EDITORIAL: Oregon’s ‘crown jewels’

Kitzhaber proposes four new wilderness areas

Ask and ye shall receive.

Earlier this year, Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar asked governors and congressional representatives across the nation to identify “crown jewels,” natural treasures on Bureau of Land Management lands in their states that should be considered for federal wilderness protection.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber took him at his word and recently fired off a wish list to Salazar. Kitzhaber’s requests should receive serious consideration for inclusion in wilderness legislation that the Interior chief plans to submit to Congress in its current session.

Kitzhaber’s list includes four wilderness proposals. All have been introduced previously as federal legislation, have been scrutinized in hearings and have the broad support of Oregonians and their elected representatives in Congress. They are:

The Devil’s Staircase: Consisting of 30,000 acres in the remote Wassen Creek roadless area in the central Coast Range between the Smith and Umpqua rivers, the area is accessible to only the most determined of hikers. It has escaped logging for much of the past century and has some of the last remaining old growth stands in the coastal mountains.

Cathedral Rock and Horse Heaven: The 8,200-acre Cathedral Rock and 8,900-acre Horse Heaven wilderness areas are located four miles apart near the John Day River in Central Oregon. The proposed wilderness areas would result from a swap of thousands of acres between private landholders and the BLM. The land swap and wilderness proposal have been endorsed by nearby landowners, Jefferson, Wasco and Wheeler counties, local businesses and recreational organizations.

The Wild Rogue: This long-standing proposal would expand the iconic Wild Rogue Wilderness by 58,000 acres and designate federal wild and scenic status along 93 miles of tributaries. As Kitzhaber noted in his letter, the Rogue proposal has been introduced in two previous congresses as a national wild and scenic rivers package and “has significant support from the business community, which relies heavily on the Rogue River for its economic prosperity.”

Other areas merit serious consideration for wilderness protection, and Kitzhaber ticked off several in his letter to Salazar. They include an expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which has been urged both by environmental groups and scientists eager to protect what Kitzhaber described as the area’s “unique biological values.”

Even with the addition of 200,000 new acres of wilderness, including a 125,000-acre expansion of the Mount Hood wilderness two years ago, Oregon still has a relatively small amount of land designated as wilderness. Only 4 percent of the state is protected under the federal Wilderness Act, compared with 15 percent of California, 10 percent of Washington state and 8 percent of Idaho.

Salazar plans to present his “crown jewel” recommendations to Congress later this month. The Devil’s Staircase, Cathedral Rock, Horse Heaven and the Wild Rogue should have prominent places on that list.