Located in the northeast corner of California, Modoc County is one of the last places in the state that deserves the title “cowboy country.” This high desert is home to sagebrush steppes, juniper and pine forests, and wide expanses of rangeland where cattle roam the lava-shaped landscape. The Pit River originates here, on the slopes of the Warner Mountains and surrounding volcanic hills, before flowing south to contribute source waters to Lake Shasta and the State Water Project. This is the site of CalTrout’s first meadows project outside of the Sierra Nevada – the Modoc Plateau Meadows Assessment and Restoration Design Project.
The project applies the model developed by CalTrout in the Sierra Nevada which streamlines the meadow restoration cycle by first identifying, assessing, and prioritizing meadows for restoration, then completing restoration design and environmental compliance for the priority meadows. By project’s end in early 2019, four meadows will be brought to “shovel ready” status. As part of the project’s working group, agency staff from the Modoc National Forest, California Department of Water Resources, National Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management are building their capacity to plan and carry out meadow restoration on both Federal and private lands.
RESTORATION
WRITTEN BY
Phoenix Isler
Mt. Shasta Project Manager
Phoenix istarted working with CalTrout in 2016 as a hydrologist contractor and then became a staff member in July of 2017