our view

In 2009, Gabe Howe and his wife, Jillian Stokes, were on their honeymoon in Greece when they made a decision that set the course for their life together and changed the landscape of Southern Oregon — literally.

“Over drinks on a balcony in Greece … we decided we were going to rebuild a route that went from one end of the 180,000-acre (Kalmiopsis) wilderness to the other,” Howe wrote in an essay in 2019.

It took them and the volunteers they persuaded to join them about five years to clear the trans-Kalmiopsis route. That accomplishment came to mind last week when six members of the Siskiyou Mountain Club — the organization Gabe and Jillian formed — embarked on an annual trail-clearing hike along the 27-mile route they resurrected with hand tools from the devastation of the Biscuit Fire. That’s the thing about trail-clearing. You have to keep doing it, year after year, to keep those corridors open.

Since its birth, the Siskiyou Mountain Club has assembled a catalog of work that should make members proud. In addition to clearing routes through the Kalmiopsis, it has reopened and maintained trails in the Siskiyou, Red Buttes, Sky Lakes and Wild Rogue wilderness areas.

The club now has an annual budget of about $600,000, with roughly half of that coming from contracts with the U.S. Forest Service and the rest from donations, investments and merchandise sales at the club’s outdoors store in Ashland, where hikers can buy first-rate maps produced by the club.

In addition, the club runs an internship program that puts college students into the forest during the summers. The interns work a summer from their backpacks in some of the most remote and rugged wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest. “They load their backpacks up with eight days of food and supplies and pack up to 20 miles into project sites where they work to restore historic trails fading from America’s great backcountry,” says the club’s website.

Club staff members and volunteers currently help maintain about a third of the trails in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, including the Rogue River National Recreation Trail downriver from Galice, the Illinois River Trail downriver from Selma and the Upper Rogue River Trail upriver from Prospect.

Virginia Gibbons, USFS spokesperson, told Rogue Valley Times reporter Shaun Hall that the work of the club has been pivotal.

She said the club had to cut through burned, downed trees in the Kalmiopsis that had fallen across trails in a haphazard pattern that she called “jackstraw.”

“It was a tremendous amount of work,” she said. “It was a significant accomplishment. If we hadn’t partnered with them, my guess is those trails would not be open today.”

While other community groups and volunteer organizations help maintain trails across the forest, the Siskiyou Mountain Club is the primary group doing such work, Gibbons said.

“They have had a broad influence over the forest,” Gibbons said. “They have been working hard for years on this forest.”

“People worked hard before us to build those trails,” Howe said, adding that the work of the club honors trail builders of the past, including the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.

The trail builders of the future will be tipping their hats to Howe and members of the Siskiyou Mountain Club.