ADDING TO THE CASCADE-SISKIYOU NATIONAL MONUMENT
Southern Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is an ecological wonderland, with some of the greatest diversity of plant and animal life in the West. Located at the convergence of three distinct mountain ranges—the Klamath, Cascade and Siskiyou—it is an area of global biological importance and the country’s only national monument set aside specifically for its biodiversity. It’s an extraordinary place, with more than 200 bird species and some of the widest array of butterfly species in the country. Many of its plants and animals are found nowhere else in the world.
Within the boundaries of the monument, WRC has launched an effort to conserve a 1,425-acre property called Emigrant Creek Ranch, which includes three miles of perennial streams that all feed the Rogue River. The ranch lies at the doorstep of the Soda Mountain Wilderness, in a vital transition zone between the monument’s higher-elevation conifer forests and its lower-elevation oak savanna and grasslands. Roughly 1,200 acres of the ranch contain oak habitat, one of the monument’s most underrepresented plant communities.
HABITAT CONNECTIVITY AND ECOLOGICAL RESILIENCE
Our goal is to purchase the ranch and transfer it to the BLM to preserve this critical transition zone and bolster habitat connectivity within the monument. The resilience of the area’s biodiversity depends heavily on this type of connectivity, especially across the disappearing woodland ecosystems of the Rogue Valley foothills, where Emigrant Creek Ranch lies. Conserving the ranch will also protect a mile of the Applegate Trail (part of the California National Historic Trail network), which meanders through the property.
