Five Buttes Project News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Come with us on a virtual road trip. We’ll start in the Cascade Range near the Willamette Valley and head south on Interstate 5. We’ll stop in towns with names like Detroit, Gates, Blue River, Vida, Phoenix and Talent. Or at least they used to be towns. They — and the people who lived there — were victims of the ferocious wildfires that blew through parts of Washington state and Oregon on Labor Day. In Oregon, Washington and California, wildfires destroyed 14,689 homes this year, and 6.3 million acres of forests were burned. Surveying the damage, we shake our head and ask ...

The 16,000 acres of trees incinerated in the 2003 Davis Fire were a call to action for Deschutes National Forest managers. The wide-ranging destruction caused by the wildfire convinced them that if they were going to prevent a repeat in the future, they’d have to go big. That fire also destroyed more than 3,700 acres of northern spotted owl habitat, highlighting a lethal hazard faced by the threatened species despite strict logging restrictions imposed on the “late successional reserve” stands, or LSR, commonly referred to as old growth forests. “The team realized that jus...