A Site Visit Showcasing Shared Stewardship and the Launch of the OrCal Regional Restoration Forest Resilience Bond

Published May 15, 2026

Lomakatsi was honored to coordinate and co-host a multi-day site visit at the end of April with federal agency, NGO, and tribal partners to highlight successful partnerships that are advancing forest stewardship to protect natural resources, lives, and livelihoods working across all-lands. We were joined by leadership from the U.S. Forest Service Washington D.C. and Pacific Region offices, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and elected tribal, state and municipal leaders, and many other great partners.

The site visit began with a kickoff in Ashland, OR celebrating Forests250, hosted by Lomakatsi, Blue Forest, Society of American Foresters Siskiyou Chapter, City of Ashland, the Inter-Tribal Ecosystem Restoration Partnership, and the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. Then over the next two days we visited stewardship project sites where hazardous fuels reduction, prescribed fire, commercial thinning, and post-fire restoration are occurring on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest and Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon, and the Modoc National Forest and Fort Bidwell Indian Reservation in northeast California. The visit highlighted the success of the conservation finance partnership between Blue Forest and Lomakatsi with the launch of the new OrCal Regional Restoration Forest Resilience Bond that will support Lomakatsi’s cash flow as we manage our in-house crews and forestry services and timber industry contractors working throughout the region.

The first site visit was to the Ashland Forest All-Lands Restoration Project, near the Lower East View Trailhead, where the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest recently completed an understory prescribed burn, with support from a Lomakatsi inter-tribal crew funded through Oregon Conservation Corps. Partners shared about the legacy of this project that has become a national model for collaborative forest health and community wildfire risk reduction efforts.

In the afternoon, we visited Edison Chiloquin Trust Lands, an ancestral Klamath tribal village site traditionally known as “plaikni koke,” where Lomakatsi has been partnering with the family of Edison Chiloquin and the Fremont-Winema National Forest to reduce wildfire risk, improve forest health and conduct ecocultural restoration stewardship projects. We heard from Monica Super and other members of the Trust Lands Board about the power of this special place of healing and ceremony for the Klamath tribal community.

Then we traveled to a nearby area of the Chiloquin Wildland Urban Interface Project where Lomakatsi is working with Forest Service timber staff to manage ecological forestry operations as part of commercial logging across 994 acres on the Fremont-Winema National Forest, estimated to produce 3.5 million board feet of timber through a contract with Gilchrist Forest Products, Inc. of Gilchrist, OR, with operations subcontracted to Wampler – supporting local timber businesses and mill infrastructure.

The next day, the Fort Bidwell Indian Community Council and Lomakatsi hosted a day-long site visit to six stops on the tribal trust lands of the Fort Bidwell Indian Reservation and adjacent Modoc National Forest lands to showcase our strong partnerships, with the Modoc National Forest and the Applegate BLM Field Office, based in Cedarville, CA. We started near the origin of the 2022 Barnes Fire that burned from the Modoc National Forest toward the Reservation, narrowly missing the community. That near miss pushed the Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band of the Fort Bidwell Indian Community, the Modoc National Forest, and Lomakatsi to accelerate joint wildfire‑risk planning that resulted in a 9,178‑acre Tribal Forest Protection Act (TFPA) project on adjacent Forest Service lands, and more recently a 1,878-acre TFPA project on BLM lands also adjacent to the Reservation, reducing fuels to form a coordinated, landscape-scale defense around Fort Bidwell.

We are grateful to the many partners who travelled near and far to visit these project sites and discuss how we can continue to strengthen partnerships to protect communities and natural resources from wildfire.