On a crisp, sunny morning in early March, Tonya Enger scampered through a clearing near Washington’s Yacolt Burn State Forest. The soil was so soft that it sank as she walked through the lush understory. Enger, the founder of a local civic engagement group called Vancouver Forestkeeper, frequently leads tours here. “It’s beautiful in the fall,” she said. “And in the summer, the huckleberry bushes are full and bright red.” She pointed out thriving mushrooms, moss, and lichen as she made her way. Tree snags, still charred black from one of the largest recorded wildfires in Washington history, tower over the landscape. 

That 1902 fire, exacerbated by high winds and dry conditions near the Columbia River Gorge, led to 370 square miles of forests burning on the outskirts of Mount Saint Helens. No one knows what sparked the fires. At the time, the Forest Reserve only employed one forest ranger in the region; it took two days for rains to extinguish the fires that continued to smolder, destroying hundreds of homes. The Yacolt Burn, as it would come to be known, held its record until a climate-change-supercharged fire in 2014. 

A century after the Yacolt Burn, the forest has grown back and is teeming with life. It's also a crucial habitat for the endangered spotted owl, a federally protected species. Importantly, mature forests act as carbon sinks, capturing far more of the climate-warming gas than younger trees or less biodiverse forests. The gas is stored in the rich soil, the tree stumps that feed it, and, of course, the trees that grow from it. 

On the day I met with her, Enger wasn’t leading a tour. She was working with local environmental groups to document the logging damage done to a parcel of the forest called Dabbler, which now belongs to a timber company. 

This swath of forest is part of Washington’s state trust land, some 3 million acres managed by the state’s Department of Natural Resources. In addition to managing conservation efforts, the agency auctions off parcels of land for commercial logging every month. Revenue from the sales top off local governments’ coffers, funding schools and other public services. In 2023, timber sales on state lands brought in nearly $120 million in revenue. 

If the Dabbler sale goes through, 156 acres of the forest will be cut down. And the older, more mature trees that make this forest a complex ecosystem and a vital carbon sink are also coveted for construction materials that can’t be made from younger trees typically found on commercial timber plantations. 

Enger first learned about the sale from the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, a small nonprofit that advocates for stronger protections of “structurally complex forests,” like Dabbler. The group has filed a lawsuit to reverse the timber sale and now has a restraining order to stop the timber company from clearcutting the forest. “The reality is that only about a quarter of our state forest lands have been set aside specifically for conservation,” Stephen Kropp, LFDC’s founder, said. “And most of those lands are in the High Cascades, the Olympic Mountains.” Kropp added that the Yacolt Burn is a rare example of a diverse, complex eco-region at lower elevations. 

The stakes are already clear: On the drive up to Dabbler, some patches of forest have already been clearcut, leaving bare, bald spots on the side of the hills. The disrupted soil is more likely to release carbon than store it in this condition. In other areas, trees have been replanted plantation-style to be cut down again in a few years, adding little more ecological value to the area than a Christmas tree farm. “It’s like a tinderbox,” Enger said of the dry, brittle branches that litter the edges of the plantations. 

Estimates suggest that only 3 percent of forests in the state are structurally complex—or, as Kropp calls them, legacy forests that could one day mature and become old-growth forests. The state’s habitat conservation plan calls for protecting at least 15 percent of these legacy forests by the end of the century. However, Washington is also facing a budget shortfall of $15 billion. For some local tax districts, commercial logging could shore up schools, hospitals, and other public services—and keep thousands of people employed in the timber industry.

Last November, Washington voters elected a new public lands commissioner, Dave Upthegrove, who campaigned on setting aside 800,000 acres of such forests. Environmental advocates had hoped he would pause or cancel timber sales in older forests, prioritizing the benefits of keeping them intact. Once Upthegrove took office, his agency paused nearly two dozen controversial sales that his predecessor had finalized.

Kropp had made a career out of managing forest lands in the Pacific Northwest as a hydrologist for state and federal forest agencies. “Forest conservation is the reason that I moved to the Pacific Northwest,” he said. Now, the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition has made headlines at the forefront of protecting these state forest lands. It’s pursued dozens of lawsuits against the Department of Natural Resources, including the Dabbler sale near the Yacolt Burn State Forest. Kropp had never set foot on state trust lands until about five years ago. He assumed they were managed as industrial forests, with little biodiversity or value beyond commercial logging. 

Tonya Enger and other environmental advocates examine felled trees on the Dabbler site. | Photo by Amal Ahmed

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“One year, I got curious and looked on Google Earth,” he said. “I picked out a stand of forest near Olympia that looked interesting to me.” It was remote and difficult to access, but the trip revealed just how rich and complex the forest understory was, even though it had been logged decades ago. Such stands are increasingly rare in Washington State, where native forests have been logged for profit since the arrival of white settlers in the 19th century. 

Kropp’s nonprofit has been pushing for the state to recognize “legacy forests” like the one he encountered in Olympia. These forests weren’t intentionally replanted with rows of mono-culture trees or sprayed with pesticides and herbicides, but since the trees are still relatively young, the forest isn’t technically an “old-growth forest” that could receive more protections. Instead, after fires or industrial logging, these forests were left alone and allowed to regenerate on their own, allowing biodiversity to flourish decades later. “They truly are, in every sense, a part of our natural heritage. Every forest is unique, and wandering through them is like a journey of discovery, ” Kropp said. “But the bottom line is, nobody was paying attention at all—these timber sales were sailing through in the dead of night.” 

Since founding the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, that’s changed: Kropp and his small team have been able to document timber sales and have connected with locals like Enger to rally support. “When you talk to most people and say, ‘Hey, they’re going to cut down this 120-year-old forest,’ the reaction is, ‘We can’t possibly stop this,’” said Joshua Wright, a campaigner with LFDC. “But if you take people out to these places, they start organizing.” In counties across Washington, dozens of citizens have joined forces to meet with county councillors, organize public comment campaigns, and show up at DNR hearings. Wright also documents environmental considerations to support injunctions on timber sales: creating inventories of specific combinations of native moss, fern, and trees that are rare enough to merit preservation. 

So far, LFDC has seen a handful of wins, with canceled sales and injunctions on logging operations. But often, Kropp said, the state agency will cancel a sale right before a court hearing, and the case against them is dropped. “In other cases, by the time the judge hears the case, all the trees are gone,” Kropp said. That has left the organization with little ability to change the current state policy by setting a new legal precedent. “We have to start over every time there’s a new timber sale,” he said. 

Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Trump administration recently announced it would open some 280 million acres of public lands across the country for commercial logging—leaving little hope that federal policies could create more protections for these forests. 

“If we really want to manage our resources in a way that benefits all Washingtonians, does that mean cutting down a legacy forest to fund one school district?” Enger wonders. “Or does it mean managing our oldest forests to protect us from climate change?”