Federal funding cuts are crushing California's small mountain towns [View all]

[Cattledog]

Michelle Beutler cleared 67 trees off a U.S. Forest Service road in two days. It was the spring of 2023, after a record-breaking winter in the Stanislaus National Forest in California’s Sierra Nevada. Beutler, 59, worked alone with a chain saw to remove every fallen tree on a 10-mile stretch of road between the town of Long Barn in Tuolumne County and the popular Hull Creek Campground. She single-handedly finished the work so the road could open in time for Memorial Day.

As a recreation technician based out of the Summit Ranger Station in the Stanislaus National Forest, Beutler’s job was to clean toilets, pick up trash and maintain recreation sites and campgrounds up and down Sonora Pass. She’d typically drive her Forest Service truck 100 miles a day. She sprayed pit toilets with a fire hose. She wiped away graffiti and removed thousands of pounds of house trash, old furniture and useless stuff that people dumped in the forest. She extinguished hundreds of abandoned and illegal campfires. She assisted law enforcement during emergency accidents, helping officers navigate a swath of rugged forest land that she grew up on and knows intimately.

But last week, Beutler lost her job. The Trump administration has fired thousands of people like Beutler who work for the Forest Service, hollowing out an agency that manages 193 million acres of land across the country — roughly equivalent to the size of Texas. California’s 18 national forests alone add up to 20 million acres.

Beutler was one of two recreation technicians in the Summit Ranger District. They both lost their jobs this week.
“There’s nobody left in our position to go out and do the work that we did,” Beutler said, noting that trash will accumulate and toilets in campgrounds will fester.

“Don’t go camping this summer, I wouldn’t advise it,” she added.

https://www.sfgate.com/california/article/calif-mountain-towns-in-trouble-after-federal-cuts-20177786.php