Oregon Hikers

I grabbed a satellite photo and tweaked it a little to get a sense of what the BAER maps might represent. I gotta say, I'm a little confused and disheartened, because from satellite, it sure looks bad:

2. Aesthetic restoration: Commercial timberland is only ugly because it is managed purely for extraction and quarterly corporate profits. With initial restoration work and a few decades it can be made to rival anywhere else in the State. I'm not proposing a simple thin and regenerate restoration pr...

Massive restoration efforts would be needed, and decades would be required for them to become truly attractive, but this would be a long term solution with wide ranging benefits for everyone far beyond simply relieving overcrowding in the mountains and restoring long degraded ecosystems. I'm wholeh...

First, I'd like to recognize what a terrific conversation this is, with several differing viewpoints communicated with civility and clarity. This forum has seen traffic diminish over the years (at least, as far as I can tell), but I'm still truly impressed with the quality of informed commentary and...

I had assumed that the McKenzie River Trail would have been hit, but the Holiday Farm Fire was downriver enough to spare it. Whew.

Solid job. Hard news to take about the PCT in the Jefferson Wilderness. I hope it's not a wasteland.

I offer this not as proof that powerlines definitively caused this fire (or the fires in the Santiam canyon), but rather as proof of principal that powerlines can cause fires. I see this as evidence of why authorities should more proactively use the tool of preventive de-electrification, as I origin...

Clear cutting isn’t the answer: https://forestpolicypub.com/2020/09/16/wildfires-burning-in-heavily-clearcut-logged-and-roaded-parts-of-the-oregon-cascades/ Just in case I was unclear in my earlier comments: I view preventive Forest Closures and preventive de-electrification of power lines as usefu...

Do communities built in the forest need to be able to survive without power for a few days so that power companies can cut power in advance of projected high fire danger times? Yes. Yes. If they've been paying attention to the news this last week, those communities might be quite in favor of such o...

By whose definition of healthy, though? An excellent question. It would have to end up being a values judgement, right? Not exactly perfect moral relativism, but somewhere closer to that end of the spectrum than we may be comfortable admitting. For instance, if human life and community resilience w...