Most people will never get the chance to visit southwest Oregon's infamous, gargantuan, congressionally designated Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area, and of those few who do, even fewer will see its remote interior.

One of my first jobs after leaving high school was working as a firefighter, traveling in an old, prison-issued, inmate bus that held 20 men going from fire to fire all over Northern California.

The Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion is well known for harboring a multitude of conifer species — 35 to be exact. Many of those species are rare on Earth, and some, such as the Brewer spruce, grow nowhere else in the world.