A river that shouldn't be so hard to save

The Oregonian editorial board wonders why Copper Salmon isn't yet protected.

Oregon's proposed Copper Salmon Wilderness Act should have been a slam dunk in Congress.

It passed quickly and unanimously in the House. It breezed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with vigorous support from both of Oregon's senators. It would cost so little that the Congressional Budget Office gave it a perfect revenue-neutral rating of zero.

And back home in southwest Oregon's Curry County, the legislation has no organized opposition. Quite to the contrary, the bill is backed by an astonishingly diverse group -- loggers, hunters, fishing guides, environmentalists, port authorities, business owners and county commissioners -- that doesn't always see eye to eye on land-use issues.

Yet the Copper Salmon Wilderness Act, instead of sailing through the full Senate, is now stuck there. And it's all because of one senator, Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has emerged this year as the overzealous enemy of Oregon wilderness expansion.

Last winter, Coburn used an arcane and undemocratic Senate hold to block a proposed Mount Hood wilderness bill that otherwise would have passed with ease. In a frenzy of election-year pandering to his constituents, he has placed holds on about 90 such Senate bills that call for new spending without offsetting cuts elsewhere.

It's easy to see the hypocrisy, as Coburn supports spending billions of borrowed money on the Iraq war. What's harder is to see how Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith are going to outflank him and win approval of the popular wilderness bills.

Now the Copper Salmon proposal is caught up in the same tangle as the Mount Hood legislation. Their best hope is for it to be bundled with dozens of other land-use bills -- enough so that the resulting package has the backing of at least 60 senators, the minimum required for overruling Coburn's hold.

The Mount Hood proposal gets most of the attention, but Copper Salmon must not be lost in the crush. This 12,000-acre gem in the rugged Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest would be one of Oregon's smallest wilderness areas but one of its most important because wilderness designation would forever protect the pristine Elk River, one of the nation's most productive salmon and steelhead spawning streams.

Named for its location between Copper Mountain and Salmon Mountain, this watershed is so steep that it could never be logged. As a result it contains one of America's biggest surviving stands of low-elevation old-growth forest.

Ten times larger, the Mount Hood wilderness expansion is a must for Oregon, but Copper Salmon is also an opportunity that should not be squandered. If the obstructionist senator from Oklahoma won't get out of the way, Wyden-Smith & Co. should run over him.