Massive Expansion of Mt. Hood Recreation Areas Could Be Coming
Single and loving it: It takes effort—and a little luck—to find scenes like this at Newton Creek in the Mt. Hood National Forest. Photo: Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight Jurgenhessphotography.com
By Grant Stringer, Columbia Insight
It’s getting harder to find solitude, let alone parking, around Oregon’s Mt. Hood and the Columbia River Gorge.
Millions of visitors each year flock to the areas, on the doorstep of Portland, for hiking, skiing and waterfall photo ops. The great outdoors is being loved to death.
The crowds, coupled with disastrous wildfires in recent years, may spur a federal policy makeover. Oregon Democrats Rep. Earl Blumenauer and Sen. Ron Wyden are proposing a huge expansion of federally protected land to disperse crowds and bring logging operations in line with wildfire protection and conservation.
The pair released a list of legislative proposals in the fall that could become part of a bill that may be introduced in Congress this year, Janine Kritschgau, a spokesperson for Blumenauer, told Columbia Insight.
Notably, the lawmakers are proposing a tenfold expansion of the 35,000-acre Mt. Hood National Recreation Area within the Mt. Hood National Forest.
Mt. Hood National Forest Map: USFS
Popular areas like Tamanawas Falls and Mt. Defiance, together amounting to about 30,000 acres, would be incorporated into the 311,000 acres of designated wilderness already in the Mt. Hood National Forest.
Kritschgau said Blumenauer is planning for more rounds of public feedback before introducing a bill, and the proposals aren’t set in stone.
Alongside the land protections, lawmakers are also proposing a laundry list of conservation and recreation projects to include in the bill, including building more trails to disperse crowds, preserving foods important to Native American tribes and funding public transit options to alleviate traffic.
A number of conservationists and economic development advocates have lined up in support of the proposals.
Timber industry advocates are concerned about the possibility of adding more protected forests.
Tensions over land use
The Forest Service hasn’t officially estimated the annual number of visitors to the 1-million-acre Mt. Hood National Forest since 2016. But Heather Ibsen, a public affairs officer with Mt. Hood National Forest, says popularity has spiked in recent years.
Drive by: Major attractions are getting tougher to access. Photo: Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight Jurgenhessphotography.com
The nearby Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, a corridor with dozens of waterfalls and scenic hikes, receives 2 million visitors annually, the agency says.
Crowded parking lots at scenic attractions can put drivers in dangerous situations, like the tragic 2015 Dog Mountain parking area accident that killed two teenagers.
Ecological impact is another concern. Human waste can spread parasites into watersheds.
At places like Paradise Park, a popular campsite in the Mt. Hood Wilderness, an ever-growing spiderweb of user trails is marring the fragile alpine environment known for summer wildflowers.
Behind the scenes, the crowding has also created tension between different types of land use policies, according to Ibsen. While serving as a hub for recreation, the national forest produces an average of more than 30 million board-feet of timber annually.
The Forest Service also has to mitigate and manage wildfires that generally burn bigger and hotter with climate change. Ibsen says the 2020 Labor Day fires left personnel saddled with “a huge amount” of labor to reopen roads and recreation sites.
It’s a slow effort because of funding shortfalls, she says.
New roads off-limits
In 2019, Blumenauer and Wyden began reaching out to local officials, advocacy groups and the public soliciting ideas to better protect the region. That outreach is expected to continue this year, but they’ve already collected numerous ideas.
Among big-ticket items in the lawmakers’ proposals is the addition of more than 350,000 acres to the Mt. Hood National Recreation Area.
Parking? Lots: Springtime congestion around the Rowena Plateau on the Oregon side of the Gorge. Photo: Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight Jurgenhessphotography.com
In that national recreation area, the federal government only allows timber harvests deemed to advance goals such as reducing wildfire risk and protecting habitats. It’s also more difficult for the Forest Service to build new roads unless they fulfill a purpose like protection from wildfires.
Timber projects and road-building would be off-limits in newly designated wilderness areas.
Designated wilderness areas offer havens for flora and fauna and allow old-growth forests to sequester carbon, increasingly seen as a vital tool to mitigate climate change.
But across the United States even wilderness areas have been sustaining harm from heavy visitation, Ibsen says. The Forest Service estimates 7 million more people visited wilderness areas in fiscal year 2020 compared with the year before, an increase of 75%.
Arran Robertson, a spokesperson for the conservation group Oregon Wild, is a former member of Blumenauer’s staff. The last Congressional push to designate wilderness areas on Mount Hood, in 2009, left out some crucial additions, he said, and Oregon Wild has been lobbying for years to fix that.
You are not alone: Hiking on Mount Hood ain’t what it used to be. Photo: Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight Jurgenhessphotography.com
But the proposals could make it harder for the Forest Service to cultivate a healthy forest, according to Nick Smith, a spokesperson for the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry advocacy group.
Smith says that putting more acres off-limits to logging will only fuel wildfires in overgrown forests.
“We are concerned about any proposals that put arbitrary lines on a map and add more red tape and bureaucracy to manage these lands,” said Smith.
Miles of new trails
The proposed wilderness expansions could imperil at least one plan to log and thin a forest near popular Trillium Lake in the Mt. Hood National Forest.
Ideal: Oregon’s Newton Creek. Photo: Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight Jurgenhessphotography.com
The Forest Service project is partially motivated to protect old-growth stands and huckleberry plants. Part of that site, in the Zig Zag Integrated Resource Plan, would be designated wilderness and off-limits to timber harvesting in Blumenauer and Wyden’s proposal.
The lawmakers are also proposing that crews build new miles of trail to disperse hikers.
They haven’t yet set a goal for how many miles of new trails would be created. But the effort would include Towns to Trails, a years-in-the-making plan to build a 200-mile loop trail in the Gorge, according to Renée Tkach, project manager at Friends of the Columbia Gorge.
More than three-quarters of that plan is already completed.
Jessica Metta, executive director of the Mid-Columbia Economic Development District and a member of the Hood River City Council, said she’s especially interested in seeing an expansion of public transit options to alleviate crowding at trailheads and reduce emissions. That’s also included in the proposals.
Blumenauer’s office recently solicited hundreds of comments on the proposals, which are listed online. In October, the congressman also released a map of the would-be land expansions.
