Let’s not get stung by the Yellowjacket Project
Written by:
Luke Ruediger
In April 2025, Secretary of Agriculture Brook Rollins issued a Secretarial Memo aimed at increasing timber production on National Forest lands. This action placed over 112 million acres, approximately 58 percent of our National Forest lands, including all of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, under an “Emergency Situation Determination,” or ESD.
ESDs were intended to address urgent, sudden, or unforeseen threats to public safety or natural resources, but they are now being used to approve large logging projects on federal lands where no urgent threat exists. The intent is to fast-track timber extraction, bypass traditional environmental analysis, cut out public involvement opportunities, reduce transparency, eliminate standard public comment periods, eliminate objection processes, and expedite logging projects on public lands throughout the West, including the Applegate Valley.
Currently, National Forest Ranger Districts across the West are implementing increasingly large and damaging timber sales with increasingly little to no public involvement, little environmental analysis, and virtually no limits on the scope, scale, or intensity of logging that can be proposed under ESD timber sales.
Unfortunately, despite being designated an Adaptive Management Area (AMA) specifically for community-based collaboration, the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest is proposing its first ESD timber sale in a very large portion of the Applegate River watershed. The timber sale, called the Yellowjacket Project, covers potentially thousands of acres of Applegate forests on the western face of Wagner Butte, at the headwaters of the Little Applegate River, on Glade Creek and Yale Creek, as well as on Teel Creek in the Upper Applegate River watershed, along Elliott Ridge and Yellowjacket Ridge, and on the slopes of Acorn Woman Mountain above Acorn Woman Lake.
Sprawling across much of the eastern Applegate River watershed, the commercial logging proposed in this project has the potential to permanently damage the forests, scenic viewsheds, wildfire resilience, and habitat and watershed values of the region. Recent field monitoring has validated these concerns as we are finding mature, late-successional, and old-growth forests targeted for logging throughout the timber sale area. We are also seeing that many new, decommissioned, defunct, and/or long unused roads and skid trails would be developed to facilitate logging operations, many large trees would be logged, and, as we are seeing in local BLM timber sales, mature hardwood trees would be almost universally removed during felling and yarding operations.
With remote cameras, we have also documented the rare Pacific fisher in proposed logging units and have serious concerns that this logging would not only degrade habitat for species like the Pacific fisher that require mature forest habitats but would also increase fire risks. The removal of large-diameter trees is detrimental to habitat values and increases fire risk by removing the most resilient portions of the landscape, by altering microclimate conditions, and by creating hotter, drier, more windy landscapes colonized by a dense, highly lammable mix of logging slash, fine fuels, dry grass, shrub growth, bushy stump-sprouting hardwoods, and young conifers. Converting mature forests into young, dense growth is the opposite of fuel reduction and would increase fire risks on the landscape scale. According to agency staff, this project could produce between seven and 14 large timber sales, depending on what is approved and what units are ultimately moved forward into a final decision. This level of harvest, combined with the current BLM logging frenzy in the foothills of the Applegate, would permanently alter our beautiful watershed and dramatically increase fire risks in the mountains that surround our communities.
Currently, the Forest Service appears unsure about providing the public with adequate opportunity for commenting on the Yellowjacket Project. They are also saying the analysis for this massive, sprawling timber sale that includes much of the Siskiyou Mountains Ranger District will be capped at a paltry 15 pages, meaning virtually none of the relevant issues will be properly considered or analyzed in the upcoming Environmental Analysis.
The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest is in the process of planning one of the largest Applegate Valley timber sales in many decades, and they are being pushed by the administration in DC to log off our public lands without properly considering the impacts or providing meaningful public involvement or public-comment opportunities. It’s time for the public to push back and demand these lands be managed for both the public interest and future generations, rather than for short-term profits that leave our communities, watersheds, and forests less resilient, less vibrant, and less beautiful.
Luke Ruediger
Image 1: A Pacific fisher documented on the western face of Wagner Butte within mature and old growth forest habitat proposed for logging in unit 278 of the Yellowjacket Project.
