‘The people’s land.’ Will the feds close California forests to hunters, campers again? 

A smoke machine at a gender reveal party. Sparks from flat tires. Escaped camp fires. Illegal fireworks.

As California gets hotter and drier, some moment of human carelessness or just bad luck will undoubtedly ignite another uncontrolled fire that sweeps through thousands of acres of forestland and dry brush, leaving people dead.

Last September, as millions of acres burned, the U.S. Forest Service did something it had never done before to try to prevent people from catching even more forestland on fire. It closed all of its 20 million acres of California forests to the public for nearly two weeks.

Some forests remained closed for a month. At the same time, the managers of more than 2 million acres of private forests shut off access to woods that are typically open for public recreation. Tens of thousands of hikers, campers, hunters, anglers, bird watchers, equestrians and cyclists had to stay out of the woods.

Is this what the future holds for California? Millions of acres off limits as the state’s spectacular natural landscape turns into kindling?

Already, there are signs that last year’s closure orders in California weren’t an anomaly. Citing extreme fire danger, the Forest Service in neighboring Arizona closed four of its five forests this week. Earlier in June, Sierra Pacific Industries — the largest private landowner in California — announced it was closing its 1.8 million acres in California.

It is only the fourth time in the company’s history that the fire-risks were deemed so high that the company closed all of its private timberlands to public use.

“This is the earliest we have closed our lands, which is being driven by the fact that fuel moisture levels in our forests are the lowest we’ve ever seen for this time of year,” said Andrea Howell, the corporate affairs director at Sierra Pacific, headquartered in Shasta County.

The same day Sierra Pacific closed its lands, W.M. Beaty & Associates, which manages 280,000 acres of private forests in Plumas, Lassen, Modoc, Shasta and Siskiyou counties, announced its lands were off limits. It was only the second time in the company’s history following last year’s closure, said Ryan Hilburn, the land-management company’s chief forester.

“We want to protect the resource. That’s our goal,” Hilburn said. “Our clients want people to be able to use their lands. But the resources have got to be there to use and so we’ve got to do everything we can to protect it.”

Hilburn said the fire conditions are so dangerous “you almost kind of don’t have a choice” but to keep the public out.

So far, the U.S. Forest Service isn’t saying whether it was planning for a repeat of last September’s closures in California.

“Last year was unprecedented and led to a unique situation where we closed forests due to safety concerns of firefighters, because of active conditions on the ground last year,” Forest Service spokesman Jonathan Groveman said in an email last month. “We cannot speculate on what this season will bring, still in June.”

An unprecedented closure

More acres burned in California last year than at any time in modern history, due in large part to a August lightning storm. About 4.4 million acres were scorched, and at least 33 people died.

As the fires raged, on Sept. 9, the Forest Service announced that all 18 of its national forests in California were off limits to the public. Ten days later, nine forests were allowed to reopen, though certain areas inside those lands remained closed and open flames and campfires were prohibited.

The remaining forests across the state stayed closed for the remainder of the month. Four Southern California national forests — the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres and San Bernardino — stayed closed through early October.

“A violation of these prohibitions is punishable by a fine of not more than $5,000 for an individual or $10,000 for an organization, or imprisonment for not more than 6 months, or both,” read the closure orders signed by Randy Moore, the forester in charge of California’s national forests.

The Biden administration this week appointed Moore as the head of the U.S. Forest Service. The Forest Service declined to make Moore available for an interview.

The federal Bureau of Land Management and the National Parks Service didn’t issue blanket closure order for California lands last year, though some properties, including Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, were closed around the same time due to fires inside the park boundaries.

Some open-lands advocates are worried that last year set a troubling trend of locking the public out of Forest Service lands that are managed with taxpayer dollars and set aside to be enjoyed in perpetuity.

“This is the people’s land, and while we all have great concern about fire, we can’t force everyone into a bubble where no possible bad thing can happen. That isn’t freedom,” U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, said in a written statement.

“Last year’s closure of public land was a historic precedent. If it’s closed again this year, it becomes a pattern, and we have a real problem.”

But other public lands advocates say they understood the decision last year to keep people out of the woods.

Far too many people light fireworks and set campfires even when they’re banned — like they are already in the Lake Tahoe region this summer, said Kristine Koran, trail operations manager for the Tahoe Rim Trail Association, which promotes and manages the popular hiking trail around the lake.

“As much as we love the opportunity to backpack and we love public lands, we feel what they did last year was right to keep the public safe,” she said.

Why some environmentalists are worried

Some environmental groups are troubled by the precedent the federal government set last year.

Ryan Henson, policy director of the California Wilderness Coalition (CalWild), said there’s concern that the Forest Service will adopt a mindset of, “ ‘We can’t even afford to manage the land, so let’s put up a gate on it.’ ”

Henson said that if the Forest Service does face another overwhelming fire season this year, he hopes land managers will lean more toward targeted closures like limiting vehicular travel on certain roads while prohibiting opening flames to allow hikers and bikers access to the public’s lands.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter who now heads the environmental advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said he understands why forest managers don’t want the public to interfere with active firefighting efforts and to tamp down the risk of starting fires.

But when the public is allowed in the woods, it serves as an important check to make sure the forests are being managed appropriately, Ingalsbee said.

He worries that excessive closure orders that can last well after a fire is extinguished allows foresters to block environmental groups and members of the public from keeping an eye on logging projects or other potentially ecologically harmful activities, he said.

“There’s a lot of, I think, nefarious activities that take place under the cover of ‘public safety’ or ‘wildfire prevention,’ ” he said.

Hunters fear lands will close

California’s big game hunters are especially nervous about the potential for the forests being closed again.

Last year’s closures happened during the brief hunting seasons for deer, elk and pronghorn antelope.

In certain desirable hunting areas, California’s wildlife agency issues permits to hunters who’ve won lotteries, with winners picked in a weighted system based on the number of years they’ve applied.

Last year, many hunters who might have spent close to 20 years applying for these premium hunts and who finally got drawn for a permit weren’t able to hunt because the public and private lands were closed.

“They’d been scouting that all year and then all of a sudden the rug gets pulled out from under them,” said Devin O’Dea, the California Chapter coordinator for Backcountry Hunters & Anglers

“That’s not a good feeling.”

Because the big game hunting permits are typically non-refundable, hunting regulators at the California Fish and Game Commission last year had to frantically change the regulations to allow hunters who drew a permit for elk and antelope to get a refund. The commission set up a new system so the applicants didn’t lose the weighted “preference points” they’d built up applying all those years.

The land closures came at the same time as more Californians bought fishing and hunting licenses last year during the pandemic, reversing a trend of declining sales. License sales provide a key source of habitat funding for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Nearly two million sport fishing licenses were sold in California in 2020, an 11% increase from 2019. They also issued nearly 300,000 hunting licenses in 2020, up 9% from the previous year.

Stafford Lehr, a deputy director at the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said there’s “a big concern” in his department that the sorts of private and public land closures will keep happening, even as the state is ramping up its efforts to get more hunters and anglers out in the field.

If the forests continue to be closed, Lehr said the department may need to consider bumping back the state’s big game seasons from their traditional August through October dates to later in the fall.

“I think it has to be part of the conversation if this becomes the new norm,” he said.

This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.