The Greater Hells Canyon Region
A Region of Continental Ecological Importance
As conservation incorporates new approaches and perspectives to meet the needs of the 21st century, the Greater Hells Canyon Region has the full list of the opportunities and challenges, as well as the right ingredients, to serve as a focal point for putting this work into practice. If ever there was a perfect region to integrate intact ecosystems and thriving communities, this is it.
Since 1967, Greater Hells Canyon Council has advocated for the lands, waters, wildlife across a wild swath of Northeast Oregon into parts of Southeast Washington and Western Idaho. We got our start in Hells Canyon on the Oregon Idaho border, and in the decades that followed, the issues, scale and scope of our work took on new dimensions; the region needed a name to match its ecological importance. Welcome to the Greater Hells Canyon Region. We invite you to learn more about this land where the conservation issues we work on within the region impact all of us on a much larger scale.
The Blue Mountains Ecoregion
Connectivity, Intact Forests, Wild Waters, and Rural Communities
The Blue Mountains Ecoregion is at the intersection of the Rockies, Cascades, Great Basin and the Columbia Plateau of which the Greater Hells Canyon Region occupies the easternmost 75%. Spanning over 18,000 square miles, it is highly rural (less than 100,000 year-round inhabitants), is home to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation along with the ancestral lands of the Nez Perce, the Southern Paiute, and the Warm Springs, and about half of the area is public lands: the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, and the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur National Forests.The region has more 9,000’ mountains than any other part of Oregon, it is home to the free flowing John Day, Grande Ronde, and Umatilla watersheds, and it has over 5 million acres of forests.
Large Landscape Conservation in Action
Here conservation takes on a large landscape lens. It requires embracing complexity, working collaboratively, and engaging with issues that bridge the boundaries between public and private lands, agencies and individuals, and making a place for all communities, human and wild. We play a key part alongside many others on behalf of this special place. We say we aim to connect place to place, people to place, and people to people, so we can all work together toward a vision of a region of abundant, biodiverse, and connected lands and waters where all wild species and human communities thrive.
