Chelan Tour 2025
This fall, Sustainable Northwest organized a field tour in the Chelan area of Central Washington, bringing together forest managers, county officials, Tribal representatives, and conservation partners to see firsthand how collaborative forest management is reducing wildfire risk and restoring ecosystem health in one of the state’s most fire-prone landscapes.
The tour visited several sites where thinning and prescribed fire have been used to reduce hazardous fuel loads in the dry forests surrounding Lake Chelan. At one site managed by the Chelan County Community Wildfire Protection Plan, tour participants walked through a stand of ponderosa pine that had been thinned three years ago. The contrast with the adjacent untreated forest was striking: open, park-like spacing with abundant ground cover versus dense thickets of small trees and dead fuel that would carry fire quickly into the canopy.
A highlight of the tour was a stop at a project site managed in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Tribal forestry staff shared their approach to integrating traditional ecological knowledge with modern silvicultural practices, including the use of cultural burning to maintain meadows and huckleberry patches that have been managed by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Participants were struck by the depth of knowledge and the long time horizons that inform Tribal forest management.
The tour also included a visit to a small sawmill in Chelan that processes timber from local forest health projects, turning small-diameter logs that would otherwise be burned into dimensional lumber, fence posts, and wood pellets. The mill employs 15 people and represents the kind of rural economic activity that forest restoration can support when the supply chain is local and well-coordinated.
Field tours like this one are central to Sustainable Northwest’s approach. They build trust, foster learning across boundaries, and remind everyone involved that the work of forest stewardship is best understood by standing in the forest together.