Sea to Siskiyous Passway
ERLT is creating a legacy, the Sea to Siskiyous Passway from the Pacific Ocean to the Siskiyou Mountains - a biological corridor connecting Cape Blanco State Park with the Grassy Knob Wilderness, the Copper Mountain Roadless Area, Iron Mountain Botanical Area, the Port-Orford-cedar Natural Research Area, the Wild Rogue Wilderness, and southeastward through an archipelago of California's wildlands. We will create this Passway by outright purchase, and by holding conservation easements on discrete parcels of private land.
The vision
Elk River anchors the northwest corner of the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion. It is crucial to the survival of several endangered species, most notably the Endangered Marbled Murrelet. Its watershed is quite intact, and its large areas of publicly-owned healthy native forest host one of the greatest concentrations of nesting murrelets in the entire Pacific Northwest. Its waters are home to several sensitive salmonid species including Coho, steelhead, cutthroat trout, and Chinook.
According to World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Conservation Biology Institute's Northwest Assessment, the chief threat to this region is resource extraction; specifically, logging practices in lowland forests that cause freshwater habitat loss and fragmentation. These are exactly the problems ERLT hopes to circumvent by creating the Sea to Siskiyous Passway - and exactly the problems that will occur if we don't.
ERLT's Sea to Siskiyous project dovetails with the work of several respected Klam-Sisk organizations, including Friends of Elk River, Siskiyou Regional Education Project, World Wildlife Fund, and Ecoforestry Management Associates, who share a common vision for the Klamath-Siskiyou region.
