Voices of Humboldt County » Illegal logging in Redwood National Park

Humboldt Watershed Council

Illegal logging in Redwood National Park

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Instead of being content with ripping off something that’s not very obvious –
like ginseng – audacious backcountry bandits are cutting down Redwood National and State Parks’ namesake redwood
trees. Yep, that’s right. Crooks are stealing priceless parts of American
heritage, and what is even more disconcerting is that they are taking the very
things that the parks were created to protect.

“It's a huge problem,” Laura Denny, a Redwood park ranger who has
investigated the thefts for the past six years, told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Peter Fimrite. “To
get the wood out, they knock down vegetation and rip up the hillsides. They
leave behind garbage and oil from their chain saws…and the wood they take is
used by other species to survive.” The swath of stolen wood runs for more than 160 miles from Willits,
California, in Mendocino County all the way up the coast to Crescent City, in De
Norte County.

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