Gateway between Cascades and Rockies

Where the Columbia River enters the US it cuts a gateway through the rugged and heavily glaciated western Rocky Mountains, creating the Kettle River Range and Selkirk Mountains. Here in northeastern Washington, the Kettles lie to the west of the Columbia and include the Kettle Crest, Midway, and Christina Mountains; the Selkirks lie to the east.

Highlights of the Highlands

The Columbia Highlands connect the Rocky Mountains to the North Cascades, keeping the larger web of life intact. Scientists have identified this region as a lifeline for the movement of large mammals between the Cascades and the Rockies.

These areas are part of a large whole. British Columbia wilderness parks Mt. Gladstone, Granby, Vahalla, Kokanee Glacier and West Arm lie just over the border. They link to the Colville National Forest wildlands and make them even better corridor habitat for animals that roam like grizzly bear. The Colville provides critical habitat for rare mountain caribou, grizzly bear, lynx, wolverine, fisher, marten, bull, red-band and westslope cutthroat trout.

After all these hundreds of years since Europeans settled in this continent, large, roadless strongholds of forests and streams still remain in northeastern Washington. The Kettle River Range alone boasts 250,000 acres of natural, wild forests. Its gently rolling, mountainous terrain rises from the arid lowlands of the Columbia River Basin and the Kettle and San Poil River valleys, extending north to the Monashee Range of British Columbia.

In this entire region, bounded by the Okanogan River to the west and Idaho/Washington border to the east, only 3 percent of the Colville and eastern Okanogan National Forest have been designated and protected as wilderness, representing less than 1 percent of the wilderness areas in Washington state.

Thirty years later, and following tens of thousands of hours of documentary work done by people who love these lands, not one acre more has been protected. All this despite a burgeoning population in the region and the widely recognized importance of protecting our last wild forests for people and for wildlife.

For three decades we’ve worked to keep these highlands wild and protect them for the benefit of people, and the wildlife and water we depend on, and we’ve been largely successful. But to keep these lands in northeastern Washington forever wild, they need formal recognition and protection as wilderness.

Wild forests for wildlife

The wildlands of the Columbia Highlands, on the Colville and eastern Okanogan National Forests and adjacent Panhandle National Forest, are home to the last population in the lower 48 states of mountain caribou, a majestic mammal once numerous throughout the central and northern Rocky Mountains. The land is rich in wildlife: bear (both black and brown), wolverine, lynx, bighorn sheep, great gray owl, northern goshawk, spruce grouse, elk, moose; bull, red-band, and cutthroat trout; and dozens of sensitive species of ferns and flowers including scalloped grape fern, scalloped moonwort, and yellow lady slipper orchid.

In all, less than 3 percent of the Colville National Forest is protected wilderness—that’s just 33,000 acres (the Salmo-Priest Wilderness Area near the Idaho border) to meet the needs of grizzly bear, mountain caribou, and people.