Case 1: Mt. Hood Nat'l Forest

Managing Fire Risk on Oregon's Mt. Hood: New Science, Partnership, and Engaged Communities

Case 1 Photo Album (Please feel free to add photos & videos!) 

October 21-25, 2024 | Mt. Hood, OR

The Labor Day fires of 2020 devastated communities in the Oregon Cascades, resulting in multiple fatalities and causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. Even though Highway 26 over Oregon’s Mt. Hood was one of the few Cascade passes that did not experience the same loss of life and property, community leaders were motivated to reexamine how they prepare for and think about fire. When the 2,055-acre Camp Creek Fire on the Mt. Hood National Forest ignited in August 2023, those three years of intense collaboration and communication helped shape the response and the result. On the drier eastern side of the mountain, in more traditionally fire-prone areas, communities have been gathering for more than a decade to pursue fire-resilient ecosystems and adapted communities. This collective work earned the Mt. Hood National Forest recent designation as one of 21 Wildfire Crisis Strategy landscapes nationally. In October, ESP will travel to Mt. Hood to hear from landowners, land managers, tribes, homeowners, the fire services, utilities and communities about how they are experimenting with fuels management approaches and other tools–using established and emerging science about fire history and ecology–to be as ready as possible for the next big one.