Opinion: The Blue Mountains Were Protected for the Future, Not from the Public
Why the Forest Plan DEIS matters to eastern Oregon, southeast Washington, and everyone who depends on meaningful access
By Jeff Knoll
The Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision is not a distant federal paperwork exercise. It affects the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests across eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, including the public lands reach from John Day, Prairie City, Baker City, La Grande, Ukiah, Heppner, Enterprise, Joseph, Pendleton, Walla Walla, Pomeroy, and Hines. The planning area covers about 4.9 million acres, but it excludes Hells Canyon National Recreation Area because it operates under a separate comprehensive management plan.
The Blue Mountains carry fire scars, old timber roads, hunting camps, trail systems, snowmobile country, grazing allotments, watersheds, rural economies, tribal history, and generations of working relationships between people and place. To understand why this DEIS matters, step away from the comment portal for a moment and remember why Americans began protecting forests in the first place.
Nancy Langston’s Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares examined the Blue Mountains as a cautionary tale about management confidence and unintended consequences in the Inland West. Her work reminds us that forest problems rarely come from one simple villain. Fire suppression, grazing, logging, insects, disease, changing public values, and agency assumptions all shaped the forest we see today. The lesson is not that people should stop touching forests. The lesson is that management must be honest enough to measure whether its theories work.
My Wife; Angela Knoll’s Steering the Ship: Women and Forest Conservation in the Progressive-Era West adds another useful layer. Her thesis examines western clubwomen and their role in forest conservation during the Progressive Era, including their movement from literary clubs into civic work described as “municipal housekeeping.” Her abstract states that women’s clubs were instrumental in campaigns that helped create national and state parks, and that western women helped safeguard timberlands “for the use and enjoyment of future generations.” Early conservation was not built on the idea that people must be removed from the landscape. It was built around the fear of waste. Forests were being cut hard, burned hard, and treated as if abundance had no end. The conservation response was not simply preservation for preservation’s sake. It demanded that public resources be managed with discipline, foresight, and accountability.
That old conservation ethic belongs in today's Blue Mountains discussion. One Voice’s current position reflects that same practical ground. One Voice does not endorse any alternative as currently written. Alternative 1 continues the 1990 plans. Alternative 2 is the proposed action and appears to provide a better starting framework for active management and multiple use in several areas important to motorized recreation. Alternative 3 adds additional resource protections, including Recommended Wilderness and Roadless Area management. But a better starting point is not an endorsement. The public should use comments to improve the final forest-specific plans rather than treating this as a simple vote for one alternative exactly as written.
The Forest Plan does not directly close named OHV, four-wheel-drive, motorcycle, snowmobile, or eBike routes today. Claims that adoption of the plan immediately closes specific routes are inaccurate. But the plan can influence future route maintenance, reconstruction, travel management, recreation settings, management areas, standards, and guidelines. In plain language, the Forest Plan may not lock the gate today, but it can write the policy that makes locking, or maintaining the gate, easier tomorrow.
The same caution applies to Roadless Areas. Alternative 2 does not automatically open hundreds of thousands of acres to cross-country OHV travel or create new motorized routes. Route designation remains a separate process. The access question is more practical: how much flexibility will local forests have to maintain roads, reconstruct routes after fire or flood, manage vegetation, reduce wildfire risk, and support lawful recreation over time? That question became more important on August 20, 2026, when USDA published a separate proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule and return more decision-making over Inventoried Roadless Areas to individual national-forest planning. That proposal is not final, but if adopted, the direction written into individual Forest Plans becomes even more important. Access is part of forest management. Roads and trails are not merely weekend conveniences. They are how firefighters move, how volunteers reach drainage problems, how culverts get replaced, how trail damage gets repaired, how search and rescue operates, how habitat projects happen, how grazing is administered, how post-fire recovery begins, and how rural families continue their relationship with the public lands around them.
A locked gate does not restore a meadow. A roadless label does not clear a plugged culvert. A closure does not automatically improve habitat. A wilderness-like setting does not reduce wildfire risk unless management outcomes are measured and proven. That is the question One Voice is asking more clearly now:
Did it work?
If a route is restricted to reduce sediment, measure sediment. If a seasonal closure is intended to improve wildlife conditions, measure the relevant wildlife or habitat outcome. If active treatment is intended to reduce wildfire risk, measure treatment completion and performance. A closure should not be counted as success merely because the gate stayed closed. The DEIS does include monitoring questions for ecological conditions, visitor use, visitor satisfaction, recreation objectives, and multiple-use opportunities. That is a useful structure. One Voice is asking the Forest Service to strengthen it by measuring the condition of access itself: miles of designated roads and trails available by use and season, miles maintained, routes made unusable by fire or deferred maintenance, over-snow opportunities, dispersed camping, trailhead condition, volunteer stewardship, maintenance backlog, and recreation-related economic contribution.
The same principle applies to state recreation planning. Oregon’s 2025–2029 Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan and the 2026 Oregon Recreational Trails Plan are important because they identify recreation needs, access gaps, mapping problems, maintenance priorities, OHV demand, trail connectivity, camping near staging areas, shared-use roads, and better closure information. One Voice has not located a clear discussion in the DEIS itself showing how those current state plans influenced the recreation direction. We are asking the Forest Service to make that connection explicit in the Final EIS and the three final Forest Plans. The Forest Service is preparing one regional EIS but separate final plans and draft Records of Decision for the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman. Regional consistency can be useful, but it should not erase local differences. Nearly five million acres across three forests do not share identical communities, road systems, trail systems, fire risk, recreation patterns, or economic dependencies. One Voice is asking the Forest Service to clearly show where recreation conditions, access needs, infrastructure, and management direction differ among the three forests.
This is where the public can help.
Treat historic recreation use as a tangible public asset. Clubs and users should be recording old maps, ride histories, volunteer hours, trail maintenance, event records, GPS tracks, snowmobile routes, hunting access, dispersed camping patterns, staging areas, local business spending, grant-funded projects, and photographs before and after stewardship work. That record shows that recreation is not just impact. It is history, economy, culture, maintenance, volunteer labor, and public value. It also helps establish the connection needed for future objection eligibility.
The Forest Service commonly calls this standing; the regulation describes it as eligibility to file an objection. A person or organization that submits substantive formal comments during the proper comment opportunity may later object to the proposed decision, generally based on concerns previously raised.
The strongest comments are not slogans. They are specific, grounded, and useful. A substantive comment should be within the scope of the proposal, specific to it, directly related to it, and supported by reasons the Forest Service can consider. A useful comment explains what you observe, why it matters, what experience or evidence supports your concern, and what you want the Forest Service to change, retain, explain, or measure.
Participate because the Blue Mountains deserve informed public involvement, not because every paragraph must sound like a lawsuit. Read the plan where it affects the places you know. Personalize your comment. Explain your connection. Ask for three genuinely forest-specific final plans. Ask the Forest Service to use the best available recreation data. Ask for a clear recreation and access baseline. Ask that motorized recreation, roads, trails, eBikes, over-snow travel, dispersed camping, and rural access be treated as legitimate multiple uses. Ask that restrictions be tied to measurable outcomes and revisited if they fail to achieve their stated goals.
Comments are due September 30, 2026.
The Forest Service identifies CARA as the preferred online method. Written comments may also be emailed as an attachment to sm.fs.bluesforests@usda.gov
or mailed to the Umatilla National Forest Supervisor’s Office,
Attn: Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision, 72510 Coyote Road, Pendleton, Oregon 97801.
Whatever method you use, save a copy of the exact comment and proof of submission. The Blue Mountains were not protected from people. They were protected from waste. Today, we should be just as concerned about wasting access, local knowledge, volunteer capacity, rural economic value, and the chance to learn whether management decisions actually work. Healthy forests and meaningful public access do not have to be opposing goals. The task before the Forest Service is to write three plans that protect resources, serve communities and recreationists, and show the public—through measurement rather than assumption—whether today’s decisions will work tomorrow. That is the educational value of this DEIS. It gives the public a chance to ask better questions before the answers are written into decades of management direction.
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By Jeff Knoll Find me on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-knoll-b5632437/
Originally published at: OneVoiceRec.Org
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