Deep in the heart of Oregon's coastal rainforest, nestled between the Smith and Umpqua rivers, lies the Wassen Creek Roadless Area. This is a place so remote and inaccessible it has escaped the chainsaws which have decimated so much of the old-growth forests in the Coast Range in the last century.

In fact, this area is so remote, that the wilderness proposal (see map in jpg or pdf) derives its name from a rarely seen, almost mythical waterfall: "The Devil's Staircase." This series of cascading pools is buried deep in the heart of the Wassen Creek area and takes more than a day's trek to get there (if you can find it)! Read an article on the Devil's Staircase from The Eugene Register Guard.

Wassen must be Wilderness before it's too late.

While the Devil's Staircase Wilderness Proposal is wild and remote now, federal timber managers have other ideas. The recently released Western Oregon Plan Revisions (WOPR) put huge tracts of the Wassen Creek area into intensive timber management. In this Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plan, thousands of acres of old-growth forest could be clear-cut, forever damaging the last vestige of forest primeval we have left in the Coast Range. Click here to help stop the WOPR.

About Devil's Staircase:

"Wassen Creek deserves no less than the highest protection that can be afforded under law." -Former Congressman Jim Weaver

Blanketed with huge Douglas-fir, cedar and hemlock, Wassen Creek has the last remaining old-growth forests in the coastal mountains. The
cascading waters of Wassen Creek support native coho and chinook salmon, trout and steelhead runs. Black bears, elk, deer, river otter, spotted owls and marbled murrelets live as they have for thousands of years sequestered in this remnant of Oregon's coastal forest. With the highest density of northern spotted owls in the Coast Range, the Devil's Staircase Wilderness Proposal is critical to the recovery of this threatened species.

The forest soils are mostly classified as the most landslide-prone soil type in Oregon and among the most unstable in the world. Unstable soils so plagued early efforts to log in the vicinity of Wassen Creek that, in the 1970s, the U.S. Forest Service withdrew from timber management all land between the Smith and Umpqua rivers, including Wassen Creek.