The Columbia Highlands
The Columbia Highlands of northeastern Washington is beautiful and important to people and wildlife in the Northwest.
Washington's last frontier
The Columbia Highlands of northeastern Washington connect the northern Rockies on the east to the North Cascades on the west. A landscape of wild, roadless forests, mountains, streams, and glacier-wrought kettles, characterize public lands in the Colville National Forest. The highlands is also home to independent communities that depend on these forests and wildlife for their quality of life and heritage. Many of these lands qualify as true wilderness and deserve a measure of protection.
Conservation Northwest is working with the local timber industry and others to recommend wilderness that balances the need for wildlife habitat and jobs in the woods.
Take a slideshow tour of the Columbia Highlands
Read more about roadless lands.
Highlands which feed the Columbia River
The Columbia Highlands are the highland ranges and watersheds that feed the upper Columbia River. From meadow to mountain, the Columbia Highlands contains some of the
best wildlife habitat remaining in the Inland and Greater Northwest, with mountains and valleys are rich in wildlife, including lynx, bears, wolverine, and wolves, and provide a key landscape pathway connecting the Rockies to the Cascades.
Because two major ecosystems (the Rockies and Cascades) intersect here, the eastern Okanogan, Kettle River Range, and Selkirk Mountains of the Columbia Highlands are especially rich in a broad diversity of plants and animals including signature wildlife, like bighorn sheep and moose, more commonly associated with the Rocky Mountains. In fact, the Selkirks are considered a western part of the Rockies.
Today in the Columbia Highlands are still found many of the same animals as when explorers Lewis and Clark and David Thompson traversed the region hundreds of years ago.
Conservation Northwest helped produce an essential book of photos and essays on the Columbia Highlands that for the first time describes this diverse landscape.
Bringing communities together
In the Columbia Highlands we have a unique opportunity to look at the landscape as a whole and plan ahead for a future that otherwise might not be so quiet and undeveloped. Conservation Northwest is part of a team effort with industry and others to come up with a management proposal for the area that helps conserve these beautiful lands and keep communities vibrant and connected. As part of the Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition, Conservation Northwest has helped build a local, cooperative effort and collaborative process in the Columbia Highlands and a management plan. Our hope is to
- sustain timber industry jobs
- ensure outdoor recreation opportunities
- restore forests, and
- protect wildlife, wildlife habitat, and wilderness
That's a recipe for success in the Columbia Highlands.
