June 18, 2009 08:33 am
Jim Erler raises some points (“Hurdygurdy Creek watershed should be sold to county, not feds,” June 10) that warrant more information.
Regarding the fire buffer: this is a “Top Priority Fuel Reduction Project” in the Del Norte Fire Safe Plan, which is available on the county’s Web site. (See pages xii, 95, and 98.) The property is four miles northeast from Big Flat, not six as indicated by Mr. Erler, and as stated in the Fire Safe Plan, “given that major fire conflagrations often are pushed by winds from the northeast, this is a direct threat to this community.”
At a meeting with local fire chiefs and Cal Fire representatives earlier this year, it was emphasized that during conflagration conditions a fire can travel very fast — and that was the case during the Biscuit Fire where it traveled 8.5 miles in 3 hours.
Regarding the site quality for timber: the property is mostly poor quality for growing trees. This is due to the shallow, rocky, often serpentine soils found there — and the slopes which range from 30 percent to 70 percent. Del Norte’s best commercial timber land is located further west in the more productive soils found there. These better soils support double the growth rate than is possible on the Hurdygurdy Creek property. Mr. Erler is correct that the property needs timber stand improvement work.
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June 16, 2009 09:42 am
Driving toward the coast on Highway 199, I’ve never been so focused on exactly when the redwoods would start appearing as I was Sunday afternoon. That’s because I was bringing my parents to visit Del Norte County for the first time, and the redwoods would be part of the welcoming party.
It’s called the Redwood Highway from Grants Pass on, but it takes a maddeningly long time for the tall trees to materialize when there’s anticipation. First there’s the climb into the Illinois Valley and the series of small towns from Selma to O’Brien.
I’m an Oregon native and lived almost three decades there, but I’ve got to say that the California side of the Grants Pass-Crescent City route is where it’s at for scenery. We hugged the cliff sides of Smith River canyons on the slow descent out of the Coast Range, but still no real highway redwood presence even as we passed through Gasquet.
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June 09, 2009 01:51 pm
Vast stretches of the redwoods have turned pink and purple as the wild rhododendrons hit their peak.
You can get glimpses — better than glimpses, really — from the highways. But for the best blasts of color, go just a little deeper into the woods. Damnation Creek Trail off of 101 south of Crescent City and the Hatton and Hiouchi trails off of 199 merited special recommendations from the North Coast Redwood Interpretive Association.
Laura and I pulled off at the Damnation Creek trailhead Saturday. Our objective was to log another section of the Coastal Trail stretching south from there. Despite the front-page article in that day’s paper, we weren’t really thinking about the timing being perfect to immerse ourselves in a rhodie wonderland. But there it was, starting just a couple hundred feet from the parking area.
It’s hard to beat the redwood-rhodie combination, but it’s also a great time to check out the variety of wildflowers that grace the Myrtle Creek trail off Highway 199, near the turnoff for South Fork and Howland Hill roads. And finally, if you haven’t been to Point St. George recently, a feast of low-slung, rock-clinging wildflowers awaits you.
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June 02, 2009 01:06 pm
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With the helpful information readers provided, I probably could have driven back out to Wonder Stump Road and found the Wonder Stump. Or, as an old postcard described it, the “Del Norte Wonder Stump of Eternal Redwood.”
Somehow, though, it seems more appropriate to leave the subject shrouded in a little of the mysterious fog that pervades and nurtures the redwoods of the North Coast. After all, the folks who research this kind of thing aren’t even sure if they’ve found the tallest of the tallest trees in the world, so what’s wrong with leaving a little wonder in the location of the Wonder Stump?
Besides, like all of us, the Wonder Stump ain’t what it used to be. “It’s about half the size it was,” said one caller.
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May 30, 2009 02:27 pm
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Just when it seemed our leaders had done the ultimate job of botching their responsibility to pay for state government, along comes a still-higher level of ineptitude.
Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal to close almost all state parks is just plain dumb. We could almost forgive him if this fell into the typical cynical realm of making citizens suffer by cutting popular services so that next time they’ll be more supportive of proposed tax increases. But in a remote area such as Del Norte County that is heavily dependent on tourism, a call to close not some of our state parks but all of them amounts to political terrorism on the part of the Terminator.
These are financially desperate times in Sacramento. State leaders spent too much when the treasury was flush, and now revenues are way below what’s needed to support our current level of services and bureaucracy. The governor and legislators have been absolutely hapless in dealing with this situation, first going months past their deadline for adopting a budget, then presenting voters with a hopelessly complicated combination of propositions that wouldn’t have fixed the problem anyway.
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May 28, 2009 10:05 am
There is not much that people from all political parties can agree on. Almost everyone, however, agrees that our state government is broken and is completely unable to address the issues surrounding the budget while ignoring the critical issues of the day such as energy, water, education and health services.
Sacramento lawmakers continue to offer hundreds of bills that cater to special interests yet fail to address the real issues that face Del Norters or Californians. Often these bills are contradictory and when passed, create a lawyer’s dream case that can land in the courts for years. New state mandates are often imposed before the prior reforms have had a chance to work, and they typically give the state control over the details of services delivered at the community level. For school districts, Sacramento now wants to dictate the brand and type of cleaning supplies to be used in Gasquet Mountain School’s bathrooms. That gives you an idea of how much they want to micro-manage and take away local control.
This top-down, centralized governance system is at the root of many of our problems as a state. Community government leaders no longer have the tools to set and fund community priorities and be held accountable to the voters for them. Moreover, the state provides neither adequate funding nor the flexibility in using state funding for effective community service delivery. Sacramento believes that what is good for Los Angeles is good for Crescent City.
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May 26, 2009 10:20 am
When I go home for the night, the next day’s newspaper isn’t finished. That’s the job of Assistant Editor Matthew Durkee and Sports Editor Bill Choy, who work later shifts and produce most of the pages.
This allows for two forms of second-guessing. First, I sometimes find myself thinking of things I forgot or maybe should have done differently. Since Matt and Bill are still there, I can phone in a change. That encourages me to keep thinking about things that I probably should let go of once I walk out the door.
One night Laura and I had two reporters over after work and I mentioned that I still wasn’t satisfied with a headline I’d written for a front-page story. We spent the next half-hour playing something of a party game in which we tried to come up with a better headline. I took the top alternative emerging from the brainstorming and phoned it in to Matt, who talked me into sticking with the original headline.
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May 26, 2009 10:15 am
I was a judge at a polling location in Klamath and yes, about 22 percent of our voting public voted in our precinct.
It was a slow 13-hour day at the polls allowing the one or two voters, at any one time, to make comments about the propositions. The sense I got was that they were going to send a message to Sacramento, not to Washington.
The message involved fiscal responsibility by our state elected officials. The common theme was a need to reduce and control government spending, reduce taxes and stop hiding government finances in rainy day slush funds or unspecified plans that divert large sums of money to the general fund from existing children’s and mental health funds.
Oh, sure we Californians are threatened by our state governor and legislators with reduced services, but like the rest of the country, few will notice any change from the diminished level of service we currently receive.
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May 24, 2009 07:26 pm
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“Support.” “Buying local.” “Championship.”
Divergent ways of defining those words make for three capsules of thought at the beginning of this long Memorial Day weekend.
• “Support”: Just what did it mean when Crescent City Council members stood up along with more than 50 people in the audience Monday to demonstrate their “support” for the Visitors Bureau?
The audience members, after all, showed up to back the bureau’s efforts to gain an ongoing source of funding from the council. Dedication of one-quarter of the city’s revenue from the hotel/motel tax is sought. This would provide the bureau with the financial stability to much more aggressively promote tourism in our area, which would in turn produce more revenue from that hotel/motel tax while boosting the local economy.
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Opinion 
