The Klickitat River is spectacular: Make a trip to the river and you’ll see why its lower 10.8 miles were designated as Wild and Scenic. Columbia Land Trust acquired its first land here in 2001; since then, we’ve markedly expanded the amount of land we care for. Our most ambitious restoration project? We removed eight miles of an old road from the Klickitat River shore, allowing the river to reclaim its historic floodplain for the first time in 80 years. We also care for land along the Little White Salmon, a 19-mile-long Columbia River tributary to the west, which courses through similar terrain and is a go-to hotspot for whitewater kayakers.
Both the Klickitat and the Little White Salmon Rivers are critical for native plants and wildlife: The area’s Oregon white oak woodlands and pine-oak forests support more than 200 species, including Lewis’s woodpeckers and the state-threatened western gray squirrel. Millennia-old runs of salmon and steelhead spawn and grow stronger in these rivers. Our challenge is protecting this paradisaical area from the very real threat of development while finding conservation solutions that allow land-connected livelihoods, such as farming, ranching, and forestry, to continue.
More and more, we’re reading about how trees can be a solution to climate change. (We wrote about it in the previous issue of Fieldbook, in fact.) The topic has generated a number of questions about what trees can do, what they can’t do, and how we can best go about working with forests as a climate solution strategy. To answer these questions, let’s start with the…
Read MoreColumbia Land Trust and the Mt. Adams Resource Stewards (MARS) recently announced they are partnering to expand the Mt. Adams Community Forest (MACF) while also conserving a working forest that values community-based forestry and land stewardship. Through this partnership, MARS acquired 424 acres of land in Klickitat Canyon, east of the Mill Pond tract, from…
Read MoreIf you’re reading this, it’s a safe bet that you care about the environment (thank you). It’s also a safe bet that in the process of staying informed about the challenges of pollution, habitat loss, and global climate change, you’ve recently found yourself feeling overwhelmed by the sheer gravity of it all. It seems as…
Read MoreThe National Fish and Wildlife Foundation today announced that Walmart’s Acres for America program, the leading public-private land conservation partnership in the United States, has awarded $3.6 million in grants to conserve important landscapes for fish, wildlife and people across 70,300 acres in Colorado, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington and, for the first time,…
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