Your Backcountry: The Owyhee Canyonlands

BY LARS CHINBURG

Rolling sagebrush hills, sheer cliffs of fossil-studded rock, jet-black lava flows and river-carved canyons home to mule deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and upland birds: the Owyhee Canyonlands sprawl across millions of acres of southeastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho and northern Nevada. Anglers can wade into the Owyhee River, a tributary of the Snake, home to native redband trout and a world-famous brown trout fishery. Hunters can traipse across seemingly endless high desert and canyon country, glassing for the perfect muley.

Backpackers and rafters can spend days or weeks exploring labyrinths of canyons, ephemeral streams and volcanic craters, or simply stargaze beneath some of the darkest night skies left in the United States.

For years, the Owyhee stood as one of the most remote and undeveloped places remaining in the American West. More recently, however, unregulated recreation, unsustainable grazing practices, wildfires and development pressure from mining, oil and gas interests threatened the area’s important and irreplaceable ecosystems.

To combat this, a diverse coalition of stakeholders joined forces to craft legislation that would protect the area for public access and recreation, healthy habitat management and sustainable ranching and resource conservation. Among others, the group included members from local ranching organizations, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Owyhee Sportsmen Coalition – an organization including BHA. Working with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the broad stakeholder group developed a bill, the earliest versions of which were proposed in 2019.

In June of 2023, Sen. Wyden reintroduced the bill, which would permanently protect more than 1 million acres of the Owyhee Canyonlands. Known as the Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act, it is designed to protect important ecosystems and wildlife, preserve grazing rights and further economic development in the area. In its current iteration, the bill is a robust, widely supported piece of legislation, which has the potential to be a landmark success for public access, conservation and community empowerment in Oregon.

The bill, which in July was considered in a hearing by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, includes two major components that BHA members and sportsmen and women in general should be excited about supporting. First, it designates about 1.1 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land as wilderness, in addition to placing almost 15 miles of the Owyhee River under Wild and Scenic River management. To facilitate ease of public access and sustainable grazing in the area, however, the million-plus acres of wilderness will be allocated across almost 30 individual areas. These proposed wilderness areas range in size from 2,911 acres (the Upper Leslie Gulch Wilderness) to over 220,000 acres (the Mary Gautreaux Owyhee River Canyon Wilderness).

While protecting over 1 million acres of habitat, the proposed legislation would maintain the ability to upgrade existing roads and establish new roads for scenic tourism and both sportsmen and rancher access. As BHA Oregon Chapter Coordinator Chris Hager put it, “This is a bill that we’re really happy with. It allows us to maintain the opportunity we have already as outdoor recreationists in the area, while creating long-lasting protections that will provide those same opportunities for future generations.”

A second major component of the proposed bill is the establishment of the Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Group (the Malheur C.E.O. Group). The C.E.O. Group will be made up of representatives from a wide-ranging set of key interest areas, including ranching, recreation and tourism, environmental protection, hunting and fishing, local Tribes and federal, state and local government agencies. According to Kaden McArthur, BHA’s government relations manager, the C.E.O. Group is a critical component of the bill because the group is “set up to make adaptive decisions for the ongoing management of the area with buy-in from different local constituencies and officials. For example, the group will have the ability to receive federal funding and then vote on how to allocate that funding to promote conservation and other import- ant elements of the bill.”

As per the language of the bill, decisions affecting the proposed wilderness areas require unanimous support from all representatives of the C.E.O. Group with voting rights. Voting members include three representatives from livestock grazing interest groups, one member from the district irrigation group, four members who represent the interests of the hunting/fishing, recreation/tourism and environmental communities and two representatives from local Paiute Indian Tribes. There will also be eight non-voting members from federal, state and local government agencies. This ensures that all members of relevant interest groups will have a say in the ongoing management of the Owyhee, therefore maintaining access and opportunity for anyone with the gear and gumption to take on the steep trails and remote waterways of the region.

What’s next? So far, the bill has been introduced to the Senate with general support. To become law, however, it will need to pass through both the Senate and the House of Representatives before landing on the president’s desk for signing. Already, BHA members have shown incredible resolve in the early days of this bill’s creation. Chris Hager says that over 1500 members of BHA’s Oregon chapter have written directly to Sen. Wyden, expressing their support for the bill. According to him, it’s this kind of grassroots support that can really move the needle when it comes to public lands legislation, and the bill will need more of it soon if it hopes to pass both the Senate and the House.

According to both Hager and McArthur, Rep. Cliff Bentz will moves forward. He has not yet expressed support for Sen. Wyden’s bill and has been skeptical of legislation creating wilderness areas in the past. But with support from such a diverse group of stakeholders, and with the allowances made for grazing and economic development, the bill should be considered a win for sportsmen and women, backcountry recreationists and ranchers alike.

Purple sagebrush stretching into the distance, cool streams tumbling through deep-cut canyons, rugged crags rising like fortresses painted red by the setting sun; these vast tracts of undeveloped public land shape the character of our nation and its people. The Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act aims to protect this landscape for us and our future generations and deserves our unwavering support as stewards of public lands and waters.

Lars Chinburg is a BHA member, writer and avid outdoorsman. He lives in Missoula, Montana, and enjoys exploring the surrounding country with his partner Anna. You can find more of his writing at www.larschinburg.com.