The document summarizes the acquisition of 13,000 acres of formerly private timberlands in Oregon that are now public land open for recreation like hunting and hiking. Key details include:
- The land contains important habitat for elk and other wildlife and is located between two wilderness areas along the John Day River.
- The project secured public access to the land and created an unbroken area of 51,000 acres for wildlife.
- The acquisition took 5 years to complete and involved overcoming challenges like low appraisals and opposition from local officials.
1. Snuggled between two wilderness
areas in the icy-cold headwaters of
the John Day River, 13,000 acres of
once privately held timberlands is
now open for all to hunt, hike, fish
and explore.
JOHNDAY
H
igh along the ridges south of Prairie City
in northeast Oregon, the John Day River is
born. Hundreds of tiny springs and rivulets
of snowmelt trickle down hillsides as they weave
their way through elk summer range. The creeks pass
through decades-old clearcuts thick and green with
two-story-tall lodgepoles—perfectly square sections
of once privately managed timberlands. Without
warning, the creeks hit a wall of old-growth spruce
with live, dead and dying trees—640-acre sections
of public land managed by the US Forest Service.
For some creeks, this boundary hopping goes on for
miles. By the time the water nears County Road 62,
the creeks have merged to become the John Day River,
meandering through ponderosas and knee-high grass.
It’s a good place to be an elk, but it’s a management
nightmare of checker-boarded public and private
land—at least that’s how it used to be.
Under a blue spring sky, I ride shotgun with
Bill Richardson, RMEF lands program manager
(LPM) for Oregon and Washington. From the road
above the John Day, he points out far ridges where
some 20 years ago he and a friend drove where only
a Land Cruiser could go. We don’t go there today in
his Dodge, but we do turn off the pavement and inch
our way to a spot he’s picked out. We pass two open
gates, and with each fork in the road the trees close in.
Overhanging limbs screech along the doors. “Redneck
pinstripes,” Bill says with a grin. Finally, a tree hangs
across the road. I get the feeling Bill goes few places
without his Stihl chainsaw with a 32” bar. Firewood
grows big where he lives in western Oregon.
The whine of the saw breaks the stillness for
only a moment. We climb again until the ridge
flattens out and park under several old, sagging
meat poles. In front of a stand of ponderosa pines
sits a knee-high memorial for a son and a father:
“Whose favorite season was elk,” it reads. This was
a family’s elk camp. I can see why they liked it here.
Finger ridges jut every cardinal direction. You can
hunt up or down, whatever suits your mood and the
prevailing thermals. Not far away, you can summit a
peak covered in talus and glass the drainages in one
Bringing It All Together
by PJ DelHomme
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2. a bow. “I saw some bulls in the 350-class or better,
but they were all on private land. It seems those bulls
hang out in the wilderness until snow or hunting
pressure causes them to beeline it down to the private
ranches below. The key is timing it so you catch
them in the transition, which includes some of the
Headwaters project area.”
Justin Karnopp grew up in Oregon and hunted
that area with his family in the early 1990s (see
his story on page 44). They would base camp just
outside the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness and
then hike in, which is a good strategy given the area’s
popularity.
“There are lots of bowhunters, and you really
have to hike to get away from them and into the elk,
which are educated, especially during bow season,”
says Karnopp. One good way to ditch the crowds is
to take advantage of a three-week-long traditional
archery-only (long or recurve bows) season in a
portion of Unit 46 called Canyon Creek.
And while Karnopp is a die-hard elk hunter, it’s
not the bugling bulls that would keep him up at night
in camp. The thick woods and folklore of the area has
more than a couple tales of the unexplainable.
“That’s sasquatch country, man,” says Karnopp.
“It’s a place where things go bump in the night.”
Sink or Swim
Bigfoot stories aside, the area has seen its share
of spooky moments, most recently when America’s
housing bubble burst in the late 2000s. The housing
market reached its peak in 2006. A short while later,
market prices started to tank, and people were
looking to unload their investment property before
it hit rock bottom. And no one knew how low that
would actually be.
Hired by the RMEF in 2009, Bill Richardson
had heard through the grapevine that 23 sections of
land belonging to a family-owned timber company
were going up for sale. Realtors, sporting property
companies and neighboring ranches all had interest.
Based on the track record of surrounding lands, the
threat of development was very real. In fact, private
development along the edges of public land in
Oregon and Washington more than doubled since the
1970s, according to a study by the US Forest Service
Pacific Northwest Research Station. These parcels
were gems, and a number of them had ideal building
sites with access roads and gates already established.
Yet the family that owned the property was
reluctant to let it go. The D.R. Johnson Lumber
Company, based in southwest Oregon, owned the
sections that owner Don Johnson first purchased back
in 2001. The land had been heavily logged by Crown
Pacific in the early 1990s, but in a move common in
the timber industry, Don bought the land aiming to
sell or trade it for other ready-to-log timberlands.
He passed away, though, in 2012, and his family was
looking to sell the property. For Richardson, there was
no time to ease into his role as LPM with a couple of
small projects.
“As a new LPM, it was like holy cow, this is
awesome right out of the gate,” he says. But the
project was hardly a slam dunk. At every turn in the
process, the road to completion kept getting narrower,
constantly threatening to block further progress.
By far, the largest monetary contributor to the success of
RMEF’s permanent land protection projects has been the Land
and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF)—and the future of that
fund is uncertain.
Since 1965, royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling
have been allocated to the LWCF. At full-funding, the fund is
supposed to have $900 million in its coffers to protect key
pieces of wild country and safeguard clean water sources.
But the fund is always raided for Congressional pet projects;
only once has it ever been fully funded. Even so, the fund has
contributed more than $62 million to RMEF projects, helping
to permanently protect more than 62,000 acres of prime elk
country. Since its inception, LWCF has contributed $16 billion
to national wildlife refuges, forests, parks, historic and scenic
trails, wild and scenic river corridors, national battlefields and
monuments, and other federal lands.
RMEF's long partnership with LWCF started in 1989 with a
$7 million LWCF grant to help the RMEF acquire some of the
most vital winter range for Yellowstone’s northern herd. Since
then, California’s Cache
Creek, Montana’s Iron
Mask and Tenderfoot Creek,
South Dakota’s Wildcat
Canyon and more have all
been made possible by money
from the LWCF. Most recently, the
LWCF contributed $2 million for the John
Day Headwaters project. But that could all change next fall.
On September 30, 2015, the 50th Anniversary of the
creation of the LWCF, it will “sunset” or cease to exist if not
re-authorized by Congress. It is imperative that Congress
hear from you. No other Congressional program does more
to directly benefit elk and their habitat—and elk hunters.
Conservation and hunting have always been bipartisan
values. Consider calling or writing your member of Congress
to express your support for the future of the LWCF and
elk country.
—PJD
NOT ALL SUNSETS ARE PRETTY
of two roadless areas nearby, bugling until you get an
answer. It’s perfect.
The hunting camp sits just inside the public land
boundary, and anyone can make camp here. Yet some
of the roads we drive bisect what
was once private timberland.
We pass numerous gates, which
easily could be padlocked,
barring access to both private and
public land beyond. But that’s not
how things turned out. Thanks
to the efforts of RMEF staff and
volunteers, foundations, a willing
landowner and government
agencies, the RMEF was able to
purchase 13,000 acres of private
timberland in prime elk country
and then transfer that acreage to the Forest Service the
same day. The project not only secured public access
to the 13,000 acres, it created an unbroken expanse of
roughly 51,000 acres of great elk habitat.
Some of Oregon’s finest elk country is found in
the southern Blue Mountains on the Malheur National
Forest. The project area lies within Grant County,
which holds the most Boone & Crockett entries for
typical Rocky Mountain elk in the state, according
to records of the Boone & Crockett Club. The last
“Booner” was taken in 1984, and now the area is
managed for 15 bulls/100 cows,
which produces opportunity and a
chance at some quality bulls, says
Ryan Torland, Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW)
biologist for the John Day country.
“Traditionally some good bulls are
taken out of that Murderers Creek
unit because of the wilderness
area and the places they can hide,”
he says.
Much of the project area sits
within the Murderers Creek Unit
46, where archery tags are still over-the-counter and
rifle hunters can draw a tag roughly every three years.
“There are a ton of elk in the area, but it gets a
lot of pressure during archery season,” says Chad
Klinkenborg, RMEF’s northern Oregon regional
director. He hunted the area last year with a
muzzleloader, but says he’s going in next year with
The project not only
secured public access to
the 13,000 acres, it created
an unbroken expanse of
roughly 51,000 acres of
great elk habitat.
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3. The process took roughly five years. Just getting
an appraisal for the property required Richardson
to shuttle the appraisers to the 23 sections, totaling
500 miles and five days’ worth of redneck pinstripes.
And when the appraisal did come in, it was mighty
low, nearing the original purchase price back in 2001.
The Johnson family was dismayed, and was ready
to walk away from the table, and at times they did.
But they came back because that’s what Don would
have wanted.
“My husband loved the outdoors and hunting,”
says JoAnne Johnson, Don’s widow and co-owner
of D.R. Johnson Lumber Company. “Don always felt
that ultimately blocking up our sections with the
Forest Service property made the most sense. It is
the family’s hope and desire that now this beautiful
and unique area will remain accessible for hunters,
fishermen and all outdoorsmen, and that it will
receive some much-needed forest management as
well. It is a bittersweet moment for us, but we believe
Don would want the citizens of Grant County to be
able to enjoy this amazing property for generations
to come.”
The low appraisal wasn’t the only tree in the
road. Some county commissioners didn’t like the
idea of private land being turned over to the federal
government. One argument against the sale was that
the county would lose some of its tax base, which is
only partly true. While the Forest Service does not
pay property taxes on federal land, counties instead
receive payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) from the
US government that help offset losses in property
taxes due to non-taxable federal lands within their
boundaries. In 2014, Grant Country received $630,591
for 1.75 million acres of federal land. In 2013, it
was $581,458.
Because the land in the project area was private
timberland, it was taxed at a lower rate than standard
property tax. But when timber or agriculture land
is taken out of production, being either developed,
sold or transferred to the Forest Service, the sellers
are subject to a “recapture tax.” In this case, the law
calls on the landowner to pay five years’ worth of
back property taxes on the land once it is no longer
classified as timberland. Ultimately, the county
received an additional $265,000 because of the
recapture tax.
“Some projects are easier than others, but this
wasn’t one of the easy ones,” says Jennifer Doherty,
the RMEF’s director of lands. “Without Bill’s tenacity,
the Johnson family’s patience, and effort from
countless other individuals and organizations, this
vital chunk of elk country never would have made its
way to the public domain.”
A Fishery Stronghold
The headwaters of the John Day is home to
roughly 500 elk from May to September that spend
the warmer months following green-up as the snow
recedes. The project area is also a key migration
corridor. Idaho fescue and mountain mahogany
share hillsides with scattered ponderosas, lodgepole
and spruce. Very few non-native plants have made
inroads here.
The elk cross paths with mule deer, mountain
goats, black bears and even the occasional wolverine.
While the elk and potential victory for hunter access
were what first attracted the RMEF to the project, it
was the “other wildlife” of the area that helped secure
the $7.5 million to purchase the property. Namely,
wildlife elk hunters rarely see, hidden beneath the
waters of the John Day and its tributaries.
Tim Unterwegner, a RMEF Life Member since
1995, spent more than three decades as a fish biologist
with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
He’s lived in John Day for 20 years and spent the
last 16 years as finance chair for the RMEF’s John
Day Chapter.
“That retired fish squeezer had data on all
the streams,” says Richardson. “It’s what made
the project.”
It made the project because the John Day is
the longest free-flowing (undammed) river west
of the Continental Divide, and the project directly
impacted 35 miles of stream in the watershed. The
river’s list of native species reads like a who’s who of
the threatened and endangered variety. It’s home to
the threatened bull trout that spawns in headwater
streams. It has one of the largest wild runs of spring
chinook left in the Columbia River Basin. It holds
Oregon’s only known population of westslope
cutthroat trout. And here, threatened summer
steelhead have their healthiest run in the Columbia
River watershed.
“When we work to protect and conserve elk
habitat, we really do have to look at the big picture,”
Day was a classic mountain man. Born in Virginia in
1770, he trapped and explored the West on the heels of
Lewis and Clark. Nowadays, his name is immortalized
in a national monument, two Oregon towns, and a
dam on the Columbia. Perhaps his best known tribute,
though, is the river that now bears his name.
In 1811, camped in east-central Oregon where the
river the early Native Americans called Mah-hah flows
into the Columbia, John Day was robbed. He and a
companion were stripped of everything, including the
clothes on their backs. A year later, they stumbled into
Fort Astoria, more than 300 miles from their unfortunate
encounter with the locals.
—PJD
WHO WAS JOHN DAY?
says Bob Springer, RMEF project development
specialist. “For the John Day, finding money just to
conserve elk habitat and access would have been
tough without the tremendous fisheries component,
not to mention the area’s sensitive bird and
amphibian species.”
Those cold spawning streams that start high
in the John Day country put this project as the
number one funding priority for the Land and
Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). That fund alone
contributed $2 million toward the purchase. (See
sidebar on page 65.)
The project also pulled in $500,000 from the
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation—Acres for
America Program, a program created by Walmart
in 2005 to permanently conserve at least one acre of
wildlife habitat for every developed acre of Walmart
Stores’ current and future footprint. Walmart’s
footprint is roughly 138,000 acres, but the program
has since impacted 850,000 acres, including the John
Day Headwaters project.
“I don’t know if you fully realize the impact
of the RMEF until you get out on the ground,”
says Kevin Sweet, senior director of real estate for
Walmart. “If it wasn’t for the RMEF, no one would
have stepped in and put this all together. Our first
stop on the tour was an overlook where you look
down at the valley below. That’s when I got the
perspective of what this could have been. That is the
prime spot for a million dollar cabin, because it has
a million dollar view. From blocking up the land, to
conserving the elk and fish habitat, this whole thing is
a great story.”
The remaining portion of the $5 million came
from the RMEF’s Torstenson Family Endowment and
a private donor who asked to remain anonymous.
The fish that helped net those funds also pump a
lot of money into local economies.
“We get hundreds of fishermen every season,”
says Mia Sheppard, who, along with her husband
Marty, has owned Little Creek Outfitters on the John
Day for more than a decade. And while they are
based out of Condon, 120 miles downstream of the
headwaters, what happens in the headwaters has a
direct impact on their business. “The summer run of
steelhead are very special here. They start stacking up
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The early stretches of the John Day weave through Oregon's lush elk country.
4. at the confluence of the John Day and the Columbia
River in July, but water temps in the John Day are
over 70 degrees, which is too hot for them to move
upstream,” she says.
“They wait for the water to get cold in the
fall, then make their way to the upper tributaries to
spawn. If the water never gets cold enough, then they
move on to another river. It’s a lifecycle; whatever
happens in the headwaters happens downstream.
Less fish into the river, means less fish into the
headwaters to spawn.”
Little Creek Outfitters employs seven guides
during the steelhead season in the fall, and when
fishermen come to town, they bring their checkbooks
with them.
“They stay two or three nights in local hotels,
eat out in town,” Sheppard says. “And we gas
up our rigs, buy groceries and pay the mechanic
when bearings blow out. We’re supporting the
local values of the local ranching community. It’s a
way of life here, which has to be balanced with the
recreational community.”
In 2008 in Grant County alone, travel-related
revenues from fishing, hunting and wildlife watching
totaled more than $11.5 million, according to a 2008
study. Fishing accounts for $3.2 million, hunting $5.1
million, and wildlife watching $3.1 million.
Not every elk hunter likes to wet a line, so why
would they care about healthy fish habitat? “It’s
no secret that intact headwaters produce the finest
quality water and the best habitat for a number
of species, including elk,” says Unterwegner. “It’s
On August 17, 2012, Malheur Lumber, the last major
sawmill in Grant County, was going to close. “The issue
was uncertainty,” says Bruce Daucsavage, Ochoco Lumber
president. “I wasn’t going to put another nickel into that plant.
We just couldn’t find enough profitable wood. We were going to
lay off 80 people.”
Even though forest supervisors and community members
had worked to implement an accelerated forest restoration
program on 600,000 acres on the Malheur National Forest
after colossal fires in 2000, it wasn’t enough to keep that mill
going and the forest healthy. With unemployment rates in Grant
County at nearly 13.6 percent in 2012, something needed
to happen.
After the announcement, Daucsavage was invited to
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s office. In a week, Daucsavage
put together a plan of what the timber industry needed in
eastern Oregon to stay alive. At the Senator’s office, the
room was packed. At least 50 people attended, including
Kent Connaughton, Forest Service Region 6 regional forester.
The Senator told Connaughton he had 10 days to propose a
solution, says Daucsavage.
Huge fires in Idaho were able to keep the mill open with
cheap wood while the Forest Service worked to get public
comment on their proposed solution. With help from the Blue
Mountain Forest Partners and Harney County Restoration
Collaborative, the Forest Service expanded the restoration
to 1.2 million acres in 2013. The Forest Service awarded a
10-year stewardship contract to Iron Triangle Logging out of
John Day.
“That commitment we made allowed the mill to remain
open,” says Steve Beverlin, Deputy Forest Supervisor on the
Malheur National Forest. “The 10-year contract now provides
more long-term certainty allowing them to reinvest in their
mill. They’ve added another shift and seen their first increase
in staffing since 1996. Hope and optimism is growing in
the community.”
“We are very comfortable that there will be enough material
to keep us going 10 more years,” says Daucsavage. “We
just hired 30 more employees. For a town of 2,400, that’s a
big deal.”
The D.R. Johnson family also has two mills in the area:
Grant Western in John Day and Prairie Wood products in Prairie
City. Both mills, though, are currently idle. With any luck, the
new stewardship agreement will get more logs out and help get
the mills going again.
The collaborative is now a model for forest stewardship
across the country. The value of the saw logs pays for the
thinning, which feeds the mill and keeps it running.
“At times it was difficult to sit through some of the meetings,
but friendships have developed with people you otherwise
wouldn’t pass the day with,” says Daucsavage.
“Trust is so key here,” adds Beverlin. “People here are very
open, and they give you their trust. The challenge in front of
us is to continue to meet that commitment, be transparent
and inclusive and just talk to folks. We want to continue our
partnerships. Their livelihood does depend on decisions
we make.”
—PJD
because there is little or no disturbance. There has
been some logging in there, but where there is
little disturbance, that’s where the elk go. It’s not a
sanctuary but it’s good habitat.
“I worked the bulk of my career trying to protect
the best of the best, in terms of fish and wildlife
habitat,” he says. “There were darn few opportunities
that came along, and none of them had the potential
that this acquisition will provide.”
Checkered Past
As the West was settled, the US government
enticed railroad companies and private entrepreneurs
to lay tracks coast to coast by granting the companies
every other section of land along the tracks. The
same tactic was used to attract builders of military
supply roads. The checkboarded squares on the map
on page 64 are the remnants of land grants for the
construction of The Dalles Military Road, which was
supposed to stretch from The Dalles, Oregon, to Fort
Boise in Idaho. The road existed on paper but was
never actually completed. Public outcry about the
unfinished and unmaintained road ensued, but it was
too late. The land was in private hands.
Those perfectly square sections on the map
are easily seen on the ground. Logged openings of
early seral (young) forests are directly adjacent to
late old-growth forest. And this alternating land
ownership has put land managers in a bind. How do
you manage a landscape where ownership changes
every mile?
“It’s very difficult to manage,” says Ryan
Torland of ODFW. “When the area was broken up
with public and private land, there wasn’t much we
could do. How do you stop managing at one section
and then pick up at another. Plus, there wasn’t a lot of
hunter access. The landowner could post and lock one
gate closing off access to the public land behind it.”
Now, those 13,000 acres form a solid 51,000-acre
span of national forest connecting the Strawberry
Mountain Wilderness to the west and the Monument
Rock Wilderness to the east.
“What we have now is continuity of
management,” says Torland. “This acquisition makes
it easier to manage because it’s all blocked up. We will
need to see what the Forest Service does in terms of
travel management, and we’ll work closely with them
to make sure deer and elk concerns are up front in the
planning process.”
Travel and timber management for the area are
still up in the air, and the Forest Service is ultimately
responsible for opening or closing gates. The Malheur
National Forest has many miles of road accessible
for public use, says Steve Beverlin, deputy forest
supervisor on the Malheur National Forest, but
nothing will go forward without public input. “Until
the winter of 2014 or spring 2015 we’re going to leave
the area as it was before. If a gate was open it will
A COOPERATIVE FOREST
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Mia Sheppard, co-owner of Little Creek Outfitters that
guides on the John Day, shows off a beautiful steelhead.
PHOTOCOURTESYOFMIASHEPPARD.
