Mission
Siskiyou Mountain Club is a 501(c)(3) public charity that formed to restore, maintain, and promote primitive trails in the Siskiyou backcountry and beyond. We coordinate stewardship projects with volunteers, staff, and interns; publish maps and outdoor information, and lead service-adventure for the public.
What we do: Long live the backwoods trails
We coordinate with staff, volunteers, interns, and other partners who do the hard work it takes to keep trails from disappearing from the remote corners of Southwest Oregon and Northwest California. They participate in trips of varying length and put the labor in to keep our trails alive.
First we identify backcountry and wilderness trail networks that have redeeming qualities but are in poor shape or impassable. In most cases, these Forest Service trails have been burned over and left for nature to swallow. Often, we are working on trails that have experienced decades of neglect. We go in and do the work, and then some trails make it into our promise.
The trail promise
When we adopt a trail or trail section, it becomes part of our promise. That means we will maintain it no less than once every three years. View a map of the region and the trails we maintain with current conditions.
History
We started in 2010 as a small group of volunteers determined to restore a single route through the infamous Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area. Since then we’ve become the area’s only organization dedicated to wilderness and trail stewardship. We are leading the way to preserving the most threatened trails throughout Southwest Oregon and Northwest California.
Civil Rights and Social Justice
We believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We subscribe to the founding principles of American Democracy, that all humans are born with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Siskiyou Mountain Club also acknowledges that those founding principles have not been lived up to. We recognize the injustices and atrocities that are part of our history and continue to occur daily in America. We take to heart our responsibility to drive our communities and our Nation toward a more just and equitable society through self-governance.
Moreover, we recognize that our mission is stronger with diverse representation at every level of our organization. Statements and gestures alone will not bring us closer toward justice, and we aim to extend the legacies of America’s great civil rights leaders, as well as their habits of relentless service.
We thus commit to:
- Attracting and retaining individuals with diverse racial, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds to operate at all levels of our organization, including the hemispheres of board, staff, interns, volunteers, and program participants
- Developing and implementing creative strategies that break down barriers for new demographics and communities to engage with public lands and wilderness
- Building partnerships with community and national organizations that align with these ideals
Land Acknowledgment
We work in the ancestral lands of the Karuk, Yurok, Shasta, Modoc, Tolowa Dee-ni’, Takelma, Chit-dee-ni (Chetco), Cow Creek Umpqua, and Tutuni societies, and we acknowledge the nuance of wilderness ethics and that wilderness is a white social construct.
We acknowledge the public lands narrative can be associated with oppression and the unjust displacement of Native communities. We dream of a more just future, where all people feel safe, welcome, and free in America’s great public lands.
Backcountry is some of the last common ground left in America, and we believe in the core principle of the 1964 Wilderness Act, passed “to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.” We recognize that we are visitors to these places and we honor the cultural landscapes in which we operate.
