The short version: Siskiyou, our community app for Siskiyou County, is in beta on iPhone and iPad. You can sign up to test it at siskiyou.app, and you can support the launch with a one-time contribution of $10, $25, or $50.
Siskiyou County is 6,347 square miles. It has more than a dozen communities strung along I-5 and tucked into the valleys and canyons on either side, from Yreka to Mount Shasta to Happy Camp, and until now it has never had a front page.
If you live here you know the routine. The news is scattered across a handful of small outlets, a few dozen Facebook groups, and county and city websites that were not built for finding things quickly. The board of supervisors meets, a city council votes on something that affects your street, a farmers market moves, a road closes for a burn, and you find out a week later from a neighbor. The information exists. It has just never been in one place.
Siskiyou is that place.
What it does
We built the app around the questions people here actually ask.
What's going on? Siskiyou pulls in local news from more than forty sources across the county and sorts it by town and by topic, so the Weed feed is about Weed and the Scott Valley feed is about Scott Valley.
What's happening this weekend? A county-wide event calendar, with a map view and one-tap calendar sync, covering every town. If you run a venue, a market, a show, or a fundraiser, you can submit your own events from the app.
What did they decide? Every public meeting in the county, city councils and the board of supervisors included, summarized in plain language you can read in a minute: the agenda, the vote, the part that affects you. The full transcript is there too if you want it.
Is there a fire? Priority push alerts for wildfire, evacuation, and severe weather, because up here that is not a nice-to-have.
Who do I ask? Walter, the Local Guide. Ask in plain English and get a local answer: what's open late in Dunsmuir, when the next supervisors meeting is, whether the pass is clear. Walter knows the area the way someone who has lived here for years does.
There are obituaries too, free and visible for a year, because a county this small should not charge families to say goodbye. And a desktop companion site is being built alongside the public launch, with the same news, events, and meeting summaries in a layout that is easier on long reads.
Why we are building it
Wise Mountain is a design studio in Mount Shasta. The lab side of the studio builds our own software, and Siskiyou is the product we are proudest of, because it is for the place we live.
It started with South Siskiyou News. When a consolidated national news corporation bought the Mt. Shasta Herald and gutted its local coverage, we built a digital community newspaper for the south county so residents could get the who, what, when, and where of their own towns back. That project taught us two things: people here are hungry for real local information, and one website for one end of the county was never going to be enough.
Siskiyou is the whole county, in your pocket.
Where it is right now
The app has been in private beta since July 2025 with a small group of testers on iPhone and iPad, and we are widening that group now. Public launch on the iOS App Store is next, with subscriptions opening in early 2027 at $3 a month and community pricing for people who need it. Android testing opens after the public launch.
How to join the beta
- Go to siskiyou.app and tap Sign up for the beta.
- Create your account. iPhone and iPad testers get in right away.
- On Android? Sign up anyway and choose Android, and you will get an email the moment Android testing opens.
Then use it like a local. Check the events before the weekend. Read a meeting summary instead of the minutes. Ask Walter something hard. Submit the thing that is missing. The beta exists to find the gaps, and the people who know the gaps are the people who live here.
How to support the launch
Getting a county-wide platform from a working beta to a public launch costs real money: the infrastructure, the App Store release, the ongoing work of covering every town. Client work funds most of the lab, but Siskiyou is a community project, and we want the community to be able to stand behind it.
If you would like to help, you can contribute:
These are contributions toward the launch, not pre-orders: they do not buy a subscription, they help the app reach everyone in the county. The details are on our pre-order terms page, and the same tiers live on the products page.
If you are a local publisher, a venue, a district, or a town that wants to be covered better, get in touch. And if you are a neighbor who just wants to know what is going on, the beta is waiting.