Cleveland National Forest 15-Year Plan Unveiled

The U.S. Forest Service has released its 15-year plan for the Cleveland National Forest--a plan that offers concessions to environmentalists while still increasing access for campers and off-road vehicles.

The final report, made up of three large paperbound volumes, details plans for the 567,000-acre reserve that stretches across Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties. It was approved last month by Zane G. Smith Jr., Pacific Southwest regional forester, after five years of studies, planning and public comments.

A draft of the plan, issued a year ago, drew fire from environmentalists who said planners had tried to please too many special interests at the expense of the forest’s overall quality.

Many of the environmentalists’ suggestions are incorporated in the final plan, including tighter controls on target shooting, cattle grazing and chaparral harvesting. However, the plan does not designate two new wilderness areas that the Sierra Club and others had strongly advocated.

“I think the plan is significantly improved over the draft,” said Ken Croker, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Cleveland National Forest committee. “Most of our criticisms . . . were addressed in the final plan.”

Still, one very important question remains: In an era of federal budget cuts, can the Forest Service afford to carry out its wide-ranging plans for the Cleveland?

The management plan projects an $11.4-million annual budget for the forest, but the funds available--this year about $7 million--have been declining steadily since 1980, said Bob King, assistant planner at the Cleveland’s San Diego headquarters.

Forest officials expect a slight increase next year, to about $7.4 million--still about a third less than in the management plan. That kind of shortfall, King said, will slow the plan’s implementation, but will not cause a decline in the forest’s environment.

“I have some concern that they will not divvy up the pie in an equitable manner when they come up short,” Croker said. Programs like habitat enhancement and public access improvement may get smaller slices when they have to compete for funds with “necessary” programs like fire suppression, he said.

About 10 million people live within a two-hour drive of the forest, which includes mountainous, mostly chaparral-covered land that is home to many endangered plant species, such as the Tecate cypress.

“Above all,” Regional Forester Smith wrote in his decision to approve the plan, “the Cleveland National Forest offers this large population area an escape from an urban environment into a quality natural environment.”

Access to the some of the forest’s rolling foothills, rugged mountains and steep canyons has been limited, however, by inadequate or closed roads and blocked by adjacent private property owners. The management plan calls for resurfacing, realigning and widening the Cleveland’s most-traveled roads, and for gaining public access to roads that cross private lands.

The Forest Service has a spotty track record on public access, Croker said, citing the planned closure of Skyline Drive by Riverside County. Beginning this fall, Croker said, the northern Santa Ana Mountains will be virtually impossible to reach once the county blocks the dirt road that climbs into the forest from the Corona foothills.

Riverside County supervisors ordered the winding road closed, citing potential liability for accidents. A road from the Orange County side, through Black Star Canyon, is open only a few weeks each year.

Environmentalists still object that the plan does not expand the portion of the national forest designated as wilderness--which would preserve it in its natural state. Four wilderness areas now account for about 18% of the Cleveland.

The final plan does recommend setting aside five areas totaling 2,271 acres to protect significant natural ecosystems.

Among them are King Creek, a 750-acre area that includes all the forest’s stands of rare Cuyamaca cypress, which is proposed as a research area; Organ Valley, a 600-acre area on Black Mountain that includes a large grove of Engelmann oaks, native only to Southern California and northern Baja California; and the west fork of the San Luis Rey River, the only wild trout fishery in the national forest.

The plan also recommends an expanded and improved trail system, more developed recreation facilities, adding 31 miles to the forest’s 107 miles of off-road vehicle routes, modest increases in the grazing program with environmental safeguards and limits on harvesting chaparral as a potential energy source.

Even though the plan acknowledges that San Diego County suffers a shortage of land for off-road vehicle use, off-roaders believe it still fails to set aside enough additional space for them.

“It’s short and it’s going to cause them problems,” said Lynn Brown, land-use adviser for the San Diego Off-Road Vehicle Coalition. A shortage of designated areas for off-roaders to use, Brown predicted, will lead to misuse of other areas of the forest.

“There’s far too much wilderness” in the Cleveland National Forest, Brown said.

But the forest planners did take some of the off-roaders’ suggestions, Brown added. They improved the layout of trails near El Capitan Reservoir with added loops, for example, and set aside a corridor of land for a possible trail connection between Corral Canyon and Bureau of Land Management territory just east of the national forest.

An appeal period for the plan closes July 17.