Description
Cle Elum Ridge is situated above the towns of Cle Elum, Roslyn, and Ronald in Kittitas County, Washington. The property’s 3,700' ridgeline serves as the towns’ scenic viewshed within the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust National Heritage Area and is adjacent to the Washington Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) Teanaway Community Forest and the USDA Forest Service’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Since time-immemorial, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and other Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest have cared for this area.
Working with Tribes, public agencies and community partners, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) foresters and scientists have developed on-the-ground restoration treatments at Cle Elum Ridge to improve forest health and community wildfire resilience, guided by the best available science. The property is managed under a certificate of the Forest Stewardship Council, which ensures that TNC practices meet an international standard of sustainable forest management. Under agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, all forest management activities meet or exceed the requirements of a federal habitat conservation plan designed to conserve a suite of threatened or endangered fish and wildlife species.
Cle Elum Ridge is part of a much larger effort launched by TNC in 2014: the Great Western Checkerboards Initiative. This initiative pushed the pause button on the development of 48,000 acres of fragmented private timber land in Washington state’s Central Cascades. Over the last decade, 30,000 of those acres have been added to the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, reconnecting 120,000 acres of public land.