The country
One of the last intact wildlife corridors on the North American continent runs through the far northeast corner of Oregon, from the granite peaks of the Wallowa Mountains down into Hells Canyon, the deepest river gorge on the continent at 7,993 feet, almost two thousand feet deeper than the Grand Canyon. Gray wolves breed there. Chinook and steelhead run up its rivers to spawn, both listed threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Wolverine, Canada lynx, and Pacific fisher move through. It’s ancestral homeland of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce. Congress made a significant portion of it the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area in 1975, and President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law on the last day of that year.
On December 31 of last year, the recreation area turned fifty. Six weeks later, on February 11 of this year, a Forest Service district ranger named Brian Anderson signed off on industrial commercial logging across vast swaths of it. 45 percent of the project…
