The Forest Service Is Fast-Tracking a Major Logging Project in One of California's Most Critical Watersheds

The Trinity Divide/Lakehead Fuel Break Project proposes to remove up to 60–70% of the forest canopy from nearly 2,000 acres within a 2,538-acre project area in Northern California without a full environmental review. This area is a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot and a primary wildlife corridor surrounded by heavily logged private timberlands.

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What Is Being Proposed?

The U.S. Forest Service is planning a major ‘fuel reduction’ and logging operation called the Trinity Divide/Lakehead Cooperative Fuel Break Project on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The project would remove up to 60 to 70 percent of the tree canopy across nearly 2,000 acres along ridges, with additional roadside treatments across the remaining acreage of a 2,538-acre project area near Trinity Lake and Interstate 5. Treatment zones would stretch up to 1,000 feet wide. Critically, the agency is trying to fast-track this project using a shortcut called a Categorical Exclusion, which bypasses the full Environmental Assessment that a project of this scale and ecological sensitivity legally requires.

Public comments are due by May 11, 2026.

Your Drinking Water Could Be at Risk

The project area drains directly into Trinity Lake and Shasta Lake, the latter being California's largest reservoir and a cornerstone of the federal Central Valley Project that supplies water to millions of Californians. Stripping forest cover from steep, erodible terrain sends sediment cascading into those reservoirs permanently, since dams trap it rather than letting it move through. 

The Forest Service has not identified or mapped a single riparian buffer, stream, or completed any watershed analysis for this project.The agency's own maps show proposed treatments running directly along the lakeshores, with dozens of stream crossings throughout the footprint. The Trinity River below the dam is already listed as impaired for sediment, and adding large-scale ground disturbance across 2,538 acres of steep headwater terrain raises serious questions about Clean Water Act compliance.

A Critical Wildlife Corridor in a Global Biodiversity Hotspot

The Trinity Divide ridge system is the primary overland wildlife movement corridor linking the Trinity Alps Wilderness, the Castle Crags Wilderness, and the Klamath and Six Rivers National Forests. This landscape provides irreplaceable passage for wide-ranging species, including the gray wolf, Pacific fisher, Pacific marten, and American black bear. 

The upper Trinity watershed supports 232 documented species, 41 of which are rare or threatened. This landscape sits within the Klamath-Siskiyou region, recognized as one of only 36 global biodiversity hotspots on Earth, supporting a remarkable concentration of endemic plant and animal species found nowhere else in the world, including the Shasta snow wreath, found only in a few isolated areas around Shasta Lake. 

The intact forest canopy acts as a thermal refugium, moderating temperatures and maintaining the stable, moist conditions that rare and climate-sensitive species depend on for survival. As climate change forces species toward higher elevations and cooler latitudes, intact forests like this one become increasingly rare and increasingly critical.

The Last Forests Standing

The Trinity Divide is already an island of forest in a sea of industrial clearcuts. The private timberlands surrounding this project have been extensively logged, leaving slopes stripped, canopy gone, the land fragmented, and prone to fire. What remains on the public lands of this once-continuous forest provides vital refuge for wildlife, water, and ecological connectivity. The Forest Service's answer is to remove another 2,500 acres of canopy in this degraded landscape and to use a fast-track approval process that exempts it from considering the cumulative damage.

A Fuel Break Surrounded by Clearcuts Is Not a Fire Plan

The stated goal of the project is wildfire risk reduction, but more than 200 scientists agree that under extreme weather conditions, opening the forest canopy can actually increase fire spread. The fires that threaten communities are not slow-moving surface fires. They are wind-driven events that overwhelm any fuel break in their path. Closed canopies regulate temperature, humidity, and wind, reducing the conditions that drive fire. The Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan itself acknowledges that untreated stands with closed canopies show lower fire severity than treated ones.

The project names real communities at real risk, but the fuel breaks are on backcountry ridgelines, not near the communities they are intended to protect. In a checkerboard landscape where surrounding clearcuts have eliminated canopy across vast stretches of private land, any fuel break network anchored to the National Forest would be fragmented within a permanently flammable landscape that undermines the entire ‘strategic’ premise. 

What You Can Do Before May 11

Join us in urging the Forest Service to conduct a full Environmental Assessment, complete all legally required wildlife consultations, and redesign treatments to align with the locally developed Trinity County Collaborative White Paper, which prescribes narrower, more targeted fuel reduction. The Wintu people, whose ancestral homeland covers the entire project area, must be formally consulted. This forest belongs to all of us as a water source, a wildlife refuge, and an irreplaceable piece of California's natural heritage. 

Send your comment today, and please personalize the letter here, especially if you live near or recreate the areas around Trinity or Shasta Lakes.