You know better than anyone what kind of management work you’ve done in your forest, and what sorts of financial and ecological results its produced. Your closest forest-owning neighbor might have taken a different approach but ended up with similar results.

Fire is as natural a part of Pacific Northwest forests as the rain and sun. ​And while the type and frequencies of wildfire differs east and west of the Cascades, landowners everywhere can prepare their homes and forests for wildfire if it arrives.

Tree by tree, Tierra Learning Center is coaxing 250 acres of dark dense woods into open forests with room for larger trees and resilience to wildfire. Tucked amid the picturesque hills of Sunitsch Canyon, just a few miles up the Chumstick Valley outside of Leavenworth, there is a collaborative community of artists, educators, learners, farmers, and land stewards. This is Tierra Learning Center, a member of NNRG’s Forest Stewardship Council® group certificate, where care takers are carrying out fuel reduction and thinning projects to protect the community and help the forest regain characteristics of wildfire resilience. Signpost with some of Tierra

Imagine stepping into your forest at night and being utterly swarmed by flies, mosquitoes, beetles, and moths. Glad that’s not the case? Thank a bat. Bats flit through our Pacific Northwest forests every night, but it’s easy to forget they exist. After all, we almost never encounter them (except on October 31st, when they appear taped to our windows, carved into pumpkins, and ringing our doorbells begging for candy). And yet—if all bats disappeared overnight, we’d likely notice their absence very quickly as insect populations boomed and our evening walks became nightly games of “let’s see who can carry on a