Forest Service official ‘optimistic’ work will start this summer to reduce wildfire risk in Baker City’s watershed
Published 11:04 am Monday, June 2, 2025
- Baker City’s watershed covers 10,000 acres on the east slopes of the Elkhorn Mountains west of Baker City, ranging from near Elkhorn Peak, the highest point at far right in the photo, south (left) for several miles.
A Forest Service official said on Monday, June 2, that he’s “optimistic” about work starting this summer on a major project designed to reduce the wildfire risk in Baker City’s watershed.
“We’re in good shape,” said Shaun McKinney, supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.
The agency manages the 10,000 acres of public land, on the east slopes of the Elkhorn Mountains about 10 miles west of Baker City, from which the city gets most of its drinking water by way of a dozen streams and springs.
The project, which the Wallowa-Whitman unveiled in 2022, calls for a mixture of commercial logging, cutting of trees too small to be sold to mills, and prescribed burning.
It would be the biggest such project ever in the watershed, which has supplied the city’s water for more than a century.
McKinney said he has been reviewing seven written objections to the project filed this spring, focusing on three submitted by environmental groups that oppose the scale of the project, in particular commercial logging.
McKinney said Monday he has had “very productive work sessions” with officials from those groups.
(The other objections are from people or groups who urge the Forest Service to be more aggressive, particularly with commercial logging.)
Once the objections are settled, which McKinney said could possibly happen this week, the first phases could start relatively soon.
That would include having workers use chain saws to cut trees smaller than 10 inches in diameter and piling the trees to be burned later, and using a machine, called a masticator, to cut and chop up trees of that size, McKinney said.
The thinning, which would not produce commercial timber, could start this summer, he said.
“Which is huge,” McKinney said. “This has been a long time coming.”
He hopes the Wallowa-Whitman will offer a commercial timber sale before the end of the federal fiscal year, Sept. 30. Logging likely wouldn’t start until 2026, McKinney said.
The overall project covers about 23,000 acres.
The proposal calls for a combination of commercial logging (on about 3,000 acres), noncommercial thinning of trees under 10 inches diameter (about 14,400 acres), and prescribed burning (about 22,500 acres).
Fire concerns
Forest Service and city officials have been concerned for decades about the risk of a major wildfire in the watershed. Such a blaze could foul streams with ash and dirt, leaving the city, at least temporarily, without its predominant source of water.
(The city also has two supplementary wells, as well as Goodrich Reservoir, which it typically taps only during the summer.)
City officials also have said that a major fire likely would force the city to build a water filtration plant, at a cost of many millions of dollars, to continue using the watershed.
Baker City is one of just three Oregon cities that aren’t required to filter their water to meet federal standards. The city does treat its drinking water with chlorine and with ultraviolet light, both of which are disinfectants.
Although lightning has sparked several fires inside the watershed over the past three decades, firefighters have quickly doused all of those blazes.
Kendall Cikanek, formerly the ranger for the Whitman Ranger District, which includes the watershed, said in a past interview that there hasn’t been a large blaze in the watershed since the 1880s. And based on a study of fire scars on old trees in the area done by researchers from the University of Washington in the mid 1990s, such a blaze, based on historical intervals, likely is overdue.
The Wallowa-Whitman unveiled the current watershed plan in July 2022.
In the late 1990s the Wallowa-Whitman spent more than $2.2 million to cut trees and light prescribed fires to create fuelbreaks on the fringes of the watershed. Most of the work was on the south end and along the road under which is buried the city’s water pipeline, with a goal of giving fire crews a place to head off a blaze moving toward the watershed.
The current project would build on those past efforts but also expand the work inside the watershed boundaries.
Commercial logging
Most of the logging that produces trees large enough to be sold to mills would happen outside the watershed.
Areas where commercial logging is proposed include in upper Washington Gulch, California Gulch north of Highway 7, and on public land in the lower sections of Salmon Creek, Rouen Gulch and Hibbard Gulch.
Most commercial logging proposed inside the watershed is concentrated in the Marble Creek area. That’s partly because the Marble Creek Pass Road, the only public road that goes through the watershed, is nearby.
The draft decision for the project released in March by Jeremy Aujero, Whitman District ranger, does not include logging live trees larger than 21 inches in diameter.
Noncommercial tree thinning, prescribed burning
These two tactics constitute the bulk of the work proposed both inside and outside the watershed.
The overriding goal is to reduce the amount of fuel in and around the watershed — standing trees and down logs that can feed a wildfire, McKinney said earlier this year.
The idea, McKinney said, is that even if a fire starts outside the watershed, by reducing the amount of fuel the Forest Service would slow the spread of the flames and give fire crews a better chance to either keep the flames out of the watershed altogether, or to confine it to a relatively small section of the watershed. A major part of this strategy involves creating “defensible fuel profile zones” or, most simply, fuelbreaks.
In these areas, workers would use a combination of thinning and prescribed burning to make linear strips, as wide as 600 feet, where the relatively scarcity of fuel would likely slow the spread of a fire. These fuelbreaks would be built in two major places, McKinney said — along roads, which firefighters have always used as anchors for firelines, and along the tops of several ridges.
Fuelbreaks are proposed along the Pipeline Road, which forms much of the eastern boundary of the watershed, as well as sections of other roads outside the watershed.
Ridgetop fuelbreaks are planned between major drainages such as the ridge between Salmon and Elk creeks, and Salmon and Marble creeks.
Objections from environmental groups
Oregon Wild, based in Portland, submitted an objection April 17 stating, in part, that although the group “is generally supportive of non-commercial thinning and prescribed fire, we are concerned about the excessive width of fuel breaks and the extent of fire breaks, especially if the DFPZs in the roadless areas may be implemented with heavy equipment. The fuel breaks appear to be almost ¼ mile wide, which seems much wider than necessary to conduct controlled burns under typical conditions.”
“Oregon Wild is also concerned about prescriptions that remove too many green trees and therefore capture mortality and reduce future recruitment of dead wood habitat. …” the objection states. “The Forest Service likes to think that less fuel means less fire hazard, but it’s more complicated than that. In reality a more open canopy may make fire hazard worse instead of better. The Forest Service can make meaningful progress toward their purpose and need for fuel reduction and better mitigate the adverse effects of decades of excessive logging by relying on non-commercial thinning and prescribed fire. The problem is that the agency has an institutional bias in favor of timber sales as the primary tool to meet virtually all of its goals, and the agency uses motivated reasoning to minimize or dismiss all the environmental trade-offs associated with commercial logging.”
The Blue Mountains Biodversity Project of Fossil in its April 15 objection called for the Wallowa-Whitman to eliminate all commercial logging and prescribed burning within the watershed.
“Logging could result in greater fire intensity due to removal of more mature (and potentially large/old) trees that are more fire resistant, increased wind speeds through the stands, and likely dense regeneration of more flammable seedlings and saplings,” the objection stats. “Commercial logging is not restorative and does not ‘improve resiliency’ for moist or cold Potential Vegetation Group (PVG) forest. The Forest Service automatically assumes that logging moves those forest types toward an assumed HRV based on lower elevation, drier, more open forest types. This is an intrinsic bias by the Forest Service, based on outdated silvicultural science and an outdated Forest Plan.”
Greater Hells Canyon Council, based in La Grande, wrote in its April 13 objection that it is concerned about proposed logging on 819 acres of “steep slopes.”
‘These acres could be treated by non-commercial hand thinning and piling as needed or otherwise protected for wildlife habitat and connectivity,” according to the objection. “We recognize the tricky balance that is managing a municipal drinking watershed that exists within Inventoried Roadless Areas. However, we must also remember that the origin of many protected landscapes was to insure that they were not so heavily logged or developed that they lost their abilities to provide critical values to human and ecological communities.”
Other objections
Arvid Andersen, a professional forester and former Baker City Council member, urged the Wallowa-Whitman to remove “diseased, dead and dying trees” above 21 inches in diameter and to rebuild the Marble Creek Pass Road, the only public route through the watershed.
“It would be very appropriate for the WWNF to take a more aggressive and proactive action plan to restore forest health and reduce fuel loads within the Baker City Watershed,” Andersen wrote in his objection dated April 16.
Doni Bruland, natural resources coordinator for Baker County, wrote in an objection dated March 24 that although the county supports the watershed project, it “does object to the amount of time it took to get this project into the implementation phase. As a watershed that supplies municipal drinking water to 10,000 citizens plus visitors, it should have taken priority over other projects and had a 2 year start to finish, including NEPA and fieldwork. It’s not “if”, but “when” the watershed will suffer a catastrophic wildfire, and every delay puts it more at risk.”
The American Forest Resource Council, based in Portland, wrote in an objection dated April 21 that the organization wants the Wallowa-Whitman to improve the Marble Creek Pass Road and to consider amending the forest’s management plan to allow commercial logging of grand fir trees more than 21 inches in diameter.