×
86,500 acres.
One of the most important wildlife corridors left on the continent.
×
86,500 acres.
One of the most important wildlife corridors left on the continent.
They call it the Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project. 86,500 acres. One of the most important wildlife corridors left on the continent. Implementation starts this summer.
There's a stretch of country in the far northeast corner of Oregon that most Americans will live their whole lives without seeing. It begins in the granite peaks of the Wallowas, some of them close to ten thousand feet, and it falls away through stands of ponderosa and Douglas-fir and western larch, through meadows of bear grass and lupine and paintbrush, and down into canyon country cut by the Imnaha and finally by the Snake, which at its deepest runs eight thousand feet below the rim.
This is the Eagle Cap Wilderness at the top of it, Hells Canyon at the bottom. In between lies the Morgan Nesbit country. The name comes from two remote summits at the center of the project area: Morgan Butte and Nesbit Butte, a pair of forested mounds about eighteen miles southeast of Joseph. It is the Forest Service's way of naming a timber sale. Find a couple of features on the quad map and staple their names together. The result is shaped to carry no weight.
This 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.
That's about to change.
The Forest Service just approved industrial logging across all of it.
Opposition already forced one win. A federal judge reinstated protections for the biggest trees after conservation groups sued. The rest is still on the table.
Animals need connected habitat to survive. As the climate warms, species have to move north and uphill to find the conditions they evolved for. If the forest between point A and point B gets cut, they can't.
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 Wallowa Mountains rise from the plateau of northeast Oregon. To the east, the Snake River has cut the deepest gorge in North America. Eagle Cap Wilderness sits at the top. Hells Canyon at the bottom. The Morgan Nesbit country connects them.
The Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project covers 86,500 acres of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The name comes from two remote summits at the heart of the area: Morgan Butte and Nesbit Butte, about eighteen miles southeast of Joseph.
The decision authorizes 11,479 acres of commercial thinning. The Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project reports this contains the highest percentage of never-logged forest they have surveyed in any timber sale outside of Inventoried Roadless Areas (federally protected wilderness-quality land).
Forty-five percent of the project area lies inside the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, which Congress established by law and President Gerald Ford signed on December 31, 1975. The recreation area turned fifty years old six weeks before the logging was approved.
The Eagle Cap Wilderness anchors the northern end of this corridor. The granite peaks of the Wallowas hold snowfields that feed the Imnaha and its tributaries, where threatened Chinook and steelhead still run to spawn. The project area is the connective tissue between this wilderness and the canyon below.
The green boundary is the Hells Canyon NRA. The dashed blue is Eagle Cap Wilderness. The red overlay shows the logging units. The wildlife corridor that runs from wilderness to canyon passes through all of it.
The Nature Conservancy mapped where 2,903 species can still move as the climate shifts. One of the densest corridors in the interior West runs right through the heart of the Morgan Nesbit country.
Migrations in Motion, The Nature Conservancy / McGuire et al., PNAS, 2016
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 trees on the block are ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, grand fir, western larch, and lodgepole pine, the structural backbone of a forest that has never been commercially logged. A project of this size, in a place of this consequence, moving forward under a name deliberately shaped to carry no weight.
The decision notice authorizes:
The 17.4 miles of road decommissioning were removed from the plan after Wallowa County objected.
Every one of these animals uses the Morgan Nesbit country to move between the Eagle Cap Wilderness and Hells Canyon. Four are ESA threatened.
Reestablished and breeding in the Wallowas. The corridor connects the Wenaha pack territory to Hells Canyon.
The Wallowa herd is one of the largest in Oregon. Road construction fragments their winter range.
Dependent on old-growth structure for denning. Thirteen thousand acres of never-logged forest are at stake.
Spawning in tributaries below the project area. Logging on steep slopes sends sediment into their streams.
Snake River basin steelhead depend on cold, clean water. Road construction raises stream temperatures.
The most cold-water-dependent salmonid in the system. Cannot tolerate temperature increases from canopy removal.
The corridor is one of the few paths between mountain island populations as climate pushes their range.
Requires dense, continuous canopy. Logging creates gaps they won't cross. Each clearcut is a wall.
Needs unbroken forest for travel corridors. The Morgan Nesbit country is at the southern edge of their range.
An old-growth obligate. They den in large-diameter snags and downed logs. The forest they need takes centuries to grow.
Recently established in the Wallowas. Moving south through exactly this corridor. Their presence here is new and fragile.
If the Cabinet-Yaak population finds the route south, this is the corridor. That's not a metaphor. It's a map.
"This will definitely impact the ability of species to migrate through this landscape due to the scale of the habitat loss."
John Persell, Senior Staff Attorney, Oregon Wild
The Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project has spent three field seasons walking the proposed sale units. They report that Morgan Nesbit contains the highest percentage of never-logged forest they have surveyed in any timber sale outside of Inventoried Roadless Areas (federally protected wilderness-quality land). Commercial logging planned on steep slopes above streams that hold threatened fish. On ground that has never seen a chainsaw. The Forest Service scales parcels like this up to the size that makes the sale commercially attractive to timber operators. The public absorbs the habitat loss. That's a public subsidy in everything but name.
The Eastside Screens 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. A federal judge reinstated it after the Trump administration tried to scrap it. But everything under twenty-one inches is still on the table. Thirteen thousand acres of trees in the Morgan Nesbit country that have never been cut.
Judge Aiken reinstated the rule in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of six conservation groups, including Oregon Wild and the Greater Hells Canyon Council, with an amicus brief filed by the Nez Perce Tribe. On page two of Anderson's February decision, he notes the removal of "the proposal to remove trees greater than 21 inches in diameter." That's agency writing. What it means is that the biggest trees are still standing because a judge made the agency stand down. The rest of the objections were heard and overruled.
The Forest Service approved the project anyway.
The Forest Service went through the process. The comment periods. The objection meetings. And on February 11, 2026, the agency signed with every substantive objection still standing on the record. This pattern isn't unique to Morgan Nesbit. I've written about what's happening to the Boundary Waters, Grand Staircase, and a hundred other places right now under the same method. The calculation depends on one thing. That the public will be too tired, too distracted, or too late. For eighty thousand acres at a time, they've been mostly right so far.
The calculation was that this would pass unnoticed. Four things can change that before the first sale closes.
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.
Dear Regional Forester Buchanan,
My name is [your name] and I'm writing from [your city and state]. I'm asking you to withdraw the Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project decision and require a full Environmental Impact Statement before any implementation proceeds.
The project area sits in one of the most important wildlife corridors remaining in the interior West, connecting the Eagle Cap Wilderness to Hells Canyon. It contains some of the highest-quality unlogged forest remaining outside Inventoried Roadless Areas. Industrial logging at this scale, combined with 18 miles of new road construction and no decommissioning, will fragment habitat that species from Chinook salmon to gray wolves depend on.
A project of this consequence deserves full environmental review and genuine public engagement, not a categorical dismissal of every substantive objection. Please withdraw the decision and re-analyze under a full EIS.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
National and regional attention is what makes the agency reconsider a decision of this size. If you live in Oregon and you're angry about this, tell a reporter.
Litigation is the most reliable lever to stop implementation. 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 scorecard to find and contact yours.
The calculation was that this decision would pass unnoticed. Every share makes that calculation less true.
We're tracking every decision and legal maneuver threatening America's public lands. Independent reporting. No ads. No paywalls.
Subscribe Free on Substack 25,000+ readers