Heavy rain, mountain snow, and closed roads can turn an ordinary winter storm into a serious problem. Here’s what mountain residents should take care of before the weather arrives.

Start With the House

Below the Burn Scars

When the Power Goes Out

Get the Vehicle Ready

Have an Evacuation Plan

Before the First Major Storm

NOAA sees an increasing chance of a historic El Niño this winter. Here’s what that could mean for our national forests, mountain communities, and backcountry.

1982–83 and 1997–98

The San Gabriels and San Bernardinos

The San Jacintos, Santa Anas, and San Diego Mountains

Ventura and Santa Barbara: A History of Debris Flows

When the Snow Level Rises

Closed Roads and High Creeks

Missing for Decades, Claude Chana Statue Returns to Placer County

The Dentist Who Built a 45-Ton Gold Miner

Claude Chana and the Founding of Auburn

California Historical Landmark No. 404

Another Piece of the Colfax Hotel’s History

Explore More of California

See Also

From Border Bars to Hollywood Cantinas: California’s Case for Cocktail Immortality

¡Salud!

Why did the gray wolf cross the road? Nobody knows yet.

A gray wolf was spotted in northern Lake County in late August, and it’s the first confirmed sighting west of Interstate 5 since the species began returning to California.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife got two reports and a set of photos from the area where Mendocino, Glenn, and Lake counties meet. A CDFW wolf biologist checked the photos, surveyed the area, and found wolf tracks at one of the two sighting locations. The agency believes it’s a single, dispersing black wolf – one animal moving on its own, likely still searching for territory or other wolves. It may have already left the county.

The First Confirmed Sighting West of I-5

Most of California’s wolf recovery over the last decade and a half has happened east of Interstate 5, in the ranching country of the state’s far northeastern counties. West of the interstate is a different landscape – more elk, more deer, and historically fewer wolves competing with cattle operations for space. State gray wolf coordinator Axel Hunnicutt says that an animal making it this far west is a sign that the population continues to expand its range. However, it’s also possible this is just one disperser and nothing more. Nobody knows yet whether others will follow.

Wiped Out by the 1920s

Wolves were trapped and killed across California through the late 1800s and early 1900s until the species disappeared from the state by the 1920s. They stayed gone for nearly ninety years. In 2011, a wolf known as OR-7 crossed south from Oregon and became the first wolf documented in California since 1924. The Shasta Pack, the state’s first modern pack, formed in 2015. As of July 2026, CDFW counts at least 50 wolves in 11 confirmed packs, almost all of them in the northeastern part of the state. No agency reintroduced them. They came back on their own, dispersing south along the Cascades from populations in Oregon and Idaho.

Still Protected, For Now

Gray wolves are listed as endangered under both the California Endangered Species Act and the federal Endangered Species Act. It’s illegal to hunt, pursue, harass, catch, capture, or kill one anywhere in the state, and there’s no wolf hunting season here. Ranchers have one legal tool right now: non-injurious hazing, allowed under CDFW guidance when a wolf comes within a quarter mile of livestock or within 100 yards of a home.

Trump’s Executive Order

On September 4, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order called “Supporting America’s Ranchers.” It gives Interior Secretary Doug Burgum 90 days to decide whether gray wolves and Mexican gray wolves have recovered enough to have their Endangered Species Act protections reduced or removed. The order also directs officials to look at loosening the rules for when ranchers can legally kill a wolf threatening livestock, and to review the federal programs that compensate ranchers for animals lost to wolf predation. The order doesn’t remove any protections. It starts a review process, and a 2022 federal court order currently keeps wolves protected across most of the lower 48 states.

Where I Come Down on This

Hazing is the only legal response a rancher has right now, and a confirmed kill already costs money that compensation programs don’t always cover in full. I don’t have a problem with giving ranchers a real option beyond that.

What wiped wolves out of California the first time wasn’t managed removal with limits. It was decades of government trapping and poisoning campaigns aimed at protecting livestock – no permits, no caps, no plan for what came after the population hit zero. A rancher with an approved lethal-removal permit on a wolf that’s already killed livestock is a different animal than that. One was extermination. The other is management with rules attached.

Whether any of this is good news for the wolves is a separate question, and I don’t think anyone actually knows the answer yet. The Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians have both come out against the order, arguing that the population is still rebuilding and that Mexican gray wolves, in particular, can’t afford the genetic hit of losing protections early. That’s a real concern. It just isn’t the rancher’s problem to solve.

CDFW wants to hear about wolf sightings anywhere in California – reports and photos both help biologists track how the population is spreading. If you run into one on a trail, don’t run. Make noise, hold eye contact, and back away slowly.

To report a gray wolf sighting, go HERE

For the latest news on the gray wolf, go HERE

For information on fish and wildlife in California, go HERE

A Measurement Decides a Trail’s Fate

Fifty inches. That’s the width of a bath towel laid out flat, or two dining chairs pushed together. It’s also the number a lawyer, not an engineer, chose twenty-five years ago to decide which off-road routes across 44 million acres of national forest are legally protected from repair and which ones aren’t. Twenty-five years.

Under 36 CFR 212.1, a motorized route over 50 inches wide counts as a road – unless the Forest Service has specifically designated and managed it as a trail. A route 50 inches or under is a trail, full stop. That single width threshold, buried in a federal regulation almost nobody arguing about this rule has actually read – most of them are too busy fighting over politics to notice inches – is the reason a washed-out jeep trail cut before Kennedy was president can sit closed and crumbling for twenty-five years while the agency that manages it is legally barred from bringing in the equipment or allowing trained trail crew volunteers to fix or maintain it.

This is the fight underneath the fight. Everyone arguing about the Roadless Rule – Sierra Club, Cal4Wheel, the Forest Service, the governors of three western states – is really arguing about which side of that fifty-inch line a given stretch of dirt falls on, and what happens to it once it does.

What the Rule Actually Does

The 2001 Roadless Rule bans two things across roughly 44 million acres of inventoried roadless national forest land: building new roads, and cutting timber, with a short list of narrow exceptions. On paper, it leaves grazing, hunting, fishing, and trails alone entirely.

In practice, it touches trails constantly – because a huge number of the routes off-roaders, hunters, hikers, anglers, and backcountry explorers all call trails were never formally designated as trails on a Forest Service travel plan. They’re old mining roads, old logging spurs, old fire access cuts, most of them older than the Rule itself – and in California, some of them older than statehood. Under the regulation’s own definition, an unclassified route over fifty inches wide that was never given trail status is legally a road. And roads under this Rule can’t be reconstructed. When one washes out, the agency’s only lawful options are to leave it broken or close it for good – which won’t stop every outdoor adventurist. The Rim Fire wasn’t started by someone who was following the Forest Service’s rules.

What Happened at Rim

In August 2013, a bow hunter lit an illegal campfire deep in the Clavey River drainage of the Stanislaus National Forest – a remote stretch of country he’d reached on foot, miles from the nearest road, during a fire restriction that banned open flames on the forest entirely. The fire escaped him on terrain he later said was almost vertical. Nine weeks later, it had burned 257,314 acres and become the third-largest wildfire in California history, reaching into Yosemite itself.

The ignition itself undercuts the “roads-cause-fires” narrative before the suppression story even starts. Rim began in the kind of remote, hard-to-reach country the Roadless Rule was supposedly written to protect, not at a trailhead or a pullout – proof that a lightning strike isn’t the only way a fire starts far from a road, and that distance from a road buys no immunity from a human ignition either.

What that same remoteness cost was the response. Official incident updates from that week describe direct-line suppression as impeded by difficult access and steep, inaccessible terrain – not a retrospective talking point, but what the assessment fire managers were working from in real time, as recorded in the incident’s own status summaries. Much of the ground that slowed crews down was inventoried roadless land, where the same road-reconstruction ban this piece has been describing left fewer access points for engines, dozers, and hand crews to reach the fire’s edge. The fire didn’t start near any road.

The Ignition Study Doesn’t Say What Sierra Club Says It Says

The Sierra Club’s argument sounds like a knockout: wildfires ignite four times more often near roads. Read the actual peer-reviewed article instead of the sensationalistic Sierra Club headline, and the number stops proving what Sierra Club wants it to prove.

The study behind that number – Aplet, Hartger, and Dietz, published in Fire Ecology in January 2026 – is real, peer-reviewed research, and it deserves to be treated as such rather than waved off. But look at what dataset it actually built. The authors combined the Forest Service’s own road network, Maintenance Levels 2 through 5, with Census TIGER/Line data covering interstates, county roads, and local roads. They excluded Maintenance Level 1 roads outright – the closed, unmaintained routes that make up a huge share of the legacy road inventory this fight is actually about. And nowhere in the methods does the motorized-trail layer appear. OHV, ATV, and 4×4 routes designated and managed as trails under 36 CFR 212.1 sit in a separate Forest Service GIS category from roads, and this study never touches that layer.

So the finding is real – or at least “real-adjacent” – but it’s also beside the point. It’s almost completely irrelevant. The study says ignitions cluster near pavement, gravel forest roads, and county roads. It says nothing – not a single data point – about the motorized trail network the Roadless Rule’s road-reconstruction ban actually constrains. Citing this study as proof that opening OHV trails increases fire risk is citing a study of a different road network to make a claim about a category it never measured.

Call it what it is. Sierra Club’s own campaign materials describe this in detail elsewhere – they know the difference between a Forest Service road and a Forest Service trail, because that distinction is the backbone of half the federal travel-management disputes their own chapters have weighed in on for twenty years. Presenting a study of paved and county roads as settled science on OHV trail ignitions is disingenuous, and the dataset itself is the evidence.

What “Local” Actually Looks Like

The Forest Service’s own rationale for this rescission asks for management to be moved closer to the ground, not for less of it. The National Forest Management Act already requires “coordination of outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, wildlife and fish, and wilderness” – coordination that a single nationwide prohibition, by definition, can’t do at the level of one forest, one watershed, or one fire-prone ridge.

The Stanislaus National Forest’s SERAL program is the working example. It integrates water-supply protection, tribal resources, community fire risk, and vegetation treatment into a single place-based plan – something a blanket rule covering 44 million acres from Alaska to Arizona was never designed to do. A national prohibition treats a fire-prone foothill community in Tuolumne County the same as an old-growth stand in the Tongass. SERAL doesn’t, because it can’t afford to.

The Ledger the Agency Didn’t Finish

The Forest Service’s own economic analysis of this rescission puts a number on what it might cost: $6.1 million a year in lost recreation benefits, up to $11.5 million in forgone passive-use value, a $9 million hit to recreation spending. Those are the agency’s own numbers, not an opponent’s guess.

What the same analysis never does is run the other side of the ledger. It credits “increased access for recreation” as a benefit of rescission in a sentence, then declines to put a dollar figure next to it anywhere in the actual table. Thousands of miles of legacy OHV and 4×4 routes sit closed or unrepairable under the current rule’s road-reconstruction ban. Reopening them has a value. Jeep and side-by-side shops feel it. So does the outfitter selling waders to the angler working the same drainage, and the gear shop stocking boots for the hiker headed up the same ridge. Motels in these towns fill up whether the season is OHV, deer, or trout, and the rural counties this analysis elsewhere admits depend on recreation revenue don’t much care which visitor is spending the money. The agency counted the cost of closing roads to hikers. It never counted what opening them is worth to everyone else who uses a national forest. An economic analysis that quantifies one side of an access tradeoff and leaves the other side as a sentence fragment is half an analysis, not a complete one.

This Has Happened Before

Rescinding a rule sounds, in Sierra Club’s language, like an attack. It’s also, legally, nothing new. The 2001 Rule was never a statute – Congress didn’t pass it, and no court has ever ruled it constitutionally or statutorily mandatory. It was issued the same way it can be undone: through notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Tongass National Forest already ran this exact experiment twice. The Forest Service exempted the Tongass from the Roadless Rule in 2020, repealed that exemption in 2023, and – under Executive Order 14153 – reinstated it again in 2025. Three administrative reversals in five years, on the same 9.4-million-acre forest, under the same statutory framework. Whatever else that history proves, it proves the rule is not permanent, was never meant to be, and can be adjusted through the exact process now underway nationwide.

Trees Aren’t Republicans or Democrats

A lodgepole pine does not check a voter registration before it grows another ring. It burns exactly the same whether the signature on the executive order belongs to a Democrat or a Republican. The forest does not know who the president is, and it has no opinion on Secretary Rollins. That should matter to anyone arguing about how it gets managed – and for a lot of the loudest opposition to this rescission, it clearly doesn’t.

Look at how Sierra Club’s own chapters have framed this fight. The Wyoming chapter’s statement on the rescission carries the headline “Sierra Club: Republicans Use Wildfire Bill to Advance Attack on Roadless National Forest Lands.” Soil erosion doesn’t get top billing. Neither does any specific watershed. A political party does. Another Sierra Club release describes a Senate committee vote passing “on a party-line vote,” a phrase about arithmetic in the Senate, not conditions on the ground.

The National Resources Defense Council’s Garrett Rose goes further, calling the rescission part of a “deep-seated deregulatory ideology.” Forest health has a vocabulary – canopy density, fuel load, watershed yield. Rose chose the wrong words, and it led him to the wrong argument.

None of this means the underlying ecological questions don’t matter. It means a meaningful share of the loudest opposition to this rule is opposition to an administration first and a forest second – and a reader deserves to know the difference between an argument built on data and an argument built on which party currently occupies the White House.

Environmentalism Is Not Conservation

The two words get used like synonyms. They aren’t.

Conservation, in the tradition that built the Forest Service, means active management: cutting, thinning, burning, and building the access that makes those things possible, all aimed at keeping a working forest healthy over time. It’s the tradition of multiple use – timber, grazing, recreation, and watershed protection – balanced and adjusted at the local level as conditions change.

Environmentalism, as it shows up in this fight, means something closer to the opposite: keep people and equipment out, let the land alone, and treat any road or any cut tree as damage by definition. It’s a NIMBYism tantrum wrapped in politically-driven emotion, not a stewardship philosophy, and the data on what twenty-five years of that tantrum has done to these forests is unflattering.

The Forest Service’s own rationale for this rescission states plainly that the 2001 Rule “contributed to the lack of active management of the national forests, which has contributed to challenges in addressing forest health concerns.” That’s the agency responsible for these lands admitting that hands-off did not mean healthy.

The science backs it up. A 2024 meta-analysis in Forest Ecology and Management, drawing on data from 40 separate studies across the western United States, found that combined mechanical thinning and prescribed burns reduced subsequent wildfire severity by 62 to 72 percent compared to untreated forests. Untreated is exactly what a roadless designation guarantees. A forest left alone doesn’t stay pristine – it accumulates fuel, overcrowded stands, disease, and dead trees, year after year, until the fire that will ignite burns hotter and kills more of it than it would have otherwise.

Conservation manages a forest that can actually be called healthy – one built to survive drought, disease, and fire alike. Environmentalism, as practiced, has left millions upon millions of acres sickly and dying, waiting for the first spark to become a conflagration.

We Are All on the Same Side

Bringing Us Together

A hiker on a ridge trail, a hunter glassing a drainage at dawn, an angler working a creek below a washed-out crossing, and a Jeep club working its way up a rock shelf – none of them are on opposite sides of anything. They’re all people who left the pavement behind on purpose. The fight over this rule tries to divide them into camps that don’t actually exist on the ground.

Every one of those people is also, functionally, a warden. A hunter who spots an illegal dump site off a spur road reports it. A hiker who smells smoke where there shouldn’t be any calls it in before it becomes the next Rim Fire. An off-roader who finds a poached elk carcass tells a game warden. None of that happens on land nobody can reach. A forest that’s open, well-maintained, and full of people using it as intended is one that’s properly nurtured, stewarded, and cared for. It’s healthy public land, enjoyed and protected by its owners. Us.

Associations Make Us Stronger

The Golden State’s oldest off-road advocacy group, the California Four Wheel Drive Association, already proves this point in practice – its own members run Adopt-a-Trail programs, have maintenance agreements with the Forest Service, and show up with tools and equipment when a route needs work the agency can’t afford to do itself. That’s what access produces: people with a personal stake in a piece of ground showing up to take care of it.

The California Off Road Vehicle Association – CORVA – although slightly younger than Cal4Wheel, has an equally impressive résumé within the state. Stewards of the Sequoia, a CORVA-linked volunteer group, has spent more than two decades maintaining trails across the Sequoia National Forest and nearby BLM land – clearing thousands of downed trees, maintaining thousands of water bars, and brushing thousands of miles of trail that would otherwise have gone impassable. Its own volunteers aren’t just off-roaders. They’re hikers, hunters, anglers, campers, and horse riders, all doing the same work on the same ground, because the trail doesn’t ask what brought you there.

Keeping Us Apart

Sierra Club has an interest in keeping these camps separate. So do the gear companies selling one crowd a $600 pack and another crowd a $60,000 side-by-side, and so does any off-road group that raises money by framing every fight as us-against-them. None of those organizations are the ones actually standing in the mud at a washed-out crossing with their kids, wondering if the trail ahead is still passable. The people who are – hunters, anglers, hikers, off-roaders, everyone who’s ever loaded a truck before dawn to get somewhere the pavement doesn’t reach – aren’t fighting each other out there. They’re just trying to get from one place to the next, hoping the ground under them holds.

It’s the Forest, Stupid

A washed-out route in a national forest doesn’t know it’s fifty-one inches wide instead of forty-nine. It doesn’t know whether an agency planner in 1987 checked a box labeled “trail” or left the box blank. It just sits there, rutted and impassable, while the paperwork decides what happens to it next.

The question this Roadless Rule rescission actually answers isn’t who’s in the White House. It’s whether the people who manage 44 million acres of American forest get to fix what’s broken on the ground in front of them, or whether a width measurement written into a regulation twenty-five years ago gets the final word. Everyone standing on that ground – however they got there – is on the same side of the argument.

As the sun sets, the campfire crackles, and the scent of s’mores rises toward a sky full of stars, this fight isn’t us against them. It’s us for us. And in the end, it comes down to a battle of inches.

Rescind the Roadless Rule.

For more information on the Roadless Rule, check out:

Cal4Wheel’s Action Alert: Support Rescission of the Roadless Rule by Rose Winn, Cal4Wheel Natural Resources Consultant HERE

Blue Ribbon Coalition’s Roadless Rule Myths vs. Facts: Why Rescission Is Good for Forests and Access HERE

To submit a public comment on the Roadless Area Conservation proposed rule, go HERE

Further Reading

• USDA Forest Service, Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed Roadless Rule rescission (2026)
• Federal Register, Notice of Intent, Vol. 90, p. 42179 (Aug. 29, 2025), and Proposed Rule, Vol. 91, p. 53827 (Aug. 20, 2026)
• USDA Forest Service, Economic Analysis (Regulatory Flexibility Act and Cost-Benefit Analysis) for the proposed rule
• Aplet, G.H., Hartger, P., and Dietz, M.S., “Three-decade record of contiguous-U.S. national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads,” Fire Ecology 22:8 (2026)
• Davis, K.T., et al., meta-analysis of thinning and prescribed fire effects on wildfire severity, Forest Ecology and Management 561 (2024)

Getting There: Highway 395 and Lee Vining

Spring and Fall for the Birds, Winter for the Quiet

South Tufa: The Reserve’s Largest Grove

Navy Beach: Kayaks, Canoes, and a Gentle Slope

Panum Crater: The Youngest Volcano in the Chain

Old Marina: Pumice-Block Tufa and Island Views

Mono Lake County Park: Boardwalk Closed Below the Park

The Visitor Center: A Film, Two Galleries, and a Bird Board

Lee Vining: Home Base

Boating Restrictions, No Drones, and No Climbing the Tufa

Camping Nearby: Lee Vining Canyon and Lundy Canyon

Who to Call

A Million Years in the Making

This is the McCloud River, cutting through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest on its way down from Mount Shasta’s southern flank. Lower, Middle, and Upper Falls sit close enough together that you can walk the whole stretch on one trail or drive to each one separately – from parking lot to parking lot.

The full trail runs about 3.9 miles round trip, with a little over 300 feet of elevation gain, so it’s an easy-to-moderate hike. The first stretch, from the Lower Falls lot to Fowler Campground, is paved and wheelchair accessible. Past that, the surface turns to packed dirt, climbs a short run of switchbacks above Middle Falls, and flattens out again along the canyon rim to the Upper Falls overlook. Each fall also has its own parking lot, so you can skip the trail and drive the loop instead.

The canyon is made up of basalt – old lava, cooled and fractured into hexagonal columns stacked like fence posts along the walls. Douglas-fir and incense-cedar hold the slopes, with black oak and vine maple that turns color in October, when the umbrella plant (Darmera peltata, also called “Indian rhubarb”) along the water goes scarlet and orange. The undammed McCloud River is spring-fed, which is why it runs cold and clear even through the hottest months of summer.

Lower Falls

Park at the Lower Falls lot and the falls are close – a paved path from the kiosk, then a short two-flight stone staircase down to the water. This is the shortest of the three descents, built for the flip-flop-wearing visitor who wants to get close without committing to a hike.

The staircase leads to a plunge pool with a wide, rocky shelf for drying off in the sun. If you look closely, you’ll find old metal hooks embedded in a rock near the water and in it – reportedly the remains of a ladder swimmers once used to climb back out. The falls here are the smallest of the three, but the pool has the easiest access, which is why the parking lot fills first on a summer weekend.

Middle Falls

From Lower Falls, the trail continues less than a mile upstream, past Fowler Campground, before dropping down a short run of switchbacks to the base of the falls. If you’re driving instead, the dirt path down starts to the right of the overlook and gets you there just as fast.

This is the one to see if you’re short on time. 50 feet tall and 100 feet wide, it’s the largest of the three by a wide margin, and the pool below it is the safest and most popular spot on the river to swim. A boulder field separates the viewing area from the water – climb it, and you’ll find more private stretches of the pool along the edges. The falls face west, so if you want the light on them rather than behind, come in the afternoon rather than at sunrise.

Upper Falls

The trail flattens out along the canyon rim above Middle Falls and ends at an overlook. There’s no maintained trail down to the water here, just an unofficial spur that drops steep and loose to the base. Most people stay up top.

What you can see from the overlook is a waterfall squeezed through a narrow gap in the basalt, 25 to 30 feet of water forced through a channel instead of spilling freely, which makes it sound stronger than its size would suggest. Past the last viewing deck, the trail keeps going another 13 miles upstream.

Getting There

From the town of McCloud: Highway 89 east for just over 5 miles. Turn right at the signed road for the McCloud River Loop, continue less than a mile, and stay right at the first intersection – the left fork leads to Middle and Upper Falls. Pass Fowlers Camp and turn left into the signed Lower Falls lot.

From Burney: Highway 89 north for around 40 miles, then left onto the Fowler Public Camp road.

From Dunsmuir: I-5 north to the Highway 89 South exit, then about 25 miles to a right turn onto the Fowler Public Camp road.

The road connecting the three falls is paved the whole way. In winter, the gate at Forest Road 40N44 closes just south of Highway 89, with a smaller parking area at the gate for the longer walk-in.

When to Go

Summer brings the best swimming (and the biggest crowds), along with heat that regularly hits 90 degrees.

October brings the color change along the water.

Wildflower season runs April through mid-June on the shrubby stretch between Fowler Camp and Middle Falls.

Weekday mornings are the closest you’ll get to having the place to yourself; arrive at sunrise on a summer weekend, and you might only see a lone fisherman at Lower Falls or maybe a photographer waiting on the light at Middle.

Safety and Respect

The boulders underwater here are a real hazard, and they are not always in the same place. What was a safe jumping spot one season can be a dangerous one the next, so treat every pool as unknown depth and skip the cliff-jumping regardless of what you’ve seen online.

Natural dangers – rattlesnakes, black bears, and mountain lions – are all possible in this stretch of forest. There’s usually no poison oak on the trail itself.

Fire restrictions tighten during the dry months – check current conditions with the McCloud Ranger District before firing up the grills or a campfire at Lower Falls picnic area.

History

Long before Highway 89 existed, the Shasta, Pit River, and Wintu people moved through this canyon each spring and fall to hunt elk, fish for rainbow trout, and gather medicinal plants along the river. Descendants of those tribes still live in the area, and the Pit River Tribe continues to work with the Forest Service on restoration projects along the McCloud today.

Good to Know

• No fee or permit for day use.
• A vault toilet sits at each of the three lots – bring your own hand sanitizer.
• Fowler’s Campground, next to Lower Falls, makes a good base if you want an early start; sites fill fast in summer.
• Dogs are welcome (on leash) at all three falls.

Land managed by: U.S. Forest Service, Shasta-Trinity National Forest, McCloud Ranger District, (530) 964-2184
Hours of Operation: Tuesday through Friday: 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM, Saturday: 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM, Closed Sunday, Monday, and Federal Holidays.

Not a proposed rule yet. Just the opening bell – and the window to speak up is now, before that proposal gets written.

Here’s what happened. Following an executive order from the White House, the USFS issued a Notice of Intent (NOI) to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement and revise the Travel Management Rule. That’s the framework that’s governed where motorized vehicles can travel on National Forest System lands for more than twenty years, decided forest by forest based on local input, resource conditions, and the best science available at the time. The NOI kicks off the first public scoping and comment period, meaning the agency is asking what it should consider before drafting anything.

What’s on the table

The NOI lays out several changes the USFS is considering:

• An “open unless closed” presumption for existing roads and trails, instead of the reverse
• Removing the national minimization criteria that currently push managers to limit damage to soils, watersheds, and vegetation, and to reduce wildlife harassment and habitat disruption
• Reconsidering routes that are currently closed or heavily restricted, depending on funding
• Replacing the Minimum Road System requirement with a looser “adequate and appropriate” standard
• Changes to how the public gets to weigh in and how travel designations get monitored going forward
• New allowances for limited off-route motorized use – think retrieving downed big game, dispersed camping, and gathering firewood
• Pulling Class 1 e-bikes out from under motor vehicle rules on trails where regular bikes are already allowed, while keeping other seasonal and site-specific restrictions in place

Access and conservation have never been separate conversations

I’ve spent forty years running roads and trails across California’s forests and backcountry, and I’ve never seen access and conservation function as two different issues. They’re the same issue. How a route gets managed determines what happens to the habitat around it. What happens to that habitat determines whether the hunting and fishing that draw people out there in the first place are still worth doing five or ten years from now.

I support motorized access to public land. I drive it constantly. But more access isn’t automatically better access, not if it comes at the cost of clean water, wildlife habitat, or the quality of the experience everyone’s actually out there for.

This NOI comes just days after the USFS proposed rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule, another decision with the potential to reshape how millions of acres of public land get managed. Two separate actions, same underlying question: who gets a voice in how these lands are run, and how much of that decision-making stays local, science-informed, and open to the public.

How to add your voice and be heard

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers has a campaign built around exactly this moment, called United We Stand for Public Lands. The idea is simple – off-roaders, hikers, hunters, anglers, and everyone else who uses these forests don’t need to agree on every detail to stand together on the basics: responsible management, real public input, and conservation that holds up over time.

BHA’s Action Center makes it easy to submit a comment in support of durable access and a science-informed travel management process. Taking action adds your name to a petition BHA will deliver to the Forest Service on the last day of the comment period, plus a letter to your members of Congress and the White House.

Weigh in now through the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers site: CLICK HERE

If you want to go a step further, you can also file your own individual comment directly with the Forest Service through the Federal Register docket. The more specific and personal that comment is, the more weight it tends to carry.

You can submit up to three photos in each of five categories. Every photo has to be taken in a California state park. That’s the rule that actually matters – the rest is just categories.

Five Categories

• Scenic Landscapes – the natural beauty of California’s parks across every season
• Wildlife & Nature – wildlife, plants, ecosystems, and the natural details found throughout the parks
• Recreation & Activities – people hiking, camping, swimming, surfing, and exploring the outdoors
• People in Parks – meaningful moments of people enjoying California’s state parks responsibly
• California History – cultural landmarks, historic places, and the stories preserved throughout the parks

Up to three photos per category. Phone or full kit, doesn’t matter.

Deadlines

• Contest opens: August 24, 2026
• Submission period: August 24 – September 21, 2026
• Judging period: September 21 – September 30, 2026
• Winners announced: October 1, 2026

TOP PRIZE: $195 Membership, Plus a Spot in the 2028 Calendar

One winner from each of the five categories gets a complimentary California State Parks Foundation membership, including a California Explorer Vehicle Day Use Annual Pass valued at $195. That winner also gets a feature in the 2028 California State Parks Foundation calendar, a complimentary copy of that calendar, and recognition across CSPF’s website and social channels.

Honorable mentions get featured too – on the website, the social channels, and the digital photo gallery.

Review the official rules and category guidelines before you submit. Then pull your best three shots per category and get them in. September 21 comes up fast.

Find Out More Here

More Info on CalParks