Conserving and Restoring the Mount Hood National Forest

 There stood Mount Hood in all the glory of the alpenglow, looming immensely high, beaming with intelligence. It seemed neither near nor far. The whole mountain appeared as one glorious manifestation of divine power, enthusiastic and benevolent, glowing like a countenance with ineffable repose and beauty, before which we could only gaze in lowly admiration. —John Muir (1888)

Figure 1. Mount Hood from Larch Mountain. The middle ground is the Bull Run watershed. Yes, those are clear-cuts (the lighter green [and far shorter] stands). The brown patches are natural talus slopes. Congress put an end to logging in the Bull Run in 1996. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon Archives.

One autumn day in the mid-1970s near the Memorial Union at Oregon State University, a freshman forestry student from Missouri approached me in great distress and emphatically asked, “Do you know they log the national forests?” Like many Americans, he had conflated national forests with national parks. One is green on the map, while the other is pink, but both are refuges for nature. Alas, not quite.

I grew up in timber country with my national forest backyard being the Cottage Grove Ranger District of the Umpqua National Forest. In the early 1970s there was a demonstration on Eleventh Street in Eugene in front of the Willamette National Forest office demanding that a roadless area called French Pete be returned to the Three Sisters Wilderness. Wow, I thought. Parts of the national forests that aren’t logged.

East of Portland, from the Columbia River on the north to the Clackamas-Santiam Divide on the south, from the low foothills of the Cascade Range on the west to the sagebrush steppe and Warm Springs Indian Reservation on the east, lies the 1.1 million-acre Mount Hood National Forest.

Had more Oregonians earlier had more vision—and the vim, vigor, and verve to make the vision a reality—greater Mount Hood, if not the entire Mount Hood National Forest, would have become Mount Hood National Park.

Mount Hood National Park? In Fact, Not

In his dreams, Tom Kloster, a tireless advocate for the conservation of Mount Hood and beyond, envisions a greater Mount Hood National Park that includes the Columbia River Gorge, with the south half of the Mount Hood National Forest becoming the Clackamas National Recreation Area. Kloster noted, in an op-ed in the Oregonian entitled “The Push for Mount Hood National Park Status Is a Century Old”:

By the late 1800s, Portlanders became increasingly interested in setting aside their mountain as part of the new national park system. In early 1888, The Oregonian reported that “the Oregon Alpine Club are [sic] taking the preliminary steps (to have) Mount Hood set apart as a national park,” concluding that “Mount Hood belongs to the people of America, and it should be reserved for them for all time.”

The interest continued for years, and in 1916 U.S. Sen. George Earle Chamberlain of Oregon authored a bill that would have created a large park encompassing the entirety of Mount Hood. The bill stalled out, as did later efforts in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 2016, Jamie Hale of the Oregonian authored a piece entitled “3 National Parks in Oregon That Never Happened.” As for a Mount Hood National Park, Hale wrote:

In 1940, Mount Hood was considered likely for national park status, but that possibility relied on a major governmental shift: At the time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt hinted that the U.S. Forest Service might move to the Department of the Interior, where the National Park Service resided—a proposal that has come up again since.

“Mount Hood, now a national forest, would unquestionably be established as a national park,” the Oregonian reported at the time. “[Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes] has said that certain scenic areas in the Pacific Northwest lend themselves to national park status and that Mount Hood is one of these.”

As the article points out, a Mount Hood National Park wouldn’t be so far fetched. At the time, several great parks contained Pacific Northwest peaks, including Mount Rainier and the new Olympic National Park.

But the notion didn’t last—the Forest and Park Services didn’t merge, and by 1941, the new director of the National Park Service, Newton B. Drury, said there were no plans to make Mount Hood a national park, leaving it as it remains today: a sprawling national forest.

A sprawling—and somewhat cutover—national forest.

Mount Hood National Park? In Fiction, Yes

Search online for “Mount Hood National Park” and one finds the notion to be alive, if not well. As examples:

• Riparian Games (“Family Games for the Natural World”) markets three different travel games (think bored children on a road trip) advertised on the website as featuring Mount Hood National Park. Yet the actual printing on the boxes clearly states “Mount Hood National Forest” (perhaps it is a truth-in-advertising thing that applies to the product itself, but not to the marketing).

• On Etsy, one can buy a Mount Hood National Park embroidered topographic map.

• At Nordstrom, one can buy a Mount Hood National Park art print.

• More than one photographer markets their photographs as showing Mount Hood National Park.

• One can buy a commemorative quarter (or the same in more expensive silver bullion, Figure 2) struck by the US Mint commonly known among coin collectors as the “Mount Hood National Park quarter,” part of the America the Beautiful series. Fifty-six such coins were struck, one for each state and territory. As each governmental unit is not blessed with a national park, other National Park System units were often used, with an occasional national forest or national wildlife refuge thrown in. Yes, you are right, Oregon does indeed have an actual national park.

Figure 2. The “Mount Hood National Park” silver bullion coin, featuring Mount Hood and Lost Lake. Source: Stack’s and Bowers Galleries.

• Searching the Library of Congress website for “Mount Hood National Park” yields a series of photographs from 1936 clearly labeled “Mount Hood National Forest” but equally clearly indexed as “Mount Hood National Park” (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Noted photographer Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), while working for the federal government during the Great Depression, entitled this image “A natural protective watershed has been destroyed by unscrupulous logging companies. Mount Hood National Forest, Oregon.” Apparently, Arthur, born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, couldn’t tell an unnatural clear-cut from a natural burn. While there was plenty of unscrupulous logging going on in 1936, little of it was on the national forests. That unscrupulous logging came later. Source: Library of Congress.

Incremental Conservation over the Centuries

Wikipedia gives a concise history of the bureaucratic and cartographic evolution of what we know today as the Mount Hood National Forest.

Mount Hood National Forest was first established as the Bull Run Forest Reserve in 1892. It was expanded in 1893. It was merged with part of Cascade National Forest on July 1, 1908 and named Oregon National Forest with 1,787,280 acres. It extended from the Columbia River to the South Fork of the Santiam River until 1911 when the Santiam National Forest was proclaimed and the southern border of the Oregon National Forest was moved north to the divide between the Santiam River and Clackamas River. The name was changed again to Mount Hood National Forest in 1924. [citations omitted]

The first steps toward the conservation of what we now know as the Mount Hood National Forest occurred in 1892 to protect Portland’s water supply, the Bull Run River. In 1904, Congress banned mining, logging, livestock, and humans in the Bull Run Forest Reserve, before it became part of the Oregon National Forest in 1908.

Much to the consternation of Sierra Club founder John Muir, the first chief forester of the United States, Gifford Pinchot, declared that the newly proclaimed national forests were to be managed for “multiple use.” Muir rightly saw logging and grazing as multiple abuse. (See Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands by John Clayton.)

The Forest Service violated the 1904 no-logging mandate during the mid-twentieth century, with logging increasing rapidly on the Mount Hood National Forest after World War II. I estimated that at its peak logging levels, one log truck full of old-growth logs left the national forest every nine minutes, 24/7. While at much lower levels today, much abusive logging still occurs on the MHNF. (Although in 1996, Congress unambiguously put an end to logging in the Bull Run watershed.)

Starting in the 1960s, Congress periodically legislated protection for portions of the Mount Hood National Forest to prevent the ravages of logging and for the benefit of this and future generations (see Map 1). The original Wilderness Act of 1964 included a 14,160-acre Mount Hood Wilderness. The Forest Service had administratively established this acreage as a “wild area” on June 27, 1940. Congress added approximately 33,000 acres in 1978. In 2009, Congress added 7,527 acres to the (now) core wilderness unit and added three detached units: Barlow Butte (1,972 acres), Twin Lakes (6,396 acres), and White River (483 acres). Upon completion of a land exchange, 1,710 acres in the Tilly Jane area will be added to the Mount Hood Wilderness.

Map 1. Congressional conservation on the Mount Hood National Forest by year. Click here for a larger version. Source: Erik Fernandez, Oregon Wild.

Following is a list of the wilderness areas, wild and scenic rivers, and other special areas established by Congress that have elevated the conservation status of certain portions of the Mount Hood National Forest.

Wilderness

• Badger Creek, 29,815 acres, 1984 and 2009

• Bull of the Woods, 36,978 acres, 1984

• Clackamas, 9,474 acres, 2009 (five units: Big Bottom, Clackamas Canyon, Memaloose Lake, Sisi Butte, and South Fork Clackamas)

• Lower White River, 2,871 acres, 2009

• Mark O. Hatfield, 65,436 acres, 1984

• Mount Hood, 67,742 acres, 1964, 1978, and 2009

• Mount Jefferson, 4,942 acres, 1968

• Roaring River, 33,200 acres, 2009

• Salmon-Huckleberry, 61,114 acres, 1984

For more information, see “The National Wilderness Preservation System in Oregon: Making It Bigger and Better” (The Larch Company, March 2020).

Wild and Scenic Rivers

• Collawash, 47 miles, 1988

• Eagle Creek, 27 miles, 1988

• East Fork Hood River, 13.5 miles, 2009

• Fifteenmile Creek, 4.5 miles, 2009

• Roaring River, 13.7 miles, 1988

• Salmon, 33.5 miles, 1988

• Sandy (Upper), 12.5 miles, 1988

• Sandy (Lower), 12.5 miles, 1988

• South Fork Roaring River, 4.6 miles, 2009

• White, 46.8 miles, 1988

For more information, see “National Wild and Scenic Rivers and State Scenic Waterways in Oregon” (The Larch Company, May 2019).

Other Congressional Protections

• Bull Run Watershed Management Unit, 98,272 acres, 1904, 1996, and 2001

• Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, 43,058 acres, 1986

• Crystal Springs Watershed Special Management unit, 2,859 acres, 2009

• Cultus Creek, 278 acres, 2009

• Mount Hood National Recreation Area, 34,550 acres, 2009 (three units)

• Upper Big Bottom, 1,580 acres, 2009

For more information, see “Special Congressional Conservation Designations in Oregon” (The Larch Company, February 2012).

(I haven’t totaled the acreage because there is significant overlap among the kinds of congressional protection.)

What’s Next?

On the afternoon of Monday, August 5, 2019, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-3rd-OR) met with various stakeholders at Timberline Lodge (Figure 4) to discuss the future of greater Mount Hood. Their invitation stated:

It has been 10 years since the 2009 Omnibus Public Lands Act was signed into law, designating over 125,000 acres of Wilderness, almost 35,000 acres of National Recreation Area, and over 80 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers on Mt. Hood. This historic effort involved Tribes, local governments, and a broad array of conservation, natural resource, and other interests, industries, and communities on the mountain. It has impacted cultural practices, outdoor recreation, transportation, and natural resource management, as well as wildlife habitat, drinking water, air quality, and carbon storage.

Ten years later, we are gathering stakeholders to review some of the history behind this historic law, consider what has changed since 2009, and examine opportunities that lie ahead to further protect one of the most incredible icons in Oregon—Mt. Hood. During the course of this event, we would like to hear from you:

• What is your vision for the future of Mt. Hood?

• What opportunities do you see for cultural resource preservation, conservation and natural resource protection, outdoor recreation enhancement, and efficient and effective transportation on the mountain?

• What issues should guide the mountain’s legacy for the next 10 years?

Senator and Representative: What’s your plan?

Figure 4. Timberline Lodge on the slope of Mount Hood. It looks a lot better during the winter. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon Archives.