My family has recreated on the east end of the Ochoco unit for more than 80 years. My two brothers and I spent three summers at Rager around 1960 when my grandfather worked for the forest service and was stationed at Rager.
There is currently no access to any of the areas we hunt, so I don't know how bad it is, but there is no question these are the worst fires (Crazy Creek and Rail Ridge fires) in more than 100 years.
The first day of the Rail Ridge fire, it advanced more than 60 thousand acres. There were four separate lightning strikes that eventually merged in the Rail Ridge fire. The first day, it burned virtually all of the forest, and a lot of blm and private land on the southeast corner of the forest, and crossed the South fork of the John Day River burning into the Murderers Creek unit. By the third day, it had burned most of the Phillip Schneider wildlife area, burned over the top of Aldridge ridge, and threatened Aldrich lookout. At that point, it was mostly going east in the murderers creek unit.
Then the wind changed, and it burned up Black Canyon Creek in the wilderness area, surrounded Mud Springs campground, and burned up on wolf mountain before the wind changed again and stopped the movement to the west. It looked to me like the firefighters planned on stopping it on the west where they had stopped the Crazy Creek fire, but the wind change kept it from getting that far. It also burned north across the lower end of Cottonwood Creek and ended up within a mile or so of Dayville, where they stopped the north run.
It is certainly likely that there are areas that were not completely destroyed, but there was already a critical shortage of security cover on the east of the end of the forest. These two fires have reduced that substantially. Assuming the forest service does salvage logging here, once again impacting security cover, I would guess elk will spend far less time on the forest than they have in the past. I would not be surprised if a lot of our elk ended up on the private land on the west end of the silvies unit.
As to deer, it should be a crime to hunt them on the Ochoco unit, 40,000 deer in the late 60's to 3,600 last year, according to odfw statistics. I would be shocked if the forest service opened any of the areas that burned, or the areas that did not burn between the two fires, before the rifle deer season. Hopefully, odfw will cancel the hunt. It would be a disaster to put 1,800 deer hunters on the west end of the unit, but I am not holding my breath. I think it is too soon to know about elk season. We have two tags for first season, and hope we can turn them in and recover the points. No one in our group wants to deal with the depression if it burned our hunting area as badly as it appears on their fire maps.
Scoutdog
Mike Morris
503-317-7576
