A 114-Year History of Oregon Elk and the Plan That Will Decide their Future

September 25, 2026

The Blue Mountains Forest Plan will shape elk habitat and hunting opportunities for the next generation; the latest draft falls short of the science and the collaborative vision that this landscape deserves

The Forest Service’s draft environmental impact statement for the Blue Mountains is open for public comment through September 30, and hunters and anglers have a direct opportunity to weigh in on the future of the many herds that call the Blues home. For a full breakdown of what’s at stake for elk, water, and roadless areas – plus talking points and a link to submit your comment go here.

In the spring of 1912, 15 elk were loaded onto a railcar in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and shipped west to Wallowa County, Oregon. Three thousand people gathered along the tracks in nearby La Grande just to watch them pass through. From the rail depot, the animals were hauled by horse-drawn wagon through deep snow to Billy Meadows, 46 miles north of Joseph, Oregon, and released into a fenced enclosure on the edge of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. A second shipment followed the next year, and by 1915, 265 elk roamed the mountains. By 1933, elk hunting seasons opened across eastern Oregon.

Elk being brought to the Blue Mountains.

That recovery is one of many great conservation success stories of the American West, but truth be told, conservation has never been simple, is rarely convenient, and the pressures on this successful herd have changed dramatically within living memory.

The Changing Landscape

After World War Two, the Blue Mountains management focused on a timber landscape. Harvest levels hit historic highs, road networks expanded rapidly to access timber sales, and the forests were managed primarily for commodity production. The environmental and regulatory corrections that followed and shifting public expectations around old growth and forest health swung the pendulum hard in the other direction. Timber harvest dropped precipitously and mill closures rippled through communities that had been built around a steady supply of logs. Forests that had been actively managed for decades were, in many places, left to accumulate fuels and grew increasingly dense.

While timber policy oscillated, other forces were coming to bear on the landscape. In 1994, Oregon voters passed Measure 18, banning the use of hounds to hunt cougars and bears. Cougar harvest declined and populations grew. Wolves, absent from Oregon for decades, began recolonizing the Blue Mountains in the 2010s, adding another layer of predation pressure. Recreational use of national forest lands increased exponentially too, with more people using roads, trails, and traveling the backcountry than ever before.

Taken individually, each of these changes could be manageable. But together, across 30-40 years, they have reshaped the distribution of elk on this landscape in ways that are now impossible to ignore. Elk have increasingly concentrated on private agricultural lands surrounding the forests, seeking refuge from the cumulative weight of motorized disturbance, hunting pressure, predation, and inadequate habitat security on public lands. The consequences are felt on both sides of the fence: landowners contend with infrastructure and crop damage and forage competition, hunters lose access to animals that were once broadly distributed across public land, and wildlife managers face the difficult task of potentially reducing herd numbers to limit agricultural conflict, even as public land hunting opportunity declines.

Blue Mountains Collaborative

This dynamic conflict became a new normal. It was precisely this problem that gave rise to the Blue Mountains Elk Initiative (BMEI) in 1990, a collaborative effort among the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the Oregon Hunters Association. For more than 30 years, the BMEI has funded and coordinated habitat improvements along with strategic road management decisions to help anchor elk on public lands and reduce conflict with neighboring agricultural operations. By combining grant funding, volunteer power, and agency support, the Initiative has delivered nearly $10 million in habitat improvements to date. It remains one of the longest-running elk initiatives in the country.

Against this backdrop, the Blue Mountains Intergovernmental Council, a collaborative body of county governments, state and federal agencies, and tribal representatives, also set about addressing the conflict. The Blue Mountains Intergovernmental Council (BIC) developed a desired condition statement for elk security that reflects a clear understanding of the problem and its solution. The BIC calls for managing forest habitats, trails, and road systems in a manner that supports broad distribution of elk on public lands based on their seasonal habitat needs. It recognizes that achieving this requires balancing adequate nutritional resources, cover, and human disturbance regimes, and it explicitly accounts for the many other factors, including predation, hunting pressure, and private land practices, that influence where elk end up.

“Elk Security: Forest habitats, trails, and road systems are managed and maintained in a manner that supports and enables broad distribution of elk populations based on their seasonal habitat needs. The desired condition is that habitat is managed to provide a balance of adequate nutritional resources, cover, and human disturbance regimes that encourage elk to remain on public lands. Collaboration and coordination occur that benefits these desired future conditions by addressing the many other factors such as predation, hunting, and private land practices that also effect elk distribution while providing year-round recreational and cultural opportunities and limiting agricultural damage on private lands.” -The Blue Mountains Intergovernmental Council

That language deserves recognition. It was developed collaboratively, it reflects the input of the people who live and work closest to this landscape, and it captures what the science consistently shows: that forage, cover, and disturbance must be addressed together if elk are going to stay on public lands. You cannot thin the forest to improve nutrition and expect elk to use it if activity on the road network keeps them moving. Conversely, you cannot close roads and expect elk to move in if the forage is not there. BIC members understood this, and their desired condition statement provides a foundation that any durable forest plan should build on.

The 1990 forest plans that currently govern these three national forests were supposed to be revised every 15 years. They are now 36 years old, but not for lack of trying.

The Forest Service first initiated a revision in 2004. A draft environmental impact statement followed in 2014, drawing thousands of comments during public feedback opportunities. Years of additional workshops and public engagement produced a near-final plan by 2018, one that incorporated science-based elk security provisions informed by decades of elk management research from the nearby Starkey Experimental Forest and input from the BIC’s predecessors, but that plan was never signed. In March 2019, the Regional Forester withdrew the entire package, citing concerns that the revised plans were difficult to understand and potentially confusing to implement.

What emerged from that setback was in many ways the most productive chapter of this long process. Forest Service leadership sat down with local elected officials, tribal representatives, and state agencies to identify common ground on the issues that had derailed the prior effort. The Blues Intergovernmental Council was formally established in November 2019, and over the following years it developed the collaboratively agreed-upon desired conditions, including the elk security language discussed above, that were intended to anchor the next revision.

Then, in 2023 under the 2012 Planning Rule, the Forest Service re-initiated the planning process. The agency released a draft assessment in 2024 and published the draft environmental impact statement in July 2026. The draft plan, however, does not carry forward the BIC’s collaboratively developed desired conditions for elk security. It drops valuable elk security standards from the 1990 forest plans without adopting a science-based replacement. The monitoring program does not include questions about elk habitat, elk distribution on public versus private lands, or the effectiveness of road management for wildlife. The agency’s own Starkey Experimental Forest, located within the planning area, has produced decades of peer-reviewed research demonstrating the relationship between road density, seasonal disturbance, and elk behavior. That science is acknowledged in the draft but is not reflected in the plan’s enforceable components.

Hunters are not asking for a return to the 1990 standards, but do want modern, measurable elk management direction to sustain quality hunting opportunities that reflects what Starkey and 30 years of additional research have taught us about what elk need to remain on public lands.

Collaborative Action is the Way Forward

Hunters are concerned that this moment will pass without integrating those tools into the plan. The policies of the past three decades, whatever their imperfections, were grounded in the recognition that active management and wildlife conservation are not competing objectives. They are partners. Thinning and prescribed fire improve forage. Strategic seasonal motorized closures will let elk use that habitat. Monitoring tells us whether it is working. Adaptive management corrects course when it is not.

A durable plan does not require choosing between restoration and wildlife, between timber and elk, between access and conservation. It requires doing all of them well, together, with the kind of measurable accountability that lets the public see whether the plan is delivering results.

That is what the Blue Mountains deserve, and it is what the people who put those first elk on that train 114 years ago were counting on.

The Forest Service’s draft environmental impact statement for the Blue Mountains is open for public comment through September 30, and hunters and anglers have a direct opportunity to weigh in on the future of this herd. For a full breakdown of what’s at stake for elk, water, and roadless areas – plus talking points and a link to submit your comment – see our article: Speak Up for Elk Habitat and Forest Management in the Blue Mountains.

by: Tristan Henry

posted in: Pacific Northwest

September 8, 2026

The Owyhee Evolved with Fire. Just Not Like This.

The Big Grass Fire has burned nearly 590,000 acres in prime upland and mule deer habitat across Oregon and Idaho’s Owyhee Watershed and is now the largest wildfire in modern Oregon history. Thankfully, it appears to have lost steam with just a few remaining hot spots. The fire has lasted weeks and forced thousands of evacuations in Pleasant Valley, South Mountain, and Jordan Valley, burning at least four homes. The Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association, a crew of local ranchers who volunteer to fight fire on their own ground, has been running trucks around the clock for weeks and is now running low on fuel. Statewide, more than 2.5 million acres have burned this season, and the cold fall nights are still two months away.

I have hunted sage grouse and chukar in this country. I have watched the sun break over the Owyhee rim with my dog running ahead. I know what is riding on the weeks and months ahead. As the Oregon field representative for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, I have listened to ranchers, hunters, and land managers all ask for the same thing again and again: certainty about how this place will be managed in the years to come.

The landscape evolved with fire, but not like this

Fire has always had a place in the West, and the sagebrush country in the northern Great Basin is no different. Historically, it burned on cycles measured in centuries, the spread of flames limited by the patchy fuel of its bunchgrass landscape. What has changed is not the fire, but what fuels it. Cheatgrass and medusahead, invasive annual grasses native to Europe and Asia, arrived in the late 1800s in shipments of contaminated grain and quickly gained a foothold in the American West.

The sagebrush country of the Owyhee. Photo credit: Brian Grossenbacher

The challenge with these non-native annual grasses is that they germinate quickly and abundantly to fill in the bare soil and forb covered spaces between native sagebrush and bunchgrass. These annual grasses have much finer and shallower root depths than native perennial bunchgrasses. They dry out weeks earlier than the cold weather bunchgrasses of the northern Great Basin. And now these invasives cover millions of acres of the Great Basin.Adding to these woes is the fact that land invaded by cheatgrass is roughly twice as likely to burn as native rangeland.

Every fire that burns on this landscape leaves behind widened interstitial spaces and more bare ground, which is primed for the expansion of invasive annual grasses, setting the stage for the next blaze to move even faster. This cycle has been building for decades, but this summer it is compounding at a scale that portends a bleak future for habitat and the species and hunters that rely on it.

The new fire cycle is having outsized impacts

What burns is only part of the story. The larger changing patterns of weather and climate are changing what this country can grow. Perennial bunchgrasses are working capital for grazers and hunters. Their roots go deep into the soil, which keeps them green and less likely to burn well into summer. Cheatgrass cures to tinder dryness within a few weeks, and once its awns harden, it goes from acceptable forage to a liability for grazing animals. The hardened seeds can stick in an animal’s eyes and mouth, causing lasting injury. Medusa head is even worse, so silica-rich it is nearly inedible.

Cured cheatgrass and medusahead. Photo credit: James Wicks

The animals tell the same story. Mule deer and cattle alike require a minimum quality of forage. This is something native perennials readily provide, while invasive annual grasses offer considerably less—outside a brief window in early spring they are neither nutritious nor easy to digest— and they cure out by early summer, leaving deer short of feed in late summer and fall, exactly when they are needing to put on weight to survive the winter months. Researchers at the University of Wyoming tracked 115 GPS-collared mule deer and found that deer begin steering clear of an area once invasive annual grasses reached 13 percent coverage, and strongly avoid it past 20 percent. Left unchecked in that study area, those grasses could erase nearly two-thirds of high-quality mule deer habitat within 20 years. The pattern holds for birds too; Sage grouse across the Great Basin have been projected to decline 57 percent by 2044 if the fire and invasive grass cycle runs on unchanged.

This nutritional productivity is measurable. The USDA’s Rangeland Analysis Platform shows Malheur and Harney counties together produced roughly 540 million pounds less herbaceous growth than their ten-year average through midsummer. This year, production over the last two weeks of July is down 28 percent in Malheur County and nearly 25 percent in Harney County. A dry summer explains some of that, but the longer trend is even clearer. Across Bureau of Land Management rangelands from 1991 to 2020, annual grasses and forbs increased while perennial cover declined, with annuals now out-producing perennials on some 52 million acres. Feed that cures in July is feed that nobody grazes in September, and becomes fine fire fuel weeks ahead of schedule, increasing the probability of fire’s return.

Holding the line

Restoring burned rangeland is a race against the calendar. Holding back invasive annual grasses requires the deployment of seed and pre-emergent herbicides in a tight window before winter precipitation gives cheatgrass and medusahead their headstart. This leaves agencies only a few months to assess the burn, line up funding, contract crews and aircraft, and get seeds and herbicides on the ground. On top of all this, the success of the native species reseeding lies in the hands of nature bringing fall rains for the seeds to successfully germinate.

Bleak as this may seem, there is reason for hope in the form of new and old chemical applications. Imazapic, sold as Plateau, has been the standard pre-emergent treatment for years, though its hold on annual grasses tends to fade within the first year or two as the seed bank reestablishes. A newer option, indaziflam, sold as Rejuvra, targets that seed bank directly and has shown control lasting three to four years in field trials across the region, without harming existing native shrubs or established perennial grasses. Camera-trap research in Colorado found mule deer spending more time on ground treated with Rejuvra, where native shrubs like antelope bitterbrush rebounded once the annual grasses were knocked back. Applied at scale and combined with reseeding efforts, these tools could change the trajectory of this post-fire landscape. Therein lies the rub: getting funding, staffing, and gathering native seeds at a scale to match the size of the fires burning across the West from agencies whose workforces are stretched thin.

Bird hunters in the Owyhee. Photo credit: Brian Grossenbacher

There is another reason for optimism. We are looking at this country differently. Researchers at Oregon State University, the Agricultural Research Service, The Nature Conservancy, and state and federal wildlife agencies have built a framework that sorts this landscape by the three drivers that actually move the needle for local residents: invasive annual grasses, conifer encroachment, and wildfire. This tool works across public and private lines, giving people a common picture. A rancher, a BLM range specialist, a Tribal biologist, and a bird hunter can stand on the same rim, agree on what they are looking at and which direction it is trending, and get straight to the question of what to do about it. In places where trust is earned slowly, that is as good as gold.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Ranchers, Tribes, hunters and anglers, and local leaders in Malheur County have spent more than six years building the Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act, legislation that would deliver adaptive rangeland management, restoration funding opportunities, and long-term management certainty for this landscape. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent in December 2024, only to see it expire without a House vote before the session of Congress adjourned. It is back in this current Congress as S. 1942, waiting to be considered by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Everyone who helped build that bill has been asking for the same thing since 2019: a durable framework for managing this country so the community is not left guessing at what comes next every time the sky turns orange.

The coalition of ranchers, Tribes, hunters, and anglers that built this legislation is still at the table – or at least they will be when this fire season ends. And the bill that would make certainty the law of the land, rather than a hope renewed every Congress, is further along than it has ever been. Opportunity and urgency rarely show up in the Owyhee in the same season. This year, they have.

If you hunt, fish, or simply believe this country is worth getting right, now is the time to say so. Learn more about TRCP’s work in the Owyhee, and let your members of Congress know that the Owyhee’s ranchers, Tribes, and hunters and anglers have waited long enough.

by: Tristan Henry

posted in: Pacific Northwest

July 31, 2026

Oregon’s Hunting Ban Measure Fails to Make the Ballot

IP 28 is dead, but the pattern behind it – deciding complex wildlife policy at the ballot box – isn’t going away. That conversation is worth continuing.

Initiative Petition 28 will not appear on Oregon’s November ballot. After proponents submitted 142,784 signatures on July 2, the Secretary of State’s Elections Division tested two random samples and found that neither cleared the roughly 82% validity rate the petition needed. The measure is finished.

The measure, formally called the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions Act (PEACE ACT), would have removed longstanding exemptions from Oregon’s animal-cruelty laws. Activities that injured or killed an animal, including hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock slaughter, certain breeding practices, wildlife management, pest control, and some agricultural and scientific research, could have become criminal offenses.

For Oregon’s hunters, anglers, trappers, farmers, ranchers, and everyone in the state that relies on protein from harvest of wild game or agricultural practices, this is a relief. In one form or another, this proposal has hung over our community for six years. Defending against it has consumed significant time, money, and attention that our community would have rather spent on habitat work, access, and the actual business of conserving fish and wildlife. But it would be dishonest to say we feel only relief. IP 28 would have forced a statewide conversation that Oregon has needed for a long time and because the ideas behind this measure are not going away on their own, let’s have that conversation anyway.

Oregon’s foray into direct democracy dates to 1902, when the state adopted the initiative and referendum processes – a reform so closely identified with this place that it became known nationally as the Oregon System. The initiative was designed as a corrective mechanism, giving citizens recourse when elected officials failed to act, not as a primary governance tool for complex regulatory systems like wildlife management.

More than a century on, the record is mixed, and the tool that was meant for corrections has been used to increasingly in recent decades. Oregonians have use the initiative to do genuinely important things, but they have also been asked to decide questions that were poorly drafted, misleading in their titles, funded almost entirely from outside the state, used to take the temperature of voters on certain issues, or written by people with no working knowledge of what they proposed to regulate. In 1994, Measure 18 asked voters to prohibit the use of dogs to hunt cougars and bait to hunt bears. It passed. The vote removed a management tool used by the public through campaigning rather than being guided by the state’s wildlife management process. More than three decades later, Oregon’s wildlife professionals have had to manage cougar populations within this voter approved constraint.

Wildlife Management Must Remain Grounded in Science

Measure 118 and IP 28 are not the same, but together they demonstrate the difficulty of deciding complex wildlife management questions through ballot box biology that offers voters a seemingly simple, yes- or- no, choice. Wildlife is held in trust for all Oregonians, so the public has an essential voice in setting conservation values and holding decision-makers accountable. But specific decisions about seasons, harvest methods, population objectives, and conflict management should be informed by evidence and carried out by qualified wildlife professionals through transparent public processes. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation was built to provide the foundation for that approach. Its premises are simple and radical: wildlife is held in trust for everyone rather than owned by the wealthy, it is allocated by law rather than by markets, and it is managed according to the best available science. Those principles only hold if the science is allowed to do its work.

What many Oregonians don’t know is who has been paying for the wildlife and wild places they love, and who has been doing the work: Hunters and anglers built the system that conserves Oregon’s wildlife, and then taxed themselves to fund it. License and tag sales, together with federal excise taxes paid on firearms, ammunition, and fishing tackle under the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Acts, return millions of dollars to Oregon every year. That money pays for habitat restoration, population research, enforcement, and public access. It funds work on songbirds and salamanders as surely as on elk and steelhead. It is, as far as we know, the only conservation model in the world in which the users of a resource asked to be regulated and then volunteered to pay for the careful management of those resources. That is a remarkable thing, and not enough outside our community know the story.

Neither do most Oregonians know the depth of how this measure would have reached into every day life. The traditions IP 28 treated as cruelty are, in practice, some of the oldest and most careful food cultures known: the family that fills their freezer with carefully wrapped packages of venison each fall, the crabber and the clam digger on the coast, the rancher and the chef sourcing from within a 100 miles. Hunting, fishing, and agriculture are among the oldest human traditions on this landscape, sustaining communities here for thousands of years before statehood. This is not to say these activities should be beyond scrutiny: Hunters, anglers, farmers, ranchers, and wildlife managers all have a responsibility to uphold high standards of animal care, fair chase, ethical harvest, and responsible stewardship.

The more Oregonians who understand where conservation funding actually comes from, the better equipped the state is to weigh proposals like this on their merits. As responsible hunters and anglers, we should talk with our neighbors, legislators, and other Oregonians about why we care. Every conversation that connects a wildlife refuge, a healthy salmon run, or a herd of elk in the Blue Mountains back to the people who paid for it broadens our tent. The North American Model has lasted more than a century because generations of hunters and anglers kept faith with it. It will last another century only if the public that owns this wildlife understands what it owns, and who has been tending it.

The TRCP is your resource for all things conservation. In our weekly Roosevelt Report, you’ll receive the latest news on emerging habitat threats, legislation and proposals on the move, public land access solutions we’re spearheading, and opportunities for hunters and anglers to take action. Sign up now.

by: Tristan Henry

posted in: Pacific Northwest

July 29, 2026

Speak Up for Elk Habitat and Forest Management in the Blue Mountains

The Forest Service has opened its comment period on the Blue Mountains Draft Environmental Impact Statement, giving hunters and anglers an opportunity to shape elk security, forest restoration, watershed health, and roadless conservation for decades to come

TAKE ACTION: SUBMIT YOUR COMMENT

The U.S. Forest Service has released its draft plans for the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests, and the public comment period is open through September 30. This is a rare chance to shape how some of the best elk country in the West is managed for decades to come.

Below, we break down what’s at stake for elk, water, and roadless areas — then show you how to weigh in before the comment period closes.

The Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington hold one of the country’s largest Rocky Mountain elk herds, and hunting is the most popular activity on these forests. How the plans address forest health, roads, and wildlife will shape whether elk remain distributed on public land where you can hunt them, or drift onto private ground.

The good news: we don’t have to choose between active management, healthy rural economies, clean water and quality wildlife outcomes. The Blue Mountain Forest Plan can deliver all four, and give the Forest Service an opportunity to demonstrate how these multiple use values can work together.

Hunters support increasing the pace and scale of active management in the Blue Mountains. Thinning, prescribed fire, and other restoration work helps reduce wildfire risk, restore resiliency to our forests, stimulate local economies, and create more forage. We are also encouraged that the draft recognizes the importance of continuing to provide wood products to local mills. Eastern Oregon’s remaining mills, logging workforce, and forest-products businesses are essential infrastructure for getting that work done. Without viable local markets and processing capacity, accomplishing needed vegetation management becomes more difficult and expensive.

The final plan should provide a predictable foundation for restoration work that sustains rural mill infrastructure while ensuring that treatments are designed to improve forest health, wildlife habitat, and watershed conditions.

All of this active management only pays off for wildlife if elk feel safe enough to use it. Improving forage does little good if too many open roads in the wrong places keep elk on the move. Historically, the Forest Service has managed habitat and roads together, and the final plans should continue that approach.

The science that tells us how to keep elk on public land was produced right here in the Blue Mountains, at the Forest Service’s own Starkey Experimental Forest. This plan is a chance to put that knowledge to work for hunters, for landowners, and for productive big game habitat.

The draft does not yet include clear, measurable direction to keep elk on public land. Water tells a similar story – the same forests that hold the elk herds also anchors some the regions most important salmon, trout and steelhead habitat. Here’s how to help change that:

TAKE ACTION: SUBMIT YOUR COMMENT

If you hunt or fish in the Blues, encourage the Forest Service to adopt clear, measurable direction for elk security and to manage habitat, trails, and roads together to balance nutritional resources, cover, and human disturbance in a way that keeps elk on public lands and limits conflict on private lands.
Elk security isn’t the only thing on the table in this plan. Read on for what’s at stake for water and backcountry, or scroll back up to comment now .

Healthy Forests Require Healthy Watersheds

The Blue Mountains support spring Chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout, redband trout, and other fish that depend on cold, clean, connected water. Roads, sediment, stream temperature, riparian vegetation, grazing, and the condition of floodplains and wetlands all influence whether that habitat remains productive.

The final plans should retain strong watershed safeguards while allowing carefully designed restoration that improves riparian vegetation, reconnects floodplains and wetlands, reduces sediment, and increases resilience to wildfire, drought, and warmer water temperatures. Active management and cold-water conservation should reinforce one another. That same balance – restoration paired with conservation of the regions intact backcountry habitat – is at the center of the debate over roadless areas.

Keep 722,000 Acres of Backcountry Intact

Across the three forests, approximately 722,000 acres are managed as inventoried roadless areas. These lands were identified by the Forest Service as largely undeveloped and generally free of constructed roads, where existing policy limits new roadbuilding and certain timber harvest while allowing traditional uses and appropriate restoration work. They provide large blocks of relatively unfragmented habitat, secure country for elk and other big game, cold-water headwaters, and valued backcountry hunting and fishing opportunities.

The draft alternatives take sharply different approaches to these lands. The Forest Service’s preferred alternative assumes that the national Roadless Rule will be rescinded and does not carry forward comparable protections for these lands, while another alternative retains those protections.

TRCP supports retaining core roadless protections while allowing carefully targeted habitat restoration, prescribed fire, fuels reduction, and temporary project access where needed. The goal should be to give land managers the flexibility to improve forest health without sacrificing the intact habitat, clean water, and backcountry character that make these lands so valuable to hunters and anglers.

The draft plan does not yet include clear, measurable direction to keep elk on public land. You can help change that.

Click below to submit your comment. It only takes a few minutes, and every voice counts.

TAKE ACTION: SUBMIT YOUR COMMENT

Talking Points You Can Use:

Pick the points that resonate with you, put them in your own words, and add your personal experience.

Support active management and rural forest infrastructure. I support forest management that reduces wildfire risk, restores forest health, and improves forage conditions for big game. The final plans should also provide a dependable supply of forest products that helps sustain Eastern Oregon’s remaining mills and workforce, because that infrastructure is essential to accomplishing restoration work. Active management should be paired with measurable habitat and watershed protections so that economic and ecological benefits occur together.

Keep elk on public lands. The final plans should include a clear, measurable standard for elk security so that elk stay distributed across public lands where the public can hunt them, rather than concentrating on private property. Open, well-traveled roads are the single biggest factor in where elk spend their time during hunting season. The final plans should include direction on open road density and seasonal access so that habitat investments actually translate into elk on the ground. Improved forage does not help if the road network keeps elk away from it.

Carry forward the locally crafted desired conditions for elk security. The Blue Mountains Intergovernmental Council, made up of county governments, Tribes, and state and federal agencies, developed an agreed-upon desired condition for elk security. The Forest Service should honor collaborative work and build it into the final plans.

Use the Starkey science. Decades of research from the Starkey Experimental Forest, located within these very forests, tell us what elk need to stay on public lands. The final plans should reflect that best available science in an enforceable direction, not set it aside.

Protect cold, clean water and salmon habitat. The Blues hold some of the wests most important headwaters of cold, clean salmon streams in the west. The final plans should include clear and enforceable direction for riparian areas, stream temperature, sediment, floodplain and wetland function, and road-related impacts. Restoration treatments should improve the habitat needed by salmon, steelhead, bull trout, and other native fish.

Retain core roadless protections. Roadless areas provide secure big-game habitat, intact headwaters, and important backcountry hunting and fishing opportunities. The final plans should retain protections against unnecessary permanent roads while allowing targeted restoration and temporary access where appropriate.

Recognize the value of hunting and fishing. Hunting is the most popular recreational activity on these forests and a significant driver of the rural economy. Wild game is a meaningful source of locally harvested food for families across eastern Oregon. The final plans should recognize and sustain that opportunity.”

The Blue Mountains are one of the most productive landscapes in America where hunters and anglers can chase rutting elk or dangle a dry fly over crystal-clear trout streams, and the decisions made in this plan will shape these opportunities for a generation. The Forest Service has the chance to prove that restoration and wildlife go hand in hand. With your voice in the record, we can help make sure it does.

Add your comment today and share this with a hunting or fishing partner who cares about the future of these forests.

TAKE ACTION: SUBMIT YOUR COMMENT

by: Michael O'Casey

posted in: Pacific Northwest

July 28, 2026

In the West: A Pool Is for More Than Swimming

Living with wildfire has made the need for proactive forest management, coordinated fire response, and durable federal action impossible to ignore. Part of a TRCP series on wildfire, forest health, and what this fire season means for hunters and anglers.

Growing up on the coast of Oregon, my passion for hunting, fishing, and conservation began like many others who had the good fortune of living on a farm with ample land to explore. With a growing family of my own, in 2021, my wife and I stretched to buy land that borders BLM so that our kids can build those same experiences through backyard adventures.

We also learned what it means to live in the wildland-urban interface.

Filling the inflatable backyard pool while very large air tankers fly overhead has become a summer expectation. The kids see a place to swim, and we see a thousand gallons of backup water that could help protect our home if a wildfire reaches the canyon rim above us.

As I write this, Oregon has become the center of the nation’s wildfire response. Dozens of large fires are burning; communities are under evacuation orders, and smoke is settling over much of central and eastern Oregon. The Northwest is at the highest national preparedness level, and Oregon has deployed its last available complex incident management team. We are not yet through July. This problem is no longer unique to the west either, as colleagues who work in the TRCP headquarters in D.C. stare through their office windows into an orange haze that’s encompassing the Capitol.

Last summer, the Flat Fire burned within two miles of Sisters, eventually growing to more than 23,000 acres with more than 1,400 homes threatened. I watched and prayed as the fire reached our backyard and helicopters dropped water in view of our new home while airtankers laid retardant across the canyon. For weeks after, our small community was covered with thank-you signs and potlucks for the many firefighters that saved countless homes and stopped its forward progress.

Across the West, summers increasingly involve watching smoke columns, checking evacuation maps, keeping trailers hitched, and wondering whether the next red-flag wind will send a fire toward home.

But this “new reality” does not have to become the permanent definition of summer in the West.

A New Fire Service Must Look Beyond Suppression

This year, the Department of the Interior established the U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS) to unify wildfire prevention, suppression, and recovery across more than 500 million acres of Interior-administered and Tribal lands. The new organization represents a significant opportunity to improve coordination, modernize the federal response, and better support firefighters.

Its success, however, cannot be measured only by how quickly aircraft arrive or how many fires are extinguished.

Aggressive initial attack will always be necessary when lives, homes, infrastructure, and important natural resources are threatened. I am deeply grateful for the firefighters and pilots who have repeatedly stood between my community and disaster.

But the country cannot suppress its way out of the wildfire crisis.

The new service must remain closely coordinated with the Forest Service, Interior land-management agencies, Tribes, states, counties, rural fire departments, private landowners, and restoration partners. Separating wildfire response from land management could reinforce the suppression-focused approach that contributed to today’s conditions.

Fire management is an important part of holistic land management for healthy forests and rangelands. Decisions about fuels and fire affect elk habitat, trout streams, municipal water supplies, recreation access, grazing lands, timber resources, and the long-term health of public lands. To be successful, the new USWFS should help connect emergency response to the work needed before a fire: prescribed and cultural burning, strategic thinning, invasive-species control, watershed and wet-meadow restoration, community preparation, and maintenance of previously treated landscapes.

That coordination must continue after the flames are out. Post-fire work should be invested in to protect soils and streams, limit invasive plants, restore fish and wildlife habitat, and help native forests regenerate where possible. Repeated high-severity fire, drought, and invasive species can push some landscapes beyond their ability to recover as forests. Responding faster is important, but preventing ecological type conversion and sustaining fire-adapted habitats must also be measures of success.

This broader mission requires more than a new organizational chart. Land-management agencies still need foresters, wildlife and fisheries biologists, hydrologists, prescribed-fire specialists, contracting officers, and local employees who understand the landscapes they manage. States, Tribes, local governments, collaboratives, rural mills, and private contractors are essential partners, but they cannot replace a capable federal workforce.

A Different Kind of Summer Is Possible

I do not expect wildfire to disappear from Central Oregon. Nor should it. We live in a fire-adapted landscape, and learning to live with fire is part of living here.

But that should not mean accepting increasingly destructive fires as inevitable or remaining indoors for weeks each summer when smoke fills the air.

It should mean creating defensible space around homes, restoring natural fire to appropriate landscapes, thinning overgrown forests, connecting fire and fuels projects to the many co-benefits they provide to wildlife and watersheds, supporting firefighters, and ensuring agencies have the people and resources to act before an emergency begins.

At TRCP, we are working with conservation organizations, forest collaboratives, businesses, and elected officials from both parties to advance those solutions. That includes supporting the Fix Our Forests Act, engaging the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, working closely with the U.S. Forest Service on projects and planning decisions, advocating for stable agency capacity and wildfire funding, and ensuring that forest-health projects also benefit fish, wildlife, and public access.

As I listen to our three kids splashing and yelling out in that simple, summer-time joy, coupled with the air traffic above our home speeding to the ongoing fire, I am reminded how much is at stake. We owe it to the many firefighters working all summer away from their families and to the places we hunt, fish, and call home, to find solutions at scale. Before the next column of smoke rises.

Learn more about the Fix Our Forests Act HERE

This is part of a TRCP series on wildfire, forest health, and what this fire season means for hunters and anglers. Read the others:

Hunting & Fishing Access

MAPping Public Access

Unlocking Public Lands

Public Land Access

Brian Flynn, Two Wolf Foundation's Story

Key Issues for America’s Hunters

Chronic Wasting Disease