FAQs

Our Great Northwest Forests are 18 National Forests in Western Washington, Western Oregon, and Northern California, including:

• Olympic
• Mt Baker-Snoqualmie
• Okanogan – Wenatchee
• Gifford Pinchot
• Mount Hood
• Willamette
• Siuslaw
• Deschutes
• Umpqua
• Fremont-Winema
• Rogue River-Siskiyou
• Klamath
• Six Rivers
• Shasta-Trinity
• Modoc
• Lassen
• Mendocino

Mount Hood National Forest. It was first officially designated as the Bull Run Timberland Reserve by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892. In 1893, land was added and the name was changed to the Cascade Range Forest Reserve. In 1908, the land was renamed the Oregon National Forest after the creation of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. And finally in 1924, the Oregon National Forest was renamed Mount Hood National Forest.

Mount Hood National Forest encompasses the ancestral homelands of the Molalas, Kalapuyans, Chinookan Clackamas, Shinookan Wascos, Northern Paiute, Multnomah peoples, and Sahaptin speakers.

Citation: https://www.fs.usda.gov/main/mthood/learning/history-culture

The Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest is the largest, encompassing 3.8 million acres along the east slope of the Cascade Range in Washington. The National Forest includes the ancestral homelands of the Colville Confederated Tribes and Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation.

Citation: https://www.fs.usda.gov/okawen/

Healthy National Forests are foundational to our economy, our environment, and our way of life. They provide clean drinking water, fish habitat, wildfire resilience, and diverse ecosystems that support our health and iconic Northwest wildlife. They are centers of education, outdoor recreation, culture, and economic growth, touching the lives of every person who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Whether we work, play, or learn in our forests, they’re part of who we are as individuals and communities.

The Pacific Northwest has a long history of Indigenous communities, and later settler communities, living and working in the forest, even as the ways we use and steward them have changed. Whether it’s in restoration, research, or resilience-building fieldwork like thinning and prescribed fires, working in the woods is a vital part of how many communities make a living today. National Forests are also central to the rapidly expanding outdoor recreation industry, which attracts visitors who support the local economy by hiring guides, staying in hotels, eating in restaurants, and buying gas. See below for more about Indigenous communities’ activities in the forests.

Indigenous peoples have lived in and with Northwest forests for thousands of years. Generations upon generations have learned how to best treat the land and manage these forests for hunting, fishing, medicinal and spiritual harvesting, and other practices. The deeply interwoven relationships between Indigenous communities and the nonhuman elements of ecological systems in the Pacific Northwest region remain critical to sustaining tribal food and health security; economic prosperity; recreation and tourism; spiritual and ceremonial practices and observances; heritage and cultural identity; and traditional knowledge systems, beliefs, and intergenerational exchange today.

Citation: Spies, T.A.; Stine, P.A.; Gravenmier, R.; Long, J.W.; Reilly, M.J., tech. coords. 2018. Volume 3—Synthesis of science to inform land management within the Northwest Forest Plan area. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-966. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station: 625-1020. Vol 3.

National Forests are the single most important source of drinking water in the country, the home of rivers and aquifers that supply water to over 60 million people. In the Northwest, communities from Portland to Port Townsend rely on drinking water from National Forests. These lands are natural water purifiers — they keep soil from eroding and sediment and chemicals from flowing into streams and polluting waterways that supply us with fresh water for drinking and agriculture.

See how rainwater travels through National Forests, into rivers, and to your tap with this interactive map.

Citation: https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/national-forests-grasslands/water-facts

Use the links below to access hiking trail information for each of the Great Northwest Forests.

• Olympic
• Mt Baker-Snoqualmie
• Okanogan – Wenatchee
• Gifford Pinchot
• Mount Hood
• Willamette
• Siuslaw
• Deschutes
• Umpqua
• Fremont-Winema
• Rogue River-Siskiyou
• Klamath
• Six Rivers
• Shasta-Trinity
• Modoc
• Lassen
• Mendocino

Our Great Northwest Forests are home to many iconic Northwest species, including salmon and steelhead, lamprey, rainbow trout, mule deer, elk, black bears, Douglas-fir, and ponderosa pine. These lands provide countless animal species with habitat, food, and migration routes, and their varied landscapes — from dense coastal forests to the dry pine forests East of the Cascades — foster a stunning diversity of plants. These vibrant ecosystems are critical to the natural, cultural, historic, and spiritual fabric of the Pacific Northwest.

The Northwest Forest Plan is a federal land management plan that was developed by a large team of scientists and adopted by the Clinton Administration in 1994 to resolve intense controversy over logging of old-growth and riparian habitat in the Pacific Northwest within the range of the northern spotted owl. Widely praised for its scientific and ecosystem-based approach toward forest management, the Plan effectively protected most of the region’s remaining old-growth forests and riparian habitat from logging and reduced federal timber sales by about 80 percent to more sustainable and legally defensible levels.

The Northwest Forest Plan amended forest management plans for 19 national forests administered by the U.S. Forest Service covering 19.4 million acres in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, along with 7 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) districts covering 2.7 million acres in Western Oregon and Northern California.  Since 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan has remained essentially unchanged with respect to the 19 national forests.  However, the Plan has not applied to the 7 BLM districts since 2016, when the BLM separately amended its local forest management plans for those districts.  

The Northwest Forest Plan divides the federal lands into several different management categories and provides management direction for each category through a set of Standards and Guidelines.  In addition to Congressionally reserved areas and administratively withdrawn lands, the Plan’s main management categories are: 

• Late Successional Reserves and Managed Late Successional Areas (7.5 million acres) – large blocks of forest land managed to protect and restore late-successional and old-growth forest ecosystems.
• Riparian Reserves (2.6 million acres located in Matrix) – wide bands of forest along rivers, streams, and landslide prone areas managed to protect water quality, fish habitat, and aquatic ecosystems.
• Adaptive Management Areas (1.5 million acres) – 10 areas around the region with specific local direction in which more management flexibility is provided to encourage testing of innovative approaches to forest management.
• Matrix (4 million acres) – all remaining federal forest lands, where commercial logging is generally permitted.

The Plan also established a four-part Aquatic Conservation Strategy, consisting of Riparian Reserves (see above), a large network of Key Watersheds, watershed analysis requirements, and watershed restoration.  Restoration work was to focus on reducing erosion from old logging roads and restoring riparian vegetation and in-stream habitat complexity based on a scientific assessment of needs and risks to aquatic function.

The scientists who designed the Northwest Forest Plan sought to provide enough habitat to conserve all species that rely on old-growth forest habitat, as required by law.  The Plan gave special attention to the habitat needs of relatively well-known imperiled species such as the northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, Chinook and coho salmon, and steelhead.  The vast networks of Late Successional Reserves and Riparian Reserves, together with existing wilderness areas and other Congressionally or administratively protected areas, formed the primary basis of the Plan’s species conservation strategy.

The Plan also protected hundreds of unique endemic or globally rare species that depend on mature and old-growth habitat for survival — ranging from salamanders to mosses and lichens — in order to maintain the key ecological functions that they provide.  Due to the risk of irreparable harm to these species, the Plan added “survey and manage” requirements before logging could occur in the Matrix lands. 

To ensure well-coordinated and consistent implementation, the Northwest Forest Plan (or Plan) established regional administrative teams and sub-regional advisory committees, along with a long-term monitoring program led by scientists in the research branch of the Forest Service. The monitoring program has periodically produced extensive reports evaluating the Plan’s effectiveness, including several 20-year monitoring reports in 2015.