The Forest Service Has Green Lit the Industrially Logging of Oregon’s Hells Canyon
It’s called the Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project. 86,500 acres. One of the most important wildlife corridors left on the continent. Implementation starts this summer. Here’s how to stop it.
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 area lies inside the recreation area itself. The sales start this summer. Anderson’s supervisor, Wallowa-Whitman National Forest Supervisor Shaun McKinney, reviewed the objections the public filed against the project and overruled four of them before Anderson signed. Neither the Regional Forester for the Pacific Northwest, Jacque Buchanan, nor anyone above her intervened.
That’s the present the agency is giving Hells Canyon for its fiftieth birthday. Almost nobody outside eastern Oregon knows.
One of the doors still open
Ten years ago, a group of ecologists at the University of Washington, the Nature Conservancy, and the Georgia Institute of Technology published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called “Achieving climate connectivity in a fragmented landscape.” They modeled the movements of 2,903 vertebrate species across the western hemisphere as the climate they evolved for moved north and up. Then they mapped where the country could still hold those movements and where it couldn’t. The answer wasn’t reassuring. Only forty-one percent of the natural land area of the United States still holds together well enough to let animals track the climates they need. In the eastern United States that figure falls to two percent. The rest has been too thoroughly chopped up by roads, subdivisions, clearcuts, farms, fences. When the deer and the bears and the salamanders go looking for the cold they were built for, most of them will find the door closed.
The Morgan Nesbit country is one of the doors that’s still open. The Nature Conservancy named the scientific visualization of the paper Migrations in Motion, and if you look at where the lines run thickest and brightest through the interior West, you’ll find one of them running right through the Wallowas and down into Hells Canyon. Jamie Dawson, who directs conservation for the Greater Hells Canyon Council and has walked this ground, wrote in March 2023 that the Morgan Nesbit project area sits “right in the heart” of those routes.
What moves through this country, or could, reads like a list of species we’ve mostly forgotten we still share a continent with. Gray wolves, reestablished in the last two decades and now breeding here. Elk. Black bear. Chinook and steelhead running up the Imnaha to spawn, both listed threatened under the Endangered Species Act since the 1990s. Bull trout, also threatened, holding on in the cold upper reaches of the creeks. Wolverine, moving through. Pacific fisher, Canada lynx, American marten. Moose, recently. Grizzly, potentially, if the Cabinet-Yaak population ever finds the route south. The country is also the ancestral homeland of the Wallowa Band of the Niimiipuu, the people the rest of the country calls the Nez Perce, who were driven out of it in 1877 at gunpoint by the United States Army and have held the treaty rights ever since.
John Persell is senior staff attorney for Oregon Wild. He’s been tracking Morgan Nesbit for years and has walked the project area himself. When we spoke, he put the stakes for wildlife in one sentence. “This will definitely impact the ability of species to migrate through this landscape due to the scale of the habitat loss.”
What the agency calls Morgan Nesbit
On February 11, 2026, a district ranger named Brian Anderson signed a document authorizing industrial commercial logging across this country. The project is called the Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project. The name comes from two remote summits at the heart of the project area, Morgan Butte and Nesbit Butte, a pair of forested mounds about eighteen miles southeast of Joseph. It’s the Forest Service’s usual way of naming a timber sale. Find a couple of unremarkable features on the quad map and staple their names together. The result sounds like nothing. A surveyor’s clerical entry. Which is, in a way, the first thing the reader should notice. A project of this size, in a place of this consequence, is moving forward under a name deliberately shaped to carry no weight.
The decision notice authorizes 11,479 acres of commercial thinning, 2,888 acres of noncommercial thinning, 74,840 acres of prescribed burning, 18 miles of new temporary road construction, and 367 miles of road maintenance. Forty-five percent of the project area lies inside the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, which Congress established by law and which President Gerald Ford signed on December 31, 1975. The recreation area turned fifty years old six weeks before Anderson signed off on logging a substantial portion of it. The agency calls the project a resiliency project. It’s a word doing a lot of work.
Never logged
The Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project, a small organization that has spent three field seasons walking the proposed sale units, reports that Morgan Nesbit contains the highest percentage of never-logged forest they have surveyed in any timber sale outside of Inventoried Roadless Areas. They found commercial logging planned in mature and old mixed-conifer stands, on steep slopes above streams that hold threatened fish, on ground that has never seen a chainsaw.
Persell put it in plainer terms. “Commercial logging will take place on about 13,000 of the 86,500 acres in the plan, which combined with the roads they’re planning through former roadless area is literally death by a thousand cuts.”
Ask why the project has to be this big and the answer is economic. Persell explained that the Forest Service scales parcels like Morgan Nesbit up to the size that makes the sale commercially attractive to timber operators. A smaller, more surgical project won’t pencil out for industry. A bigger one, with more volume and more road access, will. The public absorbs the habitat loss and the roads and the sedimentation. The agency absorbs the planning cost. An industry too small to bid on thoughtful work gets a landscape-scale sale handed to it. That’s a public subsidy in everything but name.
The original proposal was worse. It would have allowed the removal of Grand fir up to thirty inches in diameter. The only reason it no longer does is that on March 29, 2024, a United States district judge named Ann Aiken ruled that the Forest Service had violated three federal environmental statutes when the first Trump administration scrapped the Eastside Screens five days before leaving office. The Eastside Screens are a set of management rules adopted in 1994 that prohibited the logging of live trees over twenty-one inches in diameter across seven million acres of Eastern Oregon and Washington forest. The rule protected the largest three percent of trees in the region, which is to say, the trees that most of the wildlife actually needs. Judge Aiken reinstated the rule and ordered the agency to prepare a full environmental impact statement before trying to change it again. She did so in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of six conservation groups, including the Greater Hells Canyon Council and Oregon Wild, with an amicus brief filed by the Nez Perce Tribe. The coalition was represented by Crag Law Center.
On page two of Anderson’s February decision, under the summary of changes, he notes the removal of “the proposal to remove trees greater than 21 inches DBH” owing to the “reversal of the Eastside Screens amendment.” That’s agency writing. What it means is that the biggest trees in the Morgan Nesbit country are still standing this morning only because a federal judge made the Forest Service stand down.
The rest of the objections were heard and overruled.
Six objections, four overruled
During the forty-five-day objection period that ran from May 7 to June 20, 2025, the Forest Service received six eligible objections. They came from Wallowa County, the American Forest Resources Council, the Greater Hells Canyon Council, Oregon Wild, the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project, and one member of the public. Wallowa County withdrew on September 3, 2025, after the agency agreed to delete a proposed 17.4 miles of road decommissioning. The county wanted the roads kept open for hunting and firewood. The road decommissioning would have reduced sediment in the fish-bearing creeks and cut the road density in parts of the project area where it already exceeds six miles of road per square mile. The Forest Service’s own standard for Hells Canyon is one and a half miles per square mile. The seventeen miles of decommissioning were one of the few pieces of the project that would have actually restored the landscape. They’re gone. The eighteen miles of new temporary road construction remain.
The other four objectors held their objections. The Forest Service approved the project anyway.
The process, and what came of it
For most of the last century we held this country in something like abeyance. We built, slowly and through considerable difficulty, a framework of laws and processes that recognized the public’s standing to speak for land that can’t speak for itself. Environmental review. Public comment. Objection periods. Every one of them exists because at some earlier point we’d learned what happens when no one has to listen.
The Forest Service held the comment periods. The agency held the objection meetings. The agency went through the process. And on February 11, 2026, the agency signed with every substantive objection from the groups with the deepest knowledge of this country still standing on the record. Persell told me the agency walked away from the table in the face of an outpouring of local recommendations for changes. Brian Anderson, he said, isn’t budging. The process happened. The substance of what people said during the process was set aside.
This pattern isn’t unique to Morgan Nesbit. I wrote last weekend about what’s happening to the Boundary Waters, Grand Staircase, and a hundred other places across the country right now under the same method. The calculation running through all of it depends on one thing. That the public will be too tired, too distracted, or too late to respond to a Wednesday afternoon decision notice on the Wallowa-Whitman project page. For eighty thousand acres at a time, they’ve been mostly right so far.
The people still fighting
Oregon Wild is still weighing its options and planning its next moves. Persell and his colleague Rob Klavins, Oregon Wild’s Northeast Oregon field coordinator based near Enterprise, have been on this project longer than most. Klavins has walked this ground more times than I’ve counted. The Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project has publicly raised funds for potential litigation. Crag Law Center, who won the Eastside Screens case in 2024, knows this terrain. Greater Hells Canyon Council keeps showing up to meetings. They haven’t stopped. They’ll need help. The first timber sales are expected this summer. Crews will mark the treatment units as soon as the snow’s out of the high country.
The Wallowas are up there this morning. The Imnaha is running bankful with the last of the snowmelt. The Snake is still cutting the deepest gorge in North America. Chinook are moving up the creeks. The western larch are needling out yellow-green along the ridges. A few wolves are somewhere in the Zumwalt prairie country above the canyon, traveling. None of this has been sold yet. None of this is gone.
It still could be.
What you can do
Write to the Regional Forester. Brian Anderson signed the decision. His boss is Pacific Northwest Regional Forester Jacque Buchanan. On March 30, she announced Region 6 would prepare additional analysis and alternatives on a separate Northwest Forest Plan amendment after receiving over 3,400 public comments. She has the authority to do the same for Morgan Nesbit. Shaun McKinney, the Wallowa-Whitman Forest Supervisor, has himself publicly advised constituents to write to Buchanan with disagreements. Let’s take him up on it.
Keep it short. Three paragraphs at most. Tell her where you live, why Hells Canyon matters to you, and that the Morgan Nesbit decision should be withdrawn and the project re-analyzed under a full Environmental Impact Statement. Write to the public inquiries inbox for Region 6 at sm.fs.r6ccestaff@usda.gov and address your message to Regional Forester Jacque Buchanan. Or mail a physical letter to the Regional Office at 1220 SW 3rd Ave., Portland, OR 97204. Physical mail is read.
Also write to Shaun McKinney at the Wallowa-Whitman Supervisor’s Office: sm.fs.wwnf-webmail@usda.gov, 541-523-6391, 1550 Dewey Ave Suite A, Baker City, OR 97814.
Reach out to Oregon news desks. National and regional attention is what makes the agency reconsider a decision of this size. The following Oregon outlets cover public lands and environment. If you live in Oregon and you’re angry about this, tell a reporter.
OPB news tips: opb.org/submit-idea
East Oregonian (strongest Eastern Oregon coverage): news@eastoregonian.com, 541-966-0818
Columbia Insight (already covered the Morgan Nesbit project in January 2025): info@columbiainsight.org
High Country News tips: editor@hcn.org
The Oregonian: 503-221-8327, 1320 SW Broadway, Portland, OR 97201
Fund the legal fight. Litigation is the most reliable lever to stop implementation. Oregon Wild is weighing its options. The Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project is publicly raising money for potential litigation. Crag Law Center, the firm that won the Eastside Screens case for this coalition in 2024, knows this terrain. Dollars to any of the following directly support the people preparing to take this to federal court.
If you’re not an Oregonian, your senators matter more than ours. Wyden and Merkley are already on side. The Senate math runs through states whose senators have never heard a constituent say the words “Hells Canyon.” Use our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to find and contact yours.
Share this piece. The calculation was that this decision would pass unnoticed. Every share makes that calculation less true. If you know a reporter who should see this, forward it to them.
Until next time,
Will
More Than Just Parks is reader-supported public lands journalism. We refuse corporate money and grants. Our only obligation is to defend the American commons. If this was worth your time, the single most valuable thing you can do is forward it to someone who needs to see it.
Thank you very much. Wrote both forestry places, two news outlets and donated. You guys are my heroes.
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