Most of us know that forests are good for water: they catch rain and snow, soak it in and slowly release it throughout the year. But did you know that forests—especially intact, structurally complex mature forests—actually make the rain as well?

Protecting the Blue Mountains is not just about protecting the landscapes themselves. It is also about protecting the intricate biological system that keeps everything downstream alive.

Forests as Water Towers

Think of a high mountain forest as a sponge built out of trees, soil, fallen logs, shrubs, moss and fungus. Lots and lots of fungus. Rain and snow land on a closed canopy that slows them down. The water soaks into deep, organic soils woven with roots and fungal threads. Some of it is taken up by trees and exhaled back into the sky. The rest moves slowly downhill, through the soil, into headwater streams and down into aquifers. The stored water is released gradually, even through the dry months of late summer when nothing is falling from above.

That slow release is what keeps a river cold, clean, and running year-round. It is what fills a salmon redd in August. It is what comes out of the tap in a town fifty miles downstream.

Roads and Logging Break the Sponge

A forest’s water output depends on the canopy staying closed and the soil staying in place. When a forest is logged or fragmented by roads, the sponge starts to fail.

Logging roads, in particular, are dramatic: studies have measured erosion rates on roaded landscapes up to 850% higher than undisturbed forest. Sediment scours streams, fills reservoirs, kills aquatic insects and fish eggs, and requires much more costly drinking water treatment.

Salem, Oregon, spent roughly $100 million on new treatment facilities after logging in the upper Santiam watershed contributed to mass sedimentation following the 1996 floods. Seattle, by contrast, deferred a $150 million filtration-plant expenditure by decommissioning 300 miles of road in its watershed and limiting high-risk activity.

The lesson of the last century is that the cheapest, most reliable water infrastructure we have is the forest itself — and that the cost of degrading it is borne for decades by the people downstream.

A protected forest is a piece of public water infrastructure. We should plan it that way.

Forests Make Rain

Here is the part that most people have never heard.

When a forest stores water and breathes it back into the atmosphere, a process called evapotranspiration, that water does not just disappear. It moves downwind. Globally, about 40% of the rain that falls on land comes from water that was first lifted from another stretch of land upwind. Forests recycle moisture across continents.

Air that has passed over intact forest produces far more precipitation downwind than air that has passed over deforested land. Across the world, the broad correlation between losing forest cover and losing reliable rainfall is undeniable. The Sahel, the Mediterranean basin, much of the American West, and parts of the loess plateau of China all tell the same cautionary tale: when the forests go, the inland dries. Deforestation and desertification, again and again, go together.

A forest is not just where the rain falls. It is part of the apparatus that brings the rain inland.

The Biomechanics of Rainmaking

On its own, atmospheric water vapor does not create rain. It needs “nuclei” to condense around to form droplets, then clouds. The majority of these cloud-seeding nuclei are the products of biological functions, called “bioaerosols.”

The more we learn about this strange, beautiful process, the more we find that mature forests produce the highest proportion of these bioaerosols. Researchers studying the air above forests have found, for example, that mushroom spores, of all things, are one of the most effective natural cloud-condensation seeds we know of. The numbers are almost hard to believe.

The implication: in forests big and biodiverse enough to host abundant mushrooms, there is a positive feedback loop in the sky. Rain stimulates fungal fruiting. Fruiting mushrooms release spores. Spores ride updrafts into clouds, seed condensation, and help make the next rain. The forest is, in a literal way, breathing weather.

Logging in old, intact forests does not just remove the trees. It removes the ecological foundation of the forests’ living hydrology. It dries out the understory and slows nutrient cycling. It compacts and disturbs the soil where fungal networks live. It strips out the standing dead wood and downed logs that countless basidiomycete species depend on. The mushrooms vanish. So do their spores. So does whatever modest contribution they were making to the rain over the next stretch of country downwind.

Not All Forests Are Equal

A tree plantation, hydrologically, is nothing like an old-growth stand.

Old-growth and primary forests carry much more of the biodiversity that the water cycle quietly depends on—by whole orders of magnitude. Their canopies are deeper and more complex. Their soils are older, deeper, and threaded with fungal networks that have been building for centuries. They hold more standing snags and downed wood, the substrate for the saprotrophic and mycorrhizal fungi that release the cloud-seeding spores.

Plantation monocultures lack the diversity and species density to support this complex rainmaking machinery. Instead, they hyperventilate, pumping excess water into the air without the cooling effect of condensation, creating a feedback cycle of desiccation that takes generations to restore. Replacing an old forest with a plantation, in water terms, is not replacing it at all.

In the Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains sit on the wet side of a vast, dry interior. The water that runs off their slopes feeds the John Day, the Grande Ronde, the Umatilla, the Walla Walla, the Imnaha, the Powder, the Wallowa, the Burnt, the Malheur — and through them, the agricultural valleys, the towns, and the salmon runs of eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. The North Fork John Day, headwatered here, is the longest undammed river in Oregon.

These forests are already doing the work. The cold, clean water flowing out of the Eagle Cap and the Wenaha-Tucannon and the Strawberries is the most valuable infrastructure in the region. The closed-canopy mesic stands — grand fir, spruce, hemlock, mixed conifer — that researchers have found to run roughly 12°F cooler in summer than the surrounding dry pine type are doing temperature work that downstream salmon and downstream people will rely on more and more as the climate warms. And the immense fungal community living in their soils and their snags is part of a much larger atmospheric system providing rain to the rest of the continent, the full extent of which we are only beginning to map.

What the Blue Mountains stand to lose under continued road-building, logging, and weakening protections is not just any one of these things. It is the whole interlocked system.

What the Forest Plan can lock in

Treating the forest as water infrastructure means asking the Forest Plan Revision for four specific things.

1. First: protect the headwaters. Roadless watersheds in mountain country are what scientists call “hydrologic hotspots” — small in spatial extent, disproportionately large in the volume and reliability of clean water they produce. Once they are roaded or logged, much of what they do cannot be repaired on any human timescale. Treat them as the natural reservoirs they are.

2. Second: apply enforceable standards — not soft guidelines — to riparian buffers, mature mesic stands, and roadless lands. Standards are enforceable. Guidelines can be set aside on a project-by-project basis. The water cycle does not care about that distinction; it just responds to whether the canopy stayed closed and the soils stayed intact.

3. Third: stop building new roads, and decommission roads in damaged watersheds where the cost-benefit analysis already favors it. Road density correlates more directly than almost any other variable with the loss of clean, cold water from these forests.

4. Fourth: protect the structurally complex old and mature forests as a matter of water policy as well as climate policy. They hold the canopy, the deep soil, the moisture, the biodiversity and the structural complexity that the water cycle relies on. They are not interchangeable with plantations. The plan should never pretend they are.

The trees and the rivers and the mushrooms already do their part. The plan we choose decides whether they get to keep doing it.

It is easy to think of conservation as a defensive crouch — a perpetual scramble to slow the damage. The water story is a different kind of story. It is a story about a system that already works, that does immensely valuable things every day for everyone downstream and downwind, and that costs us nothing to keep. All we have to do is let it stay whole.

The Blue Mountains, today, are still whole enough to keep being one of the great water towers and quiet rainmakers of the interior West. The next forest plan decides whether that stays true.

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In a landscape of unbroken forest blocks linked by intact corridors, animals can do what they have always done: move. They move with the seasons. They move to find mates, food, and water. They move to recover from drought, from fire, from disturbance. And, more and more, they move because the climate is moving under their feet.

A forest reserve system does two things at once: it gives wildlife places to stay, and it gives them ways to get there.

Two concepts sit at the heart of how conservation biologists now think about a warming world. The first is the climate refugium, a place that buffers what is happening around it. A deep, north-facing canyon where the snow lingers longer. The shaded interior of an old, mesic forest where summer temperatures run cooler than in the surrounding country. A high-elevation cirque, a cold spring, a stream tucked under a closed canopy. Refugia are the slow zones in a fast-changing landscape, the places where a species can hang on while the climate shifts around it.

The second is the connectivity corridor: an intact, traversable belt of habitat that links refugia together and links core wild areas together. Corridors are how wildlife actually gets from where it is to where it will need to be.

Refugia without corridors are islands. Corridors without refugia lead nowhere. Together, they form the architecture of a resilient landscape that can hold change.

The Blue Mountains are extraordinary corridor country.

Most western mountain ranges run north and south. That north–south orientation roughly matches the direction species generally need to shift as the climate warms: uphill and poleward. The Blue Mountains are different. They run east and west.

That makes the Blues a rare transverse bridge. They form one of the only major east–west forest connections in the Pacific Northwest, linking the Cascades to the Rockies and connecting the Columbia Plateau to the Great Basin to the south. Wide-ranging species — black bears, mountain lions, wolves, elk, mule deer, lynx, the occasional wolverine — depend on long-distance forested connections like this for their genetic and demographic survival. The Nature Conservancy’s Migrations in Motion analyses, which model where birds, mammals, and amphibians will need to move as climate shifts the map of hospitable habitat, identify this east–west corridor as one of the most important pieces of climate connectivity in the interior West.

It is exactly the kind of landscape we cannot afford to fragment further.

The Blues are full of refugia worth protecting

These mountains are not just a passage. They are full of the kinds of microclimates that buffer warming weather all on their own.

The Wallowas hold cold high cirques and shaded north faces. Deep canyon systems — Hells Canyon, Joseph Canyon, Hellhole, the Walla Walla — pool cool air at their bottoms long into summer. Springs and headwater streams flow year-round under closed canopy. Mesic mixed-conifer pockets of grand fir, spruce, and hemlock run about 12°F cooler in summer than surrounding dry pine forest, research shows. The Texas Butte country in the Skookum–Potamus area catches enough precipitation along the “Blues front” to support unexpectedly wet forest types that simply do not exist elsewhere at that latitude.

These are the places a salamander, a marten, a pika, a cow elk and her calf in a heat wave will go. They are also the places that, once cut over or roaded, cannot easily be remade.

Refugia take centuries to assemble. They take an afternoon to lose.

Why protection is the network

Logging warms a forest. Roads break it apart. Each one chips at the refugia and the routes between them.

When a forest is logged or heavily thinned, the canopy opens to sun and wind. Ground temperatures rise. Streams run warmer. Springs dry up. Snow leaves earlier. Soil hardens. The exact properties that make a place a refugium — shade, humidity, structural complexity, cool soils — are the first casualties. Roads act as both physical barriers (many smaller species cross them only reluctantly, if at all) and ecological sinks: they fragment landscapes, concentrate runoff, deliver sediment to streams, and dramatically increase the chance that a wildfire ignites in a place that would otherwise stay green.

Protected areas — designated wilderness, roadless areas, riparian zones held to enforceable standards — do the opposite. They keep the canopy closed where it is closed, the streams cold where they are cold, the long unbroken paths long and unbroken. Building a reserve system in the Blue Mountains is, in plain terms, building a refugia-and-corridors network. The two questions — “which places should we protect?” and “how should those protected places be arranged?” — turn out to have the same answer.

The wild places still hold the network

What stands out about this map is that it is mostly green already — the bones of a working reserve system are still on the ground. The Eagle Cap, Hells Canyon, Wenaha-Tucannon, North Fork John Day, and Strawberry Mountains wilderness areas anchor it. Roadless areas like Lake Fork, Joseph Canyon, Hellhole, the Walla Walla, the Elkhorns, Aldrich, and Glacier Mountain hold the connective tissue. The proposed refugia overlay the places that are coolest, wettest, and most likely to persist as the climate moves through them. The reserve system is not something we need to invent. It is something we need to choose.

What the Forest Plan can lock in

The Forest Plan Revision is the single biggest tool we have right now to decide whether the Blue Mountains remain a coherent refugia-and-corridors network or get hollowed out one project at a time. Three things, in particular, are worth asking the plan to do.

1. First, recognize the Blue Mountains explicitly as a regional connectivity priority, and identify by name the corridor lands that link the reserves we already have. The Lake Fork roadless area between the Eagle Cap and Hells Canyon. The Northern Grande Ronde lands between Hells Canyon and Wenaha-Tucannon. The Meacham–Umatilla canyon complex. The Southern Blues divide. Connectivity should not be implied. It should be mapped.

2. Second, protect mature mesic forests, riparian systems, and high-elevation refugia with enforceable standards, not soft guidelines. These are the places that do the cooling, water-holding, snow-holding work the rest of the landscape will increasingly depend on. Guidelines can be set aside on a project-by-project basis. Standards cannot.

3. Third, use the best available science. The Law et al. (2021, 2022) strategic-reserve datasets and The Nature Conservancy’s Migrations in Motion model are public, peer-reviewed, and ready to be incorporated into the planning analysis. Asking the agency, on the record, to bring these datasets into the alternatives is one of the most concrete substantive comments anyone can make — and a question the agency must answer.

Connectivity is not a luxury. It is how a wild place keeps being wild.

Climate change is going to push the wildlife of these mountains hard. Some species will need to find cooler places. Some will need to move further than any single reserve can hold. Some will need refuges within refuges. The architecture that lets them do that, a connected mosaic of cores, corridors, and climate buffers, is exactly the architecture the science already maps, the wild places still hold, and the forest plan can either build or break.

The good news is that almost all of the pieces are still in place.

Read Next: Six landscapes worth protecting

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What a forest plan is

A forest plan is the long-range rulebook for a national forest. It does not approve individual timber sales or trail projects, but it sets the goals, standards, and land allocations that every one of those projects must follow for the next two or three decades. It decides which lands are managed for timber and which are recommended for wilderness; how much protection streams, wildlife, and old trees receive; and whether those protections are firm “standards” or softer “guidelines.”

Standards are enforceable. Guidelines are not. That is why the exact language of the plan matters enormously.

Why this revision, why now

The current management plans for the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests date to 1990. The Forest Service has been working to revise them, on and off, since 2003; earlier attempts in 2014 and 2018 drew widespread objections and were set aside, and the process restarted in 2023. The three forests being planned cover about 4.9 million acres of public land, an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. A plan written now will likely guide these forests until mid-century.

Where the reserve system fits, and what is at risk

This revision will decide which roadless lands are recommended for wilderness, how inventoried roadless areas are managed, and whether the 21-Inch Rule protecting large old trees survives. In the 2018 version of this plan, the Forest Service identified roughly 70,500 acres for recommended wilderness. In the current proposal, none of those areas carry that recommendation. The scientists involved have asked a fair question: how can the very same lands, evaluated by the same process, suddenly no longer qualify? The public comment period is where that question gets asked, in numbers.

The timeline

The revision is now in its most important public moment: the 90-day public comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), which ends on September 30, 2026. The DEIS lays out the proposed plan and its alternatives, and participation in the public comment period is required to have standing to object to the final Plan. A Final Environmental Impact Statement, incorporating public comments, is expected in early 2027.

Public comment is not a formality

It is easy to assume that a government comment period is just theater. It is not. Under federal law, the Forest Service must respond to substantive public comments, and a well-supported comment can change the final plan. The previous round of public input drew more than 1,300 letters and nearly 600 people to public meetings. Comments that point to specific places, cite the science, and ask for specific outcomes carry real weight: recommend this roadless area as wilderness; keep the 21-Inch Rule; make this protection a standard, not a guideline.

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DEEP DIVE

Anyone advocating for forest protection in the Blue Mountains will quickly meet a powerful argument: that the forest must be logged and thinned to keep wildfire away from our communities. It is a sincere fear, and fire is a real danger. But the best available science tells a different, more hopeful story about what actually keeps homes and people safe.

What protects a home is the home, and the few hundred feet around it

Decades of fire research point to a clear conclusion: whether a house survives a wildfire is mostly decided within 100 to 200 feet of the house itself. Hardening the home — its roof, its vents, its siding — and creating defensible space in that immediate zone is far more effective than thinning forest miles away. Logging the backcountry does not make a community safer, and it diverts time, money, and attention away from the work that does.

Most homes do not burn in forest fires at all

Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone: most homes lost to wildfire in the United States in recent years did not burn in forest fires. They burned in grass and shrub fires. In the West, where more than two-thirds of the country’s wildfire home losses have occurred, nearly 80 percent of those homes burned in grass and shrub fires, not forest fires. Fast-moving fires make up less than 3 percent of fire events but account for 89 percent of the structures destroyed, and fire moves fastest through open grass, not through forest.

The biggest fires are driven by weather, not by “fuel”

The largest, most destructive wildfires are driven primarily by drought, heat, and wind, not by how much wood is standing in the forest. Climate change is making fire weather more frequent and more extreme. And most wildfires are started by people: human-caused ignitions account for roughly 84 percent of wildfires and have tripled the length of the fire season. Most fires that cross between private and public land start on private property. Building more roads into the forest, which industrial logging requires, increases the most common source of ignitions.

Protecting a forest does not make it burn worse

It is sometimes assumed that an unlogged forest is a tinderbox. The data do not support that. Studies comparing protected and logged forests across the western United States found that protected forests do not burn more severely or more often. In fact, the reverse is true: logging opens a forest to more sun and wind, dries it out, and leaves behind younger, more uniform stands that burn hotter.

The window in which a thinning “treatment” might affect fire behavior at all is short (roughly 10 to 15 years), during which the odds that a wildfire even reaches that specific patch are very small. As soil moisture declines and shrubs and forbs fill in the gaps, severe fire risk is higher than it was prior to logging.

Logging is a climate problem, not a climate solution

Forests are one of our most powerful tools against climate change — when they are left standing. Logging releases far more carbon than wildfire does, and it is the single largest source of carbon emissions in Oregon. Treating the wild backcountry as a fire hazard to be logged gets the story backward.

Fire is a natural part of the life cycle of a forest. Logging is not. Forest hydrology recovers quickly after fires, but it takes 80 years or more to recover from industrial timber harvest.

This is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument for doing the right things, in the right places.

Home hardening, defensible space, community-scale preparedness, and carefully targeted work close to where people actually live—these protect communities. Protecting the wild forest core protects the climate, the water, and the wildlife. We can, and should, do both.

Read Next: The Forest Plan

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DEEP DIVE

The largest, oldest trees in these forests do a startling amount of work for the climate, for clean water, and for wildlife. And right now, a single rule stands between many of them and the chainsaw.

The 21-Inch Rule, and what is at stake

For three decades, a measure known as the “21-Inch Rule” has helped protect trees larger than 21 inches in diameter across the national forests east of the Cascades. It is a modest rule: it safeguards only about 3 percent of the trees in these forests — the very biggest ones. But those 3 percent of trees store more than 42 percent of all the aboveground carbon in the region’s forests.

There is no ecological basis for logging large old trees, and there’s a great deal of science for keeping them standing. Nonetheless, the Forest Service has been using loopholes to cut big trees since the rule was put in place, and now proposes to remove this rule altogether in the forest plan revision.

Big trees are the climate’s safest vault

It is tempting to picture old trees as finished growing, carbon reservoirs slowly winding down. The opposite is true. A global study of more than 400 tree species found that a tree’s growth rate keeps increasing with size: the bigger a tree gets, the more carbon it pulls from the air each year. At the extreme, a single large tree can add as much carbon in one year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree. Large trees are not just carbon storage; they are carbon’s most active workers.

In eastern Oregon, big trees of most species, including grand fir, develop thick, fire-resistant bark as they age, which makes them the safest long-term place in the whole forest to keep carbon locked away. Once that carbon is logged and released, it cannot be recovered on any timescale that matters for the climate.

Old forests do far more than store carbon

They keep water clean and steady.

Large trees in mature and old forests act like sponges, soaking up water and releasing it slowly through the dry summer months. Forestlands supply most of Oregon’s surface drinking water, and nationwide more than 136 million people depend on national forest lands for some of their drinking water. Protecting high-priority forests protects the water that flows out of them.

They are home to the animals that need forests most.

Big living trees, big standing dead trees (snags), and big downed logs are the richest wildlife habitat a forest produces — for denning, nesting, roosting, and hunting. Western forests are already short on large snags relative to what cavity-nesting wildlife need. Logging tends to remove exactly the large trees that would otherwise become these irreplaceable habitat features.

They cool the forest down.

Forests buffer temperature extremes, and the effect is powerful. Research in eastside forests found that moist fir, spruce, and hemlock forest types ran about 12°F cooler in summer than dry ponderosa pine types. Opening a closed forest canopy lets in sun and wind, dries out the understory, and raises ground temperatures. As heat waves grow longer and more intense, the shade and cool of intact old forest become a refuge — for wildlife, and for us.

Letting forests grow is climate action

Protecting mature and old forests (and letting today’s mature forests grow into tomorrow’s old ones) is one of the most effective and lowest-cost climate strategies available.

After fossil fuel emissions, logging is the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and the single largest source of carbon emissions in Oregon. The sooner these forests are protected, the more climate protection they can provide.

Protecting mature and old-growth forests is a powerful solution for confronting the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

— Adapted from Mildrexler et al. (2023), Conservation Science and Practice

Read Next: Wildfire & Logging

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DEEP DIVE

Drawing on the recommendations submitted to the Forest Service by Dr. David Mildrexler and Eastern Oregon Legacy Lands, here are six landscapes across the Blue Mountains where stronger protection would do the most good. By enlarging the reserves we have and connecting the ones we don’t, together they would turn a scatter of isolated reserves into a connected system.

1. The Wallowa Mountains

Oregon’s grandest wilderness, the Eagle Cap, is ringed by large roadless areas that are essential to its health, places such as Huckleberry Mountain, Little Sheep, Boulder Park, and Upper Catherine Creek. These lower-elevation forests are rich in wildlife habitat and clean water, and they shield the wilderness at its edges. Nearby, the Lake Fork roadless area is the single most important link between the Eagle Cap and Hells Canyon: one of the most botanically diverse corners of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, where high- and low-elevation plant communities mix among old-growth ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, and western larch. Protecting Lake Fork would join two of Oregon’s greatest wilderness areas into one connected whole.

2. The Northern Grande Ronde River

This is the northern corridor between the Hells Canyon and Wenaha-Tucannon wilderness areas — a country of deep canyons and clear rivers, and a landscape of exceptional cultural significance. Joseph Canyon anchors it, and the Indigenous-led Camas to Condors partnership is focused here, on the Joseph Creek watershed. Roadless lands along the Walla Walla and Grande Ronde rivers hold carbon- and species-rich forests and abundant cold water, woven through a complex patchwork of public, private, and Tribal land.

3. Meacham and Umatilla Canyons

An interlocking web of canyonlands that links some of the wildest and most remote country in Oregon. The Hellhole roadless area is one of the largest unbroken tracts of wild forest left in the Blues. These canyons are prized by backcountry enthusiasts, and parts have been recommended for wilderness in earlier planning efforts.

4. The North Fork John Day

The heart of the Blue Mountains, and the headwaters of the North Fork John Day — the longest undammed river in Oregon and a stronghold for native fish. The wilderness here is a four-unit complex, a working model for how multiple roadless parcels can be woven into a single reserve. The roadless lands around it, including the Elkhorn Mountains with their famous Crest Trail, are dense with high-priority forest and remarkable for their ability to keep the land cool and the water clean.

5. Skookum and Potamus Canyons

A quietly overlooked landscape on the “Blues front,” where high-elevation forests catch enough precipitation to support unexpectedly moist forest types. Texas Butte, Skookum, and Potamus Canyon hold large ponderosa groves and beaver habitat, and form a link from the Umatilla uplands down to the John Day River.

6. The Southern Blues Divide

A forest belt and wildlife corridor stretching across the more fragmented southern Blue Mountains, including the headwaters of the South Fork John Day River. Wilderness-quality landscapes like Aldrich Mountain, McClellan Mountain, and Glacier Mountain hold abundant high-priority forest and provide the connective tissue that holds this part of the range together.

Two ways to protect each place

Every one of these landscapes can be protected in two complementary ways. Some roadless areas are best protected as additions to existing wilderness, which makes our reserves larger and less isolated. Others are best protected as new wilderness areas, creating fresh core habitat where the map is currently bare. Used together, across all six landscapes, these two moves would knit the Blue Mountains back into a connected, resilient whole.

DEEP DIVE

Conservation has a deceptively simple goal: keep the best wild places intact, and keep them connected. A reserve system is how that goal becomes a map.

What a reserve system actually is

A reserve system has two parts that work together. The first is core habitat: blocks of forest large and wild enough to sustain populations of wide-ranging animals over the long term, the kind of unbroken country where a species can find food, shelter, and room to raise the next generation. The second is connectivity: the corridors of forest that link those cores, so wildlife, plants, and genes can move between them.

Cores and corridors

A core without corridors is an island, and islands lose species over time. A corridor with no cores to connect leads nowhere. Together, they form a network that can flex and hold as the climate shifts. Protected areas are the cornerstones of conserving clean water, wildlife, large and old trees, and intact forest landscapes. Without them, the most important places are degraded one project at a time. That is why a forest plan needs strong, enforceable protections — and why those protections need to be designed as a connected whole, not a scatter of pieces.

Why the Blue Mountains need one now

Our protected areas are too few, too small, and too far apart.

Oregon has more forestland (and more carbon stored in living trees) than any of the eleven other western states. Yet it has the lowest share of its forests with strong protections: only about 10 percent. The reserves the Blue Mountains do have are isolated. Oregon’s largest wilderness, the Eagle Cap, is smaller than the five largest wilderness areas in Washington, and is dwarfed by Idaho’s largest. Only one reserve outside the northeastern Blues, the multi-unit North Fork John Day Wilderness, exceeds 100,000 acres. The gaps between reserves are wide: more than 41 miles separate the Hells Canyon and Wenaha-Tucannon wilderness areas, and nearly 46 miles separate the North Fork Umatilla and North Fork John Day. For wide-ranging wildlife, those distances are a real barrier.

No new wilderness has been protected here in more than forty years.

No new wilderness areas have been designated on national forest lands in the Blue Mountains since 1984 — even though the value of safeguarding roadless areas has been clearly understood by scientists for decades.

The Blue Mountains are a bridge the West cannot afford to lose.

Most mountain wildlife in the interior Northwest needs to move north and south to track a shifting climate. The Blue Mountains run east and west. That makes them a rare transverse link — a “mega-corridor” connecting the Cascades to the Rockies, and the Columbia Plateau to the Great Basin. As the climate changes and species need to move to survive, this connection becomes one of the most important in the entire region. It is exactly the kind of landscape a reserve system exists to protect.

The science is already done

In 2021, a team of scientists led by Dr. Beverly Law published a framework for identifying where strategic forest reserves should go across the western United States, ranking forestland by its value for carbon, biodiversity, and resilience. A 2022 study then zoomed in on Oregon at fine resolution and found that more than two-thirds of the state’s highest-priority forestland for carbon and biodiversity sits on federal land — much of it in the Blue Mountains.

What is striking is how closely those priority maps line up with the region’s remaining roadless areas and with the lands the Forest Service itself has identified as having wilderness character. In other words: the wild places still standing are the same places the science says we should protect. The reserve system is not a wish. It is a dataset — one that scientists have formally asked the Forest Service to use in the current planning process.

Roadless areas: the wilderness that is already there

Much of the reserve system would be built not from scratch, but from roadless areas that already exist. These areas enlarge the reserves we have, bridge the gaps between them, and add lower-elevation forest types and habitats that the current reserves miss. They are strongholds for clean, cold water, and many of them are essential to the health of the designated wilderness they surround. Wildlife, plant communities, clean air, and water all move freely across those boundaries.

When we protect a roadless area with wilderness character, we are not creating new wilderness. We are protecting the wilderness that is already there.

This is Oregon’s largest ecoregion, an immense, varied landscape that reaches from the Cascades all the way to the Rocky Mountains. There are not many places like it.

There is still time to keep the Blue Mountains wild.

The large, intact forests of the Blue Mountains form an interconnected network of wildlands across the region. As the climate warms, protecting these landscapes only becomes more urgent. And the opportunity is still open: there is still time to keep the big blocks of forest intact, and to keep the corridors between them open so that species can move.

This vision has a name: a forest reserve system. It is the heart of what we are working toward.

A reserve system is simply a connected set of protected wild places: core habitat areas large enough to sustain wildlife over the long term, linked by corridors that let animals, plants, and clean water move freely between them. It is not a fence around the forest or a lock on the gate. It is a deliberate design to protect the wildest places that remain, connect them, and let the forest do what forests do best: store carbon, filter water, shelter life, and buffer us all against a changing climate.

We think this is something worth getting excited about.

It would be easy to look at the Blue Mountains and feel only worry. Logging pressure is persistent. Roads built for timber decades ago still fragment watersheds. Protections for the region’s largest, oldest trees are being removed. For those of us who love these forests, the work of slowing the damage can feel endless, and rife with a feeling of loss.

But there is another story here, a hopeful one, and it is just as true. The science is done. The maps exist. The wild places are still standing. What is missing is not knowledge or possibility. What is missing is enough voices saying “Yes!”

We are not starting from scratch. Scientists and Indigenous leaders in this region have spent years doing the hard work. The Camas to Condors partnership, led by Nez Perce Tribal members, has put connectivity at the center of its vision. Researchers including Dr. Beverly Law and Dr. David Mildrexler have published peer-reviewed studies that map, in detail, a realistic and achievable reserve system for the Blue Mountains — one that protects biodiversity, clean water, and the climate. The vision is not something we have to invent. It is something we can choose.

Right now, there is a once-in-a-generation chance to choose it.

The Forest Service is revising the management plans for the entire Blue Mountains, nearly five million acres of public land. A forest plan is the rulebook for a national forest: it shapes everything from how much timber is cut to whether streams and wildlife habitat are protected, and it lasts for decades. The current revision is moving toward a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, and with it a public comment period. That comment period is the moment the public gets to speak. It is the moment this vision can move from a scientific map to a real plan for real forests.

There is a bright future ahead if we can protect these places, and make them last for future generations.

— Dr. David Mildrexler, ecologist, in the film The Blues: Oregon’s Eastside Forests at a Crossroads

That is the future this site is about. On the pages that follow, you can explore what the reserve system is and the science behind it, take a tour of six landscapes worth protecting, learn why big old trees matter so much, see why protecting forests does not make wildfire worse, and find out exactly how the forest plan process works — and how to be part of it. The Blue Mountains are still wild. Let’s keep them that way.

Read Next: The Reserve System →

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