Forest Access for All Welcomes You

We are hearing through the grapevine that the Draft Assessment for the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision will be posted by the forest service in the near future. We will also anticipate that means that the Umatilla, Malheur and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests will be scheduling meetings to talk about their "findings" and next courses of action they plan to take to set the foundation of restricting access to the mountains of Eastern Oregon.

To be clear, the talking points coming out of each supervisors office is "this revision is not travel management & we are not designating routes" which is a true statement, but what they fail to state is that once they adopt the language they've talked the county commissioners into accepting into the overarching forest plan, they will have full ability to close "cross country travel" and to designate what roads you can, and more importantly can not use, which will equate to roughly a 95% closure of motorized use of Wallowa-Whitman and Malheur National Forests. 

We anticipate that the "desired condition" the forest service will state they are trying to get to is that which was agreed to by the Blue Mountains Intergovernmental Council or BIC, as group of special interests projecting themselves as local representation of the residents of Eastern Oregon.

The Desired Condition the BIC developed Click Here states that your desired condition of the forest is to know what roads are open, which are closed and which the forest service plans to close, instead of what we know is the true desired condition of having an open forest to what little we have left to access currently. While your commissioners did participate in this process, from everything we can see they did so as individual interests and not representing you as residents of their counties, as no processes was ever taken to codify their participation as a representative of any county government through a signed intergovernmental agreement between their individual county and the US Forest Service. More to the point, on several occasions that we can find outside "nonprofit" environmental organizations and other parties were allowed to participate and vote as members of the "council" outside of the Federal Advisory Committee Act breaking federal law and policy. 

We will be letting you know when the forest service schedules their meetings, so you can attend, it will be important that you attend. Please be watching for further information over the next month.

Also, FAFA is currently working to stand up a new Website to more efficiently share information with you to keep you abreast of current actions to restrict your access to the Blue Mountains, we will let you know when that is completed and ready for you.