This was originally published in the March 6, 2026 edition of The Mountain Enterprise, a local newspaper servicing the Frazier Mountain and surrounding communities.
Nearly two years ago, mountain residents attended an open house at the Mt. Pinos Ranger District headquarters. Many voiced concerns about a controversial plan to remove thousands of trees across 1,626 acres of Tecuya Ridge, worried that it would be done using a commercial timber sale.
“We will not be hauling logs off the forest,” a U.S. Forest Service fire management officer assured the crowd, as quoted in the April 5, 2024 edition of The Mountain Enterprise. Instead, he said, crews would rely on chipping and prescribed burning to get the job done.
Despite this assurance, healthy trees—some measuring up to 21 inches in diameters—were cut by a Northern California logging company. A few weeks ago, they were hauled off the forest to a local storage lot and later trucked to a facility in Tulare County to be sold as firewood or mulch. This is precisely what the U.S. Forest Service said would not happen.
Over the years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours on Tecuya Ridge, developing a deep knowledge and appreciation of this unique mixed-conifer and pinyon-juniper forest. Large Jeffrey pines tower above the ridge. California condors regularly soar overhead. It’s also formally regarded as a Globally Important Bird Area due to its avian diversity. Quail, chickadees, woodpeckers, nuthatches, jays, and raptors deliver a chorus of chirps, hoots, squawks, and screeches amidst the forest canopy. Rare amphibians like yellow-blotched ensatinas and Tehachapi slender salamanders seek refuge in decaying logs and underground burrows to survive cold winters.
Recently, I witnessed the tree cutting firsthand. I observed heavy equipment grinding up shrubs and small trees and loading large logs onto trucks. I recorded and documented the damage left behind. Deep ruts and tracks have carved up the forest floor, some more than a foot deep. Underground burrows for salamanders, squirrels, and other forest creatures were crushed and destroyed.
Much of this could have been avoided, but the U.S. Forest Service authorized this work using a categorical exclusion, a loophole that allows the agency to bypass detailed environmental review and limit public input for certain activities. A federal court recently invalidated this exemption, ruling that the agency has unlawfully relied on it for decades in commercial logging projects across the country.
Despite the branding of these fuel breaks as forest health improvements, the reality is that these projects come at a cost. While thinning followed by prescribed fire (not slash pile-burning) can modestly influence fire behavior under specific, mild conditions, large-scale mechanical thinning can degrade wildlife habitat, release stored carbon, dry and simplify forest structure, spread invasive species, increase erosion and sediment runoff, and in some cases make fires burn hotter and faster under extreme weather.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and we can look at how the Kern County Fire Department performed similar work on private land on Tecuya Ridge in 2023. There, KCFD limited tree removal to ten inches in diameter, less than half the size of the trees the Forest Service contractor removed on adjacent national forest land. By focusing on smaller trees, County Fire preserved larger, more fire resistant trees and avoided the need for log removal, heavy equipment, and cost-driven timber sales.
Fuel breaks are often hyped as a silver bullet for stopping wildfires, but their effectiveness is frequently overstated. Under the severe wind-driven conditions that make fires most destructive, embers can travel miles ahead of the flames, rendering fuel breaks largely ineffective at protecting communities.
Forestwatch supports effective wildfire risk mitigation, and we are not opposed to all fuel breaks i principle. But we do demand that they be strategic and designed intentionally to minimize ecological disturbances. Our organization has a history of supporting fuel breaks that make sense, like the 500-foot-wide defensible fuels profile zones that have been established for years directly adjacent to Frazier Park and Lake of the Woods. These projects provide strategic defense to nearby communities.
Last year, ForestWatch developed a Community Alternative to the Forest Service’s plan to buld hundreds of miles of new fuel breaks across the forest. Our approach garnered the support of over 90 community organizations and numerous state and federal elected officials. It provides tree-size cutting limits that are species-specific and appropriate for our area. It reduces fuel breaks to reasonable widths, promotes the use of prescribed fire over mechanical thinning, and minimizes that use of heavy machinery.
Moving forward, the public deserves transparency and accountability from the U.S. Forest Service. Embracing true collaboration requires open and accurate communication. It also requires responsiveness to the communities’ broad interests and needs. These steps will foster trust amongst stakeholders and the public.
With similar work approved (or in the final planning stages) for Pine Mountain, Mt. Pinos, Cuddy Valley, and other area, we urge forest officials to chart a new path that more effectively balances community protection with the duty to safeguard the environment.
Jeff Kuyper is Executive Director of Los Padres ForestWatch, a nonprofit conservation organization that protects Los Padres National Forest and helps communities identify effective ways to prepare for wildfires.