Blue Mountains Forest Plan
Revising the Blue Mountains Forest Plan
What is the Blue Mountains Forest Plan?
The Blue Mountains Forest Plan is the management plan for the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla, and Malheur National Forests spanning nearly 5 million acres in Northeast Oregon and Southeast Washington. The current plans date to 1992, and they guide how the Forest Service oversees all activities across these forests.
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Updating these plans is important. These forests have changed, our understanding of how to manage them has changed, and the communities that depend on them have changed. But we have a problem: the current political landscape isn’t exactly primed for having thoughtful and nuanced conversations about those things.​​
The Blue Mountains Forest Planning process determines how nearly 5 million acres across the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur National Forests (with the exception of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area) will be managed for the next several decades. These lands collectively cover a large swath of NE Oregon and a small portion of SE Washington.
What's Being Proposed in the Revised Blue Mountains Forest Plan?
On July 2, 2026, the U.S. Forest Service released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (also known as the DEIS) that offers various alternatives for the revised Blue Mountains Forest Plans. With its release, it starts a 90-day public comment period that will be open until September 30, 2026.
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Since the start of the forest planning process, GHCC alongside members of our community have advocated for strong and enforceable language protecting habitat connectivity, roadless lands, and mature and old forests. In today's climate and biodiversity crises, supporting and improving the ecological function of these National Forests will have a real impact on the ground. Enforceable standards hold the Forest Service accountable for managing these public lands for more than just extractive interests.
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Unfortunately, the Forest Service's preferred alternative ("Alternative 2") goes in the exact opposite direction. Instead of focusing on holistic climate adaptation, protections for wildlife like elk and salmon, and following the science to maintain the ecological complexities of our forests, this alternative calls for doubling (or in some cases, almost quadrupling) logging, increasing mining and grazing, and doing away with the roadless rule and protections for old growth trees.
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The Draft Environmental Impact Statement includes two other alternatives. The first ("no action") calls for keeping the plan as is. While making no changes to the Blue Mountains Forest Plan would be a HUGE missed opportunity to improve the way the Forest Service manages these lands for climate, wildlife, recreation, and our local communities who rely on intact forests, it's currently looking like best alternative on the table. Alternative 3 is still bad, albeit slightly better than the preferred alternative: a 200% increase in logging, retaining some elements of the roadless rule, guidelines (but not mandatory standards) for maintaining trees over 21" diameter and grand fir over 30" diameter, and recommending 35,000 acres of lands to be added by Congress to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Under the USFS's preferred alternative, over 600,000 acres of currently protected roadless lands would be opened for commercial logging and new road building.
Trees over 21" in diameter are fire-resistant climate champions. They store 42% of the above-ground carbon in the Blues while making up only 3% of the forests. Maintaining protections for large and mature trees is critically important for the region.
What We Lose if the Forest Service's Preferred Alternative is Adopted
Wildlife and Habitat Connectivity
The Blue Mountains are home to some of the most robust elk herds in the West, as well as salmon, steelhead, mule deer, wolverines, and a remarkable diversity of plant and animal species that most people don't associate with Eastern Oregon.
These forests straddle an important wildlife corridor at the nexus of the Rockies, Cascades, Great Basin and Columbia Plateau. The three national forests in this planning area represent a rare opportunity to think about connectivity not just within each forest, but across all three of them; an opportunity that the proposed alternatives squander.
These forests are already some of the most roaded in the country, and more roads mean more fragmented habitat. With nearly 26,000 miles of road in the Blue Mountain Ecoregion, there are enough roads to drive around the entire planet. The Forest Service can't maintain the roads it already has; adding more is unconscionable.
Clean Water
These forests contain the headwaters of our region’s most important rivers. The streams and rivers that flow out of the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla, and Malheur don't just support salmon and steelhead; they supply drinking water to cities like Walla Walla, Baker City, and La Grande. The mature forests in these watersheds filter and store water in ways that roads and logged-over hillsides simply cannot support. When those forests are opened to intensive management, the forest's natural filtering function is compromised.
Old and Mature Trees
The 21-inch rule prohibits logging trees over that size diameter. It has been a meaningful safeguard for the largest 3% of trees across Eastern Oregon's National Forests. Eliminating this rule entirely removes one of the few legal protections that currently exist for the trees that store the most carbon, provide the most complex habitat, and are the most fire-resistant. Large and mature trees didn't get that way by accident, and they can't be replaced on any timeline that's meaningful to us.
Take Action
​The 90-Day Public Comment Period for the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Draft Environmental Impact Statement opened on July 2, 2026 and closed September 30, 2026. The U.S. Forest Service Planning Team is now reviewing these comments prior to issuing a final Environmental Impact Statement.
As part of the public comment period, GHCC oversaw the work of groups in the Eastside Forest Coalition to draft substantive comments on the flaws, gaps, missed opportunities, and ecological impacts of the draft plan’s preferred alternative. Many of the public comments submitted by GHCC's members reflect the themes that we cover in detail. If you would like to read a copy of our coalition’s comments, you can download them here.