Public Lands

Eighty-nine percent of the Methow Valley’s biodiverse watershed is publicly owned and managed. These lands support abundant wildlife and heavily supplement the local economy: nearly one million visitors per year come to the Methow to enjoy the sun, snow, and rural environment, contributing more than $150 million to Okanogan County’s economy.
Unfortunately, a century of forest mismanagement—the logging of large trees and suppression of fire– has led to a much greater frequency of severe wildfires over the last 20 years that have significantly changed our landscapes. For the last few years, MVCC has been working collaboratively with the Forest Service and North Central Washington Forest Health Collaborative to help plan and implement landscape-scale restoration projects that are ecologically-focused and can make our forests more resilient in the face of high severity wildfire and increased drought.

Four different forest restoration projects with an area of nearly 200,000 acres have started or are going to start on U.S. Forest Service land flanking the Methow Valley in the next few years. We’ve been working collaboratively with the North Central Washington Forest Health Collaborative and the Methow Valley Ranger District for years to plan projects that are ecologically-focused. Throughout the planning and implementation process, we are advocating for restoration projects that help create the fire-resilient, healthy forests that the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest Restoration Strategy outlines. We continue to engage the public in the planning process, generate focused comment guides and work to establish monitoring for implementation. The restoration projects we advocate for include:
• A return of prescribed fire to the landscape
• The thinning of small diameter trees and the protection of large (over 20”) trees
• The protection and maintenance of wildlife programs
• The decommissioning of roads

The Pacific Northwest region of the United States is home to some of the most biodiverse and carbon-dense forests outside the tropics. These forests are crucial to carbon sequestration and play a vital role in climate resiliency and biodiversity.

To mitigate the effects of climate change on Pacific Northwest forests, the Biden administration is looking to protect old forests on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest through an update of the Northwest Forest Plan.

The Northwest Forest Plan is a landscape approach to forest management across 17 different Forests throughout Washington, Oregon and Northern California including the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. It is designed to protect at-risk species while also contributing to social and economic sustainability in the Pacific Northwest. It was intended to provide an ecosystem approach to forest management approach to federal lands that is scientifically credible, socially responsible, and legally sound. Since its adoption in 1994, climate change and other developments have prompted the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to pursue a modernization of the Plan that focuses on five key areas: wildfire resilience, climate change adaptation, tribal inclusion, sustainable communities, and conservation of old growth ecosystems.

The U.S. Forest Service began the updating process of the Northwest Forest Plan with a scoping process early in 2024. MVCC issued a comment guide which you can find below. The draft EIS of the Plan Amendment is expected to be released later in 2024.

The North Central Washington Forest Health Collaborative is a diverse group of local stakeholders that includes conservation groups, logging mills, tribal governments, elected officials, and local, state and federal land managers working to accelerate landscape-scale forest restoration on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (OWNF) in Chelan and Okanogan counties. MVCC has worked actively as part of the Collaborative since 2020. The 4 million acres of the OWNF make up 70 % of the land base in Okanogan and Chelan counties and provide critical habitat for fish and wildlife, incredible recreation opportunities, and forest products to local mills. The Forest Health Collaborative works to promote active restoration strategies that can help the forest adapt to current threats that include severe wildfires, disease epidemics, habitat loss from development, and recreation pressure.