By: Flora Booker, 2025 Summer Field and Events Coordinator
On July 30th, Cascadia Wildlands staff and WildCAT volunteers joined a tour hosted by the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative and the U.S. Forest Service to take a look at the proposed Dead Mountain Project. The collaborative is a mix of agency staff, environmental groups, timber industry representatives, and local community members who live in and around Oakridge and Westfir, Oregon. While Cascadia Wildlands is not a part of the group, we joined them to walk through sections of the Willamette National Forest near Oakridge, around 40 miles east of Eugene, to view current conditions and imagine what these ecosystems could look like in the years ahead with increasingly intense climate-driven wildfires.
With recent changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) under the Trump administration limiting public comment, this project shows how agencies can still engage the public in shaping land management. Federal directives to prioritize timber revenue can undermine ecological goals and local needs, highlighting the importance of careful evaluation to sustain ecosystems for human and more-than-human communities.
Early on during the tour, we reached a ridge top and looked down at Forest Service managed public lands that had burned in past years. Sarah Altemus-Pope, the Executive Director of Southern Willamette Solutions, which manages the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative program, pointed to a swath of trees scorched just last summer. She reminded us that this community has faced high-severity fire every year for five years. The urgency to reduce community wildfire risk became all the more real when, just days after our tour, the Aubrey Fire broke out along highway 58 just outside Oakridge. Burning just south of the Dead Mountain project area identified for future thinning and controlled burning treatments, the new start is a reminder that fire is a continual presence, shaping lives and forests. The project must ensure that the work done here prepares the forest and the community for what may come, through public involvement and careful planning to promote fire resilience.
Throughout the tour, collaborative staffers handed out a stack of maps: treatment units, proposed burn blocks, road plans, and land designations. They looked like standard planning documents but carried a larger story. We were told that those maps and plans for forest treatments had been developed through a process called Potential Operational Delineations, or PODs. In practice, it means land managers, local residents, and other interested stakeholders sit down together and weigh in on where fires are most likely to be contained, what community and resource values are at greatest risk, which ridges or rivers might serve as natural boundaries, and where firefighters could move safely. Forest Service representatives emphasized that POD planning highlights the need to thin forested areas near town and open the tree canopy to reduce crown fire risk, where flames climb up understory plants into the tops of trees, burning quickly and at extreme temperatures difficult to stifle. Local residents, many with direct experience of wildfires, stressed the urgent need for more controlled burns, and staff pointed out on our maps the areas where these treatments are proposed to take place.
The first site we walked through exemplified what these treatments can mean. Sarah Altemus-Pope grew up in Oakridge and ran regularly on the Dead Mountain trails. She told us she remembers when the forest was so dense the trails were quiet. After thinning opened the forest, she began to hear birdsong on her runs, filling the silence that had been there before. Community members nodded in agreement, noting that the trails have become more popular for recreation since then. The ground beneath us seemed to confirm her story: chinquapin, incense cedar, and madrone were sprouting in the understory, a richer mix of species than the uniform Douglas fir plantation that once dominated the hillside.
Later in the day, we stood in a different kind of forest. This one had been clearcut in the past and replanted densely with conifers, creating an even-aged stand that has grown without thinning or other caretaking. The trees were crowded, the air was still, and there was little sign of the diverse plant life we had seen earlier. Here, proposed treatments would thin the stand to create space for light, water, and nutrients to reach the understory, allowing biodiversity to return. When done thoughtfully, these treatments can create healthier forests that are less vulnerable to severe fire, while also offering better habitat and more resilient ecosystems.
The promise of healthier, more fire-resilient forests is clear when you stand among the trees, but profit rather than science-driven policy pressures complicate the picture. Management direction and laws like the National Forest Management Act of 1976 push the Forest Service to prepare parcels for timber harvest on a strict timeline, raising a critical question: how much of this management is about ecological and community wildfire resilience, and how much is about meeting timber targets?
Thinning can improve forest health, but its benefits depend on how the forest is accessed and managed. Roads bring soil erosion, altered hydrology, habitat fragmentation, and increased fire risk (Connor and McCoy 2013). The Dead Mountain project currently proposes to decommission four miles of road, restore up to ten miles, maintain or reconstruct 34 miles, and build three miles of temporary roads. Decommissioning roads can help reduce the oversized road system and encourage healthy waters, soils, wildlife, and resilient forests. Road decommissioning also reduces the risk of invasive species introduction and accidental human caused fires. Opening “light gaps” up to three acres can benefit meadows or oak savannas if paired with caretaking such as recurring controlled burns, but replanting them with uniform seedlings creates stands of dense, even-aged trees vulnerable to high intensity crown fires. Old-growth forests show resilience through structural complexity that buffers wildfire and supports biodiversity (Betts et al. 2017).
Many elements of the Dead Mountain project have the potential to support resilience, but its success will depend on careful implementation. To meet community priorities and ecological goals, management must move beyond timber quotas and focus on cultivating healthy, fire-adapted forests that can withstand changing fire regimes. Equally important is investing in home hardening and other strategies for living with fire. Collaborative members are already advancing this work through fuel reduction near homes, maintaining a five-foot buffer, and other practices that strengthen firewise communities.
One of the most encouraging aspects of the Dead Mountain project is the depth of public engagement throughout the planning stages. The incorporation of community input through the PODs and NEPA processes show a genuine effort to reach informed decisions that reflect both ecological and local priorities.
The highlight of the tour, however, was seeing how my own community responded. At one point, I spoke with two WildCAT volunteers: one who is a seasoned field checker familiar with these forests, the other a newer volunteer, an artist with a fresh perspective. The experienced volunteer admitted he had not expected to be impressed, but the level of collaboration and the way participants genuinely listened to one another gave him hope. The newer volunteer agreed, noting how the project seemed to account for diverse perspectives and marveling at the contrast between forest stands we had walked through. Their reflections reminded me that fire planning isn’t just technical; it’s relational. Building trust and making space for different experiences is an essential part of the forest management process.
Projects like Dead Mountain can succeed when sound ecological management is paired with inclusive community engagement. Fire is a constant presence on the landscape, and making respect for and adaptation to these natural processes is essential. By centering local input, focusing treatments near communities, and balancing ecological goals with policy realities, this project — if actually implemented as planned — shows what thoughtful forest management can achieve.
