Balancing Recreation, Preservation Interests in National Forest

Federal land-use planners have prepared a 50-year management plan for the Cleveland National Forest, an area that accounts for 10% of San Diego County but is not much of a forest--if you’re looking for lots of tall trees. The planners essentially want to preserve the forest as one of the region’s most precious open spaces while offering more space to campers and cattle in the years to come.

But the small yet vocal Mountain Defense League, a 12-year-old citizens group that serves as a watchdog over back-country development, says the National Forest Service’s plan for Cleveland goes overboard in trying to please too many special interest groups, at the expense of the forest itself.

If forest planners go through with their management scenario, “the overall and ultimate result . . . will be a forest that is unnatural in character and badly degraded in quality,” said Byron F. Lindsley Jr., director of the league.

Lindsley said he acknowledges the longstanding federal policy that national forests should be tapped for as many uses as possible--unlike national parks, which are intended to preserve areas for their natural beauty. But, Lindsley said, “the proposed management plan takes the multiple-use concept to the extreme. It attempts to take all uses that could be applied anywhere in Southern California and jam them into the Cleveland National Forest.”

Lindsley is among roughly 130 people and public agencies who have responded to the Forest Service’s proposed management plan and its accompanying environmental impact statement. The public comment period on the plan closed Friday, and now the planners will undertake to answer the criticisms made by Lindsley and the others.

Management plans for all national forests were mandated by Congress in 1976, and preliminary work on Cleveland got under way in 1979. Once completed, it will serve as a policy framework for managing the land and resources found within the forest through the year 2030. Of the 20 national forests in California, the Cleveland plan is closest to completion.

Steve Winslow, the assistant forest planner for Cleveland, said the challenge to the Forest Service staff was to balance the increasing demands on the forest while preserving its environment, including wildlife, vegetation, watershed and air quality.

“People don’t want to destroy the forest, yet they want to use it more and more. And that’s what we have to balance.”

The forest is divided into three parts: the Descanso District, including Mt. Laguna in East County; the Palomar District, including Palomar Mountain in North County, and the Trabuco district, which straddles the Orange-Riverside County line and dips into a bit of Camp Pendleton.

The forest comprises 420,000 acres, 279,000 of which are in San Diego County, making it the second largest piece of property in the county behind the 520,000-acre Anza-Borrego State Park.

The territory that makes up the Cleveland National Forest was government-owned forest preserves established in 1897. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt consolidated them, naming the forest after President Grover Cleveland.

Originally, the forest was valued as a watershed, to provide water for the lowlands, and the forest rangers’ jobs were to fight fires in the summer and build fire access roads during the winter. In more recent years, with the growth of Southern California, attention turned to integrating grazing and recreational uses.

Unlike national forests in Northern California and elsewhere in the United States, there is no commercial lumbering in Cleveland. In fact, chaparral covers 88% of the forest, with conifer forests appearing only at the higher elevations, such as Mt. Laguna and Palomar Mountain.

About 820 acres in the forest are set aside as developed campgrounds; over the years, another 476 acres will be added, Winslow said.

The Forest Service wants to eventually double the number of cattle grazing on forest land, partly because of controlled brush fires in currently unusable rangeland. The fires will burn older, larger vegetation and allow for the new growth of fresh and more palatable grass and brush, Winslow said, thereby opening up additional acreage to livestock.

Controlled burns, in which fires are intentionally set during favorable weather conditions to burn away years of vegetation growth, will also become more commonplace as the Forest Service works to control forest fires, he said.

“It’s better to burn it when we can control it, rather than to allow the brush to grow to such heights and density that it becomes a fire hazard which we can’t control,” he said.

To help control the prescribed burns, the number of brush-cleared fuel breaks will be about doubled in the forest. “That will have some visual effect, but that’s the trade-off if you want to control your forest fires,” Winslow said.

Opportunities for off-road vehicle enthusiasts will be enhanced by the expansion of the Corral Canyon facility from 1,200 acres to 1,800 acres. However, the number of forest trails open to off-road vehicles will be reduced from 107 miles--which includes trails open to regular passenger vehicles as well--to 85 miles, which will be available exclusively for off-road vehicles.

“There will be fewer ORV trail miles, but they will offer a better off-road experience,” he said.

“One of the criticisms of the management plan is that we’re not specific enough about the future, despite the size of the document,” Winslow said. “But that was a conscientious decision on our part, so we can manage the future with some flexibility.”

Lindsley, the director of the Mountain Defense League, called the management plan the most confusing document he has read in years.

“We’re not in fundamental disagreement with the mandate of the Forest Service, which is that Cleveland have multiple uses. But you have to limit multiple uses within the realities of the land you’re managing.

“And the problem with this plan is that it’s a creature of the present (Reagan) Administration. You don’t destroy a village in order to save it, yet the Forest Service is trying to accommodate all of the pressures to use the forest for special interests, which can’t be done. They will inevitably destroy the land.”

Specifically, Lindsley says he is concerned about increased water pollution, loss of wildlife habitat, disturbance to sensitive wildlife and erosion brought on by increased camping, grazing, controlled fires and vehicular traffic.

“It would be better to limit the number of users and protect the National Forest so that visitors will have a high-quality experience, rather than to allow such high levels of use that the quality of experience for visitors is seriously degraded.”