Public Lands – President signed an executive order that could fundamentally change public lands

02. June 2026 · Comments Off on Public Lands – President signed an executive order that could fundamentally change public lands · Categories: Current Events, Public Lands

This came from Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Friday night, the President signed an executive order that could fundamentally change public lands as we know them.

Decades of underlying policy allowing agencies to govern motorized vehicle use on federal land? Gone. Agencies have been directed to rescind or rewrite policy that has regulated ORV use on public lands for the past 50 years.

We, the BHA community, already know the implications: Unchecked motorized travel on public lands can harm access for everyone in the long run. It changes wildlife behavior, fragments habitat & trades the quiet for the noise.

Access matters & we fight for it every day. But access & motorization are NOT the same thing.
Not every acre of public land should be managed for maximum motorized access. The ability to reach public lands should not come at the expense of the wild qualities that make those places worth visiting in the first place.

We’re dissecting every detail of this order and continuing to advocate for the backcountry in the halls of Congress. More to come.
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The draft is to not allow any restrictions on motorized access to national forests, you can’t tell a motorcyclist they can’t ride there or stop ATV or UTV access to anywhere.  They want to “open and improve” airstrips in the backcountry, the Big Creek 4 are right there on top of the list.  They want to rewrite the wilderness act to allow chainsaws across the board, which opens the door for mechanized travel and motorized travel in Wilderness.  That chainsaws in Wilderness push was just the foot in the door for eliminating what we know as big W Wilderness.  Trump is piling this on faster than we can fight it.  I am still involved in fighting the chainsaw thing and a lawsuit is being drafted, those folks that are OK with using chainsaws have just opened the door for the full on removal (or updating as IOGA calls it) of the Wilderness Act. Jeff Halligan

PNW – The story of people and the lower Columbia River

02. June 2026 · Comments Off on PNW – The story of people and the lower Columbia River · Categories: Current Events, Education

The story of people and the lower Columbia River has always centered around canoes. Varying shapes and styles were built to navigate the river’s varying shapes and elements. There were canoes for shallow water and deep water, canoes to cut through currents and travel upstream, canoes for clamming, fishing and whale hunting.

Chinookan canoe construction reflected the diversity of the region’s people and the lower Columbia, comprising a vast 146-mile estuary from the river’s mouth to the western Columbia River Gorge. The most famous and largest canoes measured up to 60 feet long, designed to navigate powerful wind and waves near the river’s mouth and big enough for three tons of people and cargo. Among the smallest were 10- to 14-foot canoes made for gathering wapato, a wetland plant with emerald, arrowhead-shaped leaves and edible potato-like tubers. The boats were sleek, light enough to carry under one arm and ideal for the slow-moving shallow waters around present-day Portland, where wapato thrived.

Canoes decorated the river’s sandy shorelines. Villages lined its banks. Before the 1800s, no levees separated the waterway from the floodplain. No dams blocked salmon. Cold water roared over rapids and sighed through the estuary. Braided channels thick with insects and songbirds curved through marshy bottomlands. Minnows, suckers and sturgeon filled the clear backwater tidal sloughs. These extensive channels snaked through the broad estuary like veins from the region’s heart, the Columbia, known as wimaɬ to upper Chinookan peoples and iyagaytɬ imaɬ to the lower Chinookans at the river’s mouth. The habitat supported one of the world’s largest salmon runs, when 10 to 16 million salmon and steelhead returned from the ocean to spawn in their ancestral rivers.    Dredging the Columbia River at the expense of tribal and aquatic communities