Conservationists celebrated a great victory in June 2000 with the wilderness designation of Steens Mountain in the Great Basin country of southeast Oregon. Steens is the great anchor for high desert wilderness in this least-populous part of the state. Those who live there, and those who visit, know its beauty, its solitude and its wildness. With our partners, we are working toward wilderness protection for much more of the high desert country.
Steens Mountain
Opportunities to add additional land to America's wilderness system on Oregon's forested public lands are great. They are even greater on the High Desert grasslands of southeastern Oregon where 6 million wild acres are at stake.
The exemplar of this wild high-desert splendor is Steens Mountain, which the Congress protected as wilderness in 2000 through the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000. The Act did much besides protect 169,465 acres of Steens Mountain as wilderness. It specified that nearly 100,000 acres within the wilderness area would be free of cattle, the first such wilderness area ever. And it designated several new Wild and Scenic Rivers, a total of over 103 wild river miles throughout the cooperative management area.
A Mile High and Magnificent
Steens lies about 60 miles southeast of Burns, Oregon. Visitors deplete their store of superlatives quickly when they come to Steens Mountain: stunning, awesome, staggering, inspiring. It is all of those. For 30 miles, Steens towers a vertical mile above the Alvord Basin. Its unique geology and climatic conditions contribute to its exceptional ecological diversity and abundant wildlife.
Visitors can expect to see hawks, falcons, golden eagles, long eared owls, even an occasional goshawk. Bighorn sheep, mule deer, elk and pronghorn are common.
The views are breathtaking, looking into the surrounding desert communities and deep, glacial gorges. There are vibrant wildflower meadows here and plant species and subspecies found nowhere else, among them the Steens Mountain paintbrush and thistle. Because Steens is on the northern limit of the Great Basin, it has creatures not usually found in Oregon, such as collared and leopard lizards, Skinner's sulphur butterfly and the kit fox. Especially on its western slopes, the area provides important habitat for the troubled sage grouse.
The diversity of the landscape is exceptional, ranging from harsh desert scrub, sagebrush and junipers to large groves of quaking aspen and small groves of Sierran white firs and alpine bunch grass high on the mountain.
The Donner and Blitzen Creeks support populations of wild, native redband trout. Other fish species include the Malheur mottled sculpin and the Lahontan cutthroat trout, which was introduced in the 1970s.
Pictographs and petroglyphs remain from the ancestors of today's Burns Paiute Tribe who came to the area as long ago as 12,000 years, drawn by its diversity.
Wilderness All Around
Part of the magic of Steens Mountain is that it looks out from all its sides on country just as wild and just as deserving of permanent wilderness protection.
Getting our land managers to recognize that, though, has been difficult. When the BLM inventoried these mostly-arid western landscapes for their wilderness values in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the process seemed to conservationists more an effort to exclude, rather than to identify, deserving candidate wilderness areas. The process in Oregon was no exception. The BLM was willing to recommend only about 1 million acres in the high desert for wilderness designation and to thus manage it a bit more sensitively than surrounding lands to preserve those values.
Oregon wilderness advocates did what advocates in other western states did: went to see for themselves what was wild, what was not. And they found another 5 million wild acres that the BLM either overlooked or choose not to see.
Citizens now propose 6 million acres for permanent wilderness protection in Oregon's high desert. After our success in achieving protection for Steens Mountain, The Wilderness Society and its conservation partners are now turning our attention to building a campaign to protect these places.
Steens Mountain Facts
- Location: Oregon
- Size: 500,000 acres
- Date: On October 30, 2000 the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000 was signed into law
- Managing Agency: The Bureau of Land Management
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