Grande Ronde River

About

Grande Ronde River, Oregon Washington — 1812 David Thompson, 1840s-1880s Logging, 1988 Wild Grande Ronde 212-mi. The river drains 4,200 square miles of the Wallowa and Blue Mountains, flowing generally northeast for 212 miles to join the Snake River at river mile 169, roughly 20 miles upstream of Asotin. Its watershed is a key part of the larger Columbia River system, and the country it crosses — the Wallowa Mountains, the edge of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area — sets the terms for everything that follows: the fish, the timber, and the human history layered along its banks.

Long before the treaty era, the Grande Ronde flowed through the ancestral territory of the Nez Perce, the Cayuse, the Umatilla, the Klamath, the Northern Paiute, and the Molalla. The river served as a primary travel corridor, fishing ground, and gathering place. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Klamath Tribes, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights here. The cession framework was established through the 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla, the 1855 Treaty with the Cayuse, the 1859–1871 Oregon treaties, and the 1877 Nez Perce War. The 1812 period marked the arrival of David Thompson.

By the 1840s the logging era had begun, and from the 1860s through the 1920s the Grande Ronde was worked hard to feed the Oregon Douglas-fir, cedar, and spruce industry. Sawmills, logging drives, and flume, splash-dam, and dolly-logging operations supplied the 1870–1910 Oregon lumber boom, the expanding Oregon Railway & Navigation Company and Southern Pacific lines, and the Pacific Northwest mining-timber trade. The 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the 1930s creation of the Umatilla, Malheur, and Willamette National Forests brought large-scale logging to a close.

Comprehensive study of the river came with the USGS Oregon Survey of the early 1900s through the 1930s, followed by the establishment of USGS gauging stations and mid-century water-quality work. Gauge 13333000 still reports the river's flow today. Oregon Department of Environmental Quality studies from the 1970s onward, and the Total Maximum Daily Load program that followed, took on more than a century of logging, mining, and agricultural impacts. The Grande Ronde carries a II–III(IV) whitewater character through its canyon reaches.

The 1988 Wild and Scenic designation placed the Grande Ronde in company with Oregon's other protected rivers — the Rogue, designated in 1968, along with the Deschutes and the John Day. Recovery has continued into the present. Since 2010 the Oregon DEQ, working with Grande Ronde watershed partnerships and the CTUIR and Nez Perce Tribe, has pursued streambank stabilization, native fish restocking of salmon, steelhead, and bull trout, and the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds. The river today supports the La Grande, Elgin, and Wallowa economies, and its steelhead runs keep anglers returning through the fall.