestly, I would say anywhere you go in the Siskiyou Crest is gonna be spectacular. Even a lot of the low country around the Klamath River, those mixed conifer forests, some of the most intact coastal forests in the West Coast and the Smith River. And then you have these beautiful Applegate foothills with oak woodland and chaparral and mixed conifer forests in the rain shadow of the crest. And they all have distinctly different characters. So no matter what you enjoy, you'll find it in the Siskiyou Mountains.
WHEELER:
All right. Oh, as I said, you are a good evangelist for this area. So you referenced at the beginning of our talk that there's a variety of land management agencies that have a variety of ways that they're managing the land, and they're often inconsistent, and there are issues related to land management. What is fundamentally the largest issue that you are seeing in the Siskiyou Crest that you would want to correct?
RUEDIGER:
Well, you know, locally, I live here, I live in the headwaters of the Applegate River, and the Medford District BLM is quite aggressive in their timber sale program. And so we're seeing a significant increase in timber sale proposals here in the Medford District BLM, and in particular the Applegate River watershed. And those timber sales are starting to really impact a lot of the more intact, especially those Applegate foothill kind of areas in our region.
On the Forest Service lands, it's a little bit unclear where the Forest Service is headed at this time with the Trump administration and everything. Historically, in the last, say, 10 to 20 years, there's been a lot of controversy about salvage logging. And I cover a lot of issues around fire management and how these fires are being managed out there on the landscape and the impacts that are associated with some of that fire suppression activity, and also the opportunities of managing fire out there on the landscape for benefit.
So, you know, there's a lot of different threats out there, anything from public land grazing, which is abundant in parts of the Siskiyou Crest on the eastern part of the range. There's concerns, there has been concerns historically over mining impacts and mining proposals. There's a lot of off-road vehicle use on that eastern crest where there's more access. But I would say the biggest issue that kind of tends to come up over and over and over again is this timber management piece. And I expect that to become more controversial as time goes by under this Trump administration, under the mandates that they're putting forward to the agencies and the ways that they're trying to increase timber production, and do that even in some of these more intact areas, such as roadless areas and such.
So, you know, I see a lot of these controversies heating up in the coming years. And that's part of the reason that we're really wanting to kind of get ahead of things and talk about, like, the big picture here, like, why is this in place important? And what could we do to protect the values out there? And what kind of benefits does protecting the Siskiyou Crest have to the larger landscape? Because if we can get these industrial impacts off the crest and out of these intact environments, this connectivity corridor really is world-class, and it really does connect together ecosystems that spread up and down all across the West Coast. So in my view, excluding or minimizing those kinds of impacts in this area has a huge benefit to the broader West Coast and to the broader Klamath-Siskiyou region.
WHEELER:
So you are one person working on this with a variety of hats that you wear. There are other groups, other friends of ours who also do work in this region. EPIC plays around and you're gracious enough to share the Siskiyou Crest and this work with us. We also have Klamath Siskiyou Wildland Center, Mount Shasta Bio-Regional Ecology Center, a number of folks. And people are coming together in coalition around the Siskiyou Crest. Can you talk about this work to unite environmental organizations together to protect the Crest?
RUEDIGER:
Yeah, so in the last, I guess, two, three years, folks in southwestern Oregon, mainly to start, realized that we're fighting these battles over and over again, oftentimes over the same stands of timber or forest, generation after generation, and we're losing ground. And so we decided that it would be important. It's important to take on not only to, to oppose those bad projects and do that necessary kind of oppositional work, but to promote a vision for the region and to promote the protection of the region, we think that if we could more adequately protect these habitats, we could avoid those kinds of controversies and those kinds of impacts and move forward with management of this area in a much more comprehensive and effective manner.
And so what we've been doing is gathering together kind of a coalition of residents, rural property owners, farmers, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and we've all come together around this dedication to the Siskiyou Crest and the protection of the environment there. And so we started what we call in the Siskiyou Crest coalition, and we're starting to reach out now into Northern California and, and, and, and try to expand our network into this broader region. I mean, the area does extend across the borders. And so we're realizing we need to build that support both in Northern California and in Southwestern Oregon, both on a social and political level. And so we're, we're trying to, to look at the area and, and, and, and, and pull out like, what are the values here that we want to protect and how do we get to that?
And so a lot right now, we're focusing a lot on kind of the science, the outreach and the education component. Well, we've got a number of programs that are looking at commissioning science reports that get at some of these important values. We have an ecosystem conservation assessment we're working on right now with the Conservation Biology Institute and Dominic De La Sala. We have a Siskiyou Crest artist in residence program where we bring artists up to the Acorn Woman Lookout and they do their art, and then we use that art as part of our campaign and we help promote the artist and the art artist help promotes the region. We have, we're, we're right now starting what we call the Siskiyou Crest Moth Project. Moths are very understudied. It's known as one of the most diverse butterfly habitats in the world. And so we're looking at, there's an equal abundance of moths, but it's understudied.
So we're working with Dana Ross from OSU and we're, we're, we're crowdfunding right now to, to create a study that incorporates academic professional scientists and citizen or community-based scientists in surveying Siskiyou Crest for moths, which is pretty fun. We go out at night with a black light and collect moths and ID them. We're working on a plant species list for the Siskiyou Crest. It's world renowned for its biodiversity. No one's ever compiled a list. And it's actually harder than you might think because California and Oregon don't always agree on what the plant species are even called, let alone how they're categorizing or characterizing them. Another thing that we're doing is we have what we call the Siskiyou Crest white papers, unpublished scientific documents, exploring the biodiversity of the Siskiyou Crest region. Again, the areas tends to be under researched and underappreciated for its biodiversity. And so we're trying to pull that out and we're, we're kind of recruiting naturalists and ecologists across the region to put together papers that highlight the biodiversity of the Crest.
And then we're also working to kind of on a political level as well, engaging with elected officials and talking to them about how important these areas are. We're going out and doing community events and just trying to get out in the community. We're leading hikes and we meet monthly as a group. And like I said, we're trying to expand out this coalition to include a variety of interests from Southwestern Oregon, Northwestern California, and across the broader region that love the Crest, that see the value in protecting it and want to work towards, A, documenting why it's important and B, protecting those important values going forward into the future.
WHEELER:
Well, Luke, very briefly, if people want to learn more about Siskiyou Crest and the coalition's work, where should they go?
RUEDIGER:
We have a really wonderful website with a lot of information called, it's, you can find it at SiskiyouCrestCoalition.org. Yeah, you can plug in there and it has information on how to contact us and all the projects we're doing and just a ton of information on why this place is so incredible and beautiful and important.
WHEELER:
Well, Luke, thank you so much for joining the Econews. Look forward to having you back on in the future to talk more about maybe some individual projects or we can get a little bit deeper into moths as you get more data. Thank you so much for joining the show.
RUEDIGER:
Thanks a lot, thanks for having me.
WHEELER:
All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.