Wild & Endangered

Clackamas River Watershed earns a dubious distinction on a nonprofit’s annual list

In urban North Clackamas, the area’s namesake river gains more attention for the raucous parties along its banks than its wild and scenic wonder.

Upriver, it’s a different story. Tributaries spill off of the flanks of Mount Hood and cascade through Douglas fir forests into the roaring upper Clackamas River, home to excellent fishing and whitewater rafting.

Environmentalists are afraid the river’s natural beauty could be marred by plans for a proposed natural gas pipeline that would require a linear clearcut zigzagging for miles through the Mount Hood National Forest. The threat recently landed the entire Clackamas River Watershed on Oregon Wild’s 10 Most Endangered Places 2009 list aside such landmarks as Crater Lake National Park, southeastern Oregon’s Steens Mountain and the Rogue River.

“There are always quite a few places across the state that are at risk from one proposal or another,” said Oregon Wild communications associate Seas Stevens. “We consider the scale of the threat: how big is it; how important are the resources and the place in terms of recreation, ecological and cultural resources.”

For the Clackamas River Watershed, the threat includes a controversial pipeline that would allow energy companies to transport natural gas from a terminal near the mouth of the Columbia to an existing, north-south pipeline east of the Cascades.

Residents along the route have raised concerns about safety and land-use. For Oregon Wild, the pipeline issue also includes concerns about the right-of-way associated with the project. Power companies need a swath of land up to 150-feet across, and likely more in some areas, along the length of the line. In the Mount Hood National Forest near the headwaters of the Clackamas River, that could mean cutting old-growth forest.

“In order to accommodate these for-profit pipelines they are having to amend the Northwest Forest Plan in order to cut old growth forest. They are going through and under wild and scenic designate rivers,” said Sha Spady, an environmental activist who lives near Oregon City and owns Oak Grove Disposal, a recycling company. “They are crossing some of the most unstable terrain in the state. And they’re doing so with an expedited energy policy that was left over from the George W. Bush administration.”

The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1994 to help the region strike a balance between logging and environmental concerns, sets aside certain areas as reserves, and opponents of the project say the U.S. Forest Service would essentially have to redraw the map to make exceptions for the pipeline. In addition, the portions of the upper Clackamas River are afforded some protections under the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System Act. The 47 miles of the river between Big Springs and Big Cliff are federally protected under the act, including 20 miles designated as “scenic” and 27 miles as “recreational.”

Leaders at BARK, an environmental watchdog group for the Mount Hood National Forest, say the pipeline corridor would amount to a 720-acre clear cut in the forest.

The Palomar pipeline project is a joint venture of NW Natural and TransCanada, and proponents say the ecological risk is worth it. Palomar says the project will help get customers clean natural gas, and labor unions have come out in favor of the project for the construction jobs it would create. Another proposal from Oregon LNG would come into Clackamas County and end in Molalla.

But opposition is growing, and Oregon Wild isn’t alone. Oregon Attorney General John Kroger has taken a hard line against the project, and earlier this year, the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners wrote a letter to the Forest Service formally opposing the amending the Mount Hood Forest Plant to construct the pipeline.