PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — As the one-year anniversary of the Eagle Creek Fire approaches, many popular trails in the Columbia River Gorge are still closed because of the damage left behind by the nearly 50,000-acre fire.
Landslides, rock slides and fallen trees continue to plague the area and pose a frustrating challenge to trail keepers.
Rachel Pawlitz with the United States Forest Service showed KOIN 6 News how bad it is on the Oneonta Trail.
“This isn’t just a rock slide. This is a full-blown landslide where quite a bit of earth and rock came down,” Pawlitz said.
Less than a mile from the trailhead, toward the top, many trees have fallen into the watershed.
“Rocks can come down at any moment. Logs and tees and so on,” she said.
Why is Oneonta Trail still closed? This is why. #eaglecreekfire pic.twitter.com/zIxk9HzIhX— Eileen Park (@EileenParkTV) August 31, 2018
But there are also signs of the forest healing.
“There’s a lot of green in the canopy,” Pawlitz said. “A lot of trees have survived. Even those that have black on them.”
Still it might be years before the Oneonta Trail reopens. But others, like Wahclella Falls, are recovering well and officials hope to reopen it by the end of this year.
“Wahclella is in pretty good shape!” Pawlitz said. “So we were able to identify it as one we can open.”
The upper loop at the end of the trail is still burned and messy, but the lower part with access to the falls is a different story.
“Overall we’re leaving the situation a year later stronger as an agency and as the Gorge, unified as a community,” Pawlitz said. “We’ve really stuck together and gotten through this and it’s just going to go uphill from here.”