BY SEPTEMBER 2021, the community of Lakeview, Ore., was ready for a break. That summer brought one wildfire after another, beginning with a lightning strike on the Fremont-Winema National Forest that sparked the Bootleg Fire, which ultimately consumed more than 413,000 acres. Then there were more — the Log Fire, the Patton Meadow Fire, the Willow Valley Fire — smaller, still-devastating fires that filled the Lakeview area with smoke and burned thousands of acres of forest.

Travis Erickson, lands manager for Collins Timber Company Lakeview forest, remembers that there was no letup until Labor Day, when even the enormous Bootleg Fire had finally gone quiet.

“Locally, Labor Day is a big event where the community comes together,” he says. “Firefighters were exhausted, contractors were exhausted. There was a collective sigh of relief.”

On the ridge behind Erickson, a feller buncher operator uses the machine’s arm to grab onto a standing dead tree, cut through the trunk, and lift it away so easily that the 50-foot-tall tree looks like a twig. These burned trees are ideal tinder for future fires, so Erickson and his team are selectively thinning this tree-choked hillside to lessen the potential danger.

Collins, the forest products company where Erickson has worked for more than 20 years, owns and manages more than 110,000 acres of forest in the Lakeview area. But these landscapes where they’re carefully removing dead and burned wood are U.S. Forest Service lands. In the coming months, Collins will also be planting new seedlings to help the national forest recover.

The answer: The extensive South Central Oregon Integrated Post-Fire Resilience Strategy, developed in 2022 by American Forests in collaboration with the Forest Service, other public and private landowners, and local Tribes. This cross-boundary restoration plan strengthens existing collaborations, brings new energy, science and support to restore the Fremont-Winema, and increases resilience in the face of climate change. According to Markus, the restoration strategy and the partnerships it facilitates are allowing the Forest Service to scale up its restoration efforts to reach its goal: supporting a healthy forest for generations to come.

A strategy across property lines

Markus was already a member of the Klamath-Lake Forest Health Partnership — a nonprofit group of stakeholders which includes state and federal agencies, local watershed councils, conservation organizations, and timber companies in Klamath and Lake Counties — when the 2021 fires struck. Early on, the group recognized that, “if we’re going to restore these landscapes, it needs to include all landowners,” Markus says.

But with such a large footprint of destruction — a total of 660,000 acres lost to wildfires between 2018 and 2021 — they weren’t sure where to begin. That’s when they reached out to American Forests for help.

The American Forests team met with everyone from federal agencies to small, private landowners and began tailoring a restoration strategy to the individual needs of each property and to the forests as a whole. Then Dr. Libby Pansing, American Forests’ director of forest and restoration science, used these conversations along with extensive geospatial modeling and analysis to identify and prioritize areas in need of restoration. The team estimated the types and cost of reforestation approaches needed, and focused on specific areas where replanting trees and removing dead wood and shrubs would boost recovery. Fuel breaks — strips of land where vegetation and debris would be removed to stop fires from spreading — were also identified.

To implement this approach, the partners divided up the entire restoration area into 3,000- to 5,000-acre units, then identified the areas that would receive the most benefit from early reforestation to get seedlings established and prevent the forest from shifting permanently into scrubland.

Putting together such an all-encompassing strategy to help a range of public and private landowners is a massive challenge. But Dr. Brian Morris, American Forests’ senior director of forest restoration, says that the strategy has a secret ingredient: trust.

“It’s a very tight-knit community,” he says. “All of the decision-makers and local experts know each other. Their kids play baseball together, and outside of work they all know each other and trust each other. It’s not their positions. It’s not policy, it’s not procedure, it’s not contracts. It’s these individuals and their relationships with each other, which is why it’s worked.”

Collaboration sparks support for the region

The Cougar Peak Fire burn scar, where Erickson is working today, is one of the high-priority parcels slated for both fuel reduction and replanting efforts. Erickson says that one benefit of the strategy is that it has been a rallying point for more reforestation support.

“That document actually allowed for a lot of funding opportunities to come to the region,” he says. “It’s brought public attention to the region and allowed us to do a lot of the work.”

The strategy has allowed collaboration between Collins and the Forest Service that offers additional benefits. Collins has timber grounds adjacent to several of the national forest restoration units that Erickson is working to reforest. Restoring these neighboring national forest lands through an agreement allows the company to protect its own forests at the same time, since healthy forests provide benefits across boundary lines.

In turn, working with Collins and other partners has been critical to the Forest Service’s capacity to get new trees in the ground, Markus says. Collins has years of experience in growing new trees, as well as the crews that can make reforestation happen quickly. In spring 2025, Erickson and his team will start planting Ponderosa seedlings on the Cougar Peak Fire site.

For Erickson, healthy forests are an essential part of life. Growing up, he recalls the many hours he spent with his grandfather and father in the forests around nearby Burney, Calif. Since then, he’s come to the Fremont-Winema and other forests near Lakeview to pick mushrooms and hunt for deer with his family. When Lakeview’s forests are on fire, it feels personal — wildfires weigh heavily on his own family and on the entire community.

A community dependent on each other, and on forests

Now, Batty’s Tall Town Bike and Camp is Lakeview’s hub for all things recreation, from bikes to skis to sweatshirts supporting the Honkers, the Lakeview High School sports teams.

On just one June afternoon, a couple comes to their store for a fishing license, a girl and her family bring in a pink bike for repair, and a group of women drop off event flyers. Another fishing license gets sold, then a hunting license, then several packets of freeze-dried desserts for camping trips. And then Shelley, who serves as the chair of the Chamber of Commerce, comes in to pick up the shop dog, a friendly husky named Garmin.

All these people also feel the effects of the area’s increasingly intense wildfires.

“The impact of wildfires on recreation is really fairly severe here,” Batty says. The Lakeview area acts as a basin that holds onto the smoke he says, forcing the cancellation of events like annual bike rides and kids’ sports practices. “Even though the fire may be miles away, we’ll get air conditions that people just can’t take.” Batty says that the smoke reduces his activity levels, but for those with health conditions like asthma, “it can really put them down.”

Wildfires’ impacts linger once the smoke clears, too. At the Cougar Peak Fire burn site, Markus points to the blackened Ponderosas around her.

“We now have trails that are in a sea of dead trees, like we’re standing in here,” she says. Along with being dangerous for those in the forest when they topple, fallen trees can also block trail access for hikers, bikers and other trail users. Among the partnership efforts bolstered by the restoration strategy are recreational crews that will clear dead trees and open access for recreation.

Fire ripples out to affect everything living on this land, from the critical habitat that the forest provides for threatened bull trout, to the ability to provide clean water, to the emotional connection to a healthy forest.

“You just see the change on these landscapes and the loss of resources at such a large scale,” Markus says. “And it’s really hard to see that happen.”

Addressing the changes that forests experience after wildfires is one of the reasons that, for the past 20 years, Clif Bar has partnered with American Forests and today is helping to implement the REPLANT Act by supporting restoration on the Fremont-Winema National Forest. Passed in November 2021 as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the REPLANT Act engages partners across the country to rebuild infrastructure and help restore more than 4 million acres of burned national forests, including areas of the Fremont-Winema.

Sarah Beaubien, senior director, Impact and Sustainability, at Mondelez International (which acquired Clif in 2022), says Clif Bar has supported American Forests because of the brand’s connection to adventure and the outdoors. “The forests are a really important place for people to enjoy being active out in nature and doing the things they love to do,” she says.

“Spending time outside can serve as a support for mental health, as people increasingly recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Beaubien says. And for a forest-focused place like Lakeview, wildfires can be disruptive and damage the economy. “Fires negatively affect communities in so many ways, including hurting the broader economy and individual livelihoods. When someone can no longer make a living in their community, it can have a devastating ripple effect,” Beaubien says.

Replanting forests is also a big part of supporting environmental equity and justice for all communities. “It is really important to focus on the ecosystem benefits that forests provide,” she says. “This includes biodiversity as well as access to clean air and water, a basic human right.”

Replanting from the ground up

To help forests continue to provide these services, American Forests is deeply involved in the replanting efforts on the ground near Lakeview. On another June morning, a team in hardhats hikes up a scrub-covered slope past charred Ponderosa and lodgepole pines — reminders of the Barry Point Fire, which burned more than 92,000 acres in 2012.

The crew on the hillside is pulling tape and marking trees to designate a potential spot for future restoration — work that’s tied directly to the restoration strategy. Above them, early-morning light turns the rocky outcropping at the top of the hill a rosy gold. But the team is focused on navigating the terrain, grown thick with manzanita and ceanothus in the dozen years since the fire.

The trees themselves will have trouble returning on their own without help. The combination of the extensive fires on the Fremont-Winema and the increasingly hotter, drier conditions brought on by climate change “results in a situation where natural regeneration — just letting nature do its thing — doesn’t work anymore,” says Morris.

That’s where this crew comes in. During the spring, they’ve been driving the Forest Service roads with binoculars in hand, looking for cone-bearing trees.

“Most of the seeds that the Forest Service uses to grow new seedlings are wild-collected from the forest,” says Joe Schafer, American Forests’ reforestation manager, who’s leading the crew. With so many trees lost, along with limited resources for collecting in the past, he says, “our seed supply has been rapidly dwindling.”

There’s hope: 2024 has brought an unusually large crop of cones. Austin Rose, an American Forests reforestation coordinator who’s been working on the Fremont-Winema for the past two years, can hardly contain his glee when he talks about what they’ve been seeing.

“This has been an absolutely extraordinary year for cones,” he says. “In previous years, there have maybe been 100 to 200 trees that are coning on the entire forest. This year, we’re looking at potentially thousands of coning trees.”

Rose reaches up with a pole pruner to cut off a cluster of cones from a Ponderosa pine. Then American Forests’ Bjorn Erickson — one of Travis Erickson’s two sons, both of whom are on this crew — slices open a cone, the way that the team determines whether the tree will be a good candidate for cone collection.

What they don’t want to see are signs of insect infestation, like boreholes from beetle larva, or other infection. But this cone looks perfect: Over the course of the next few minutes, the exposed white center will begin to oxidize, turning golden, then brown. The seeds stay milky white, a sign that the tree will likely provide healthy seeds later in the season that can grow into hearty seedlings.

Seeding the future

Come September, the team will go into collection mode alongside a Utah-based team of climbing cone collectors. The cones will head to Oregon seed processing facilities where the seeds will be extracted from the cones and then transported to nurseries to be grown into seedlings that can help this forest regain its footing. Together, the Fremont-Winema National Forest and American Forests are working to select the best trees for the region, which includes projecting what the forest and the climate will look like in the coming years.

To that end, the entire forest recovery team is working with the future in mind, selecting trees that might be the most resilient in the future. Doing so may mean that the seedlings planted here may come from another place in the Fremont-Winema where trees are growing under hotter, drier conditions already — a restoration strategy known as assisted migration.

Restoring these forests in the face of climate change will require careful planning and years of effort. But the people in this community moving forward with the reforestation strategy have already shown that they’re in it for the long haul, together. “Oftentimes, we use the word collaboration, and I think it makes people feel good,” says Erickson. “But when it actually works, as we’re seeing on these projects, it’s very powerful.”

Cameron Walker writes from California and is the author of the children’s book “National Monuments of the U.S.A.”