In 2023, our crews started work on a trail project that was supported by the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP). The funding is intended to reduce wildland firefighting costs and we were able to combine private funds with CFLRP funds to maximize input into the project and leverage local resources.
It also gave us a mandate to get aggressive with our clearing limits on trails that aligned with strategic fuel breaks identified by the program. So we went big with clearing our brush prisms with the intention of creating a linear fuel break, maintaining a workable spaces that future fire crews could extend, and also preserving access so that initial attack crews could access the fire-prone areas we were assigned to addressing in the western reaches of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.
As you can see below, our crews weren’t messing around when it came to our mission to maintain aggressive clearing limits. There’s plenty more to do, and if there were more CFLRP resources available, we could extend this project and service more priority areas identified by the Rogue-Siskiyou.
Here are some before-and-after pictures from the ground, as well as a set of very grainy photos taken by the Sentinel photo satellite in May 2023 and again in August 2023 of the same trail section. While the trail is hard to make out, it is visible by the naked eye.
Here are some sections of the Tincup Trail before-and-after:
Before:
After:
Before:
After: We maintained an especially-aggressive clearing limit
In May of 2023, the Sentinel Satellite flew over and took a picture of this same trail section:
Sentinel satellite photo from May 2023, before we cleaned this trail out
We went in there and did the work you can see above. Then in August 2023, the Sentinel took this photo of the same trail section: Look closely, and you can see the corridor by a picture taken from space:
Sentinel Satellite photo from August 2023
We hope to maintain funding for this program to maintain access to these fire-prone areas, encourage sustainability, and further leverage local resources.