California State Parks’ Program, Coordinated with CalFire — Recent Operations Focused in the Santa Cruz Mountains
California State Parks crews are continuing to conduct pile-burning work across the state. The most recent announcement is that they are targeting the Santa Cruz Mountains with pile burns planned across Big Basin Redwoods, Castle Rock, and Henry Cowell (including the Fall Creek unit). Operations are planned, as weather and air-quality windows allow, through April 2026. This is hands-on fuel reduction; not spectacle, not a shortcut, but a deliberate effort to remove the dry wood and brush fuel that can turn a lightning strike or a stray ember into a catastrophic, large-scale, landscape-devouring wildfire.
The holiday season is a perfect excuse to get out into the mountains — and Plumas National Forest is making it easy. Christmas tree permits are on sale now for $10 each at local forest offices or online through 
Bring home a real tree and help the forest at the same time! 
The Johnson Valley community has been holding its breath these past months as the U.S. Marine Corps’ Special Use Airspace proposal, R2509, moves through the public process. After an intense wave of local comments and outreach, momentum slowed during the government shutdown — but the Marines have since released public fact sheets about the proposal. That put new material in front of the public, and it’s precisely the sort of moment when clear information matters most.
Built where the Nisenan village of Ustumah once stood, Nevada built itself around gold and water with the first sawmill and the Gold Tunnel on Deer Creek arriving in 1850, and it became the engine of California’s mining world. The town was incorporated in 1856 and added “City” to the name in 1864 to avoid confusion with California, a neighboring state.