Colville National Forest: The Inland Empire's Forgotten Range

The Selkirk Mountains in northeastern Washington are an outlier range, the southernmost extension of the Canadian Rockies into the United States, and they are almost entirely invisible to American tourism. The Colville National Forest covers about one and a half million acres of the Selkirks and their foothills in the corner of the state where Washington borders Idaho and British Columbia. It is the easternmost national forest in Washington, and in terms of visitor traffic, one of the least visited in the Pacific Northwest.

What it has is wildlife. The southern Selkirks once supported the last herd of woodland caribou in the contiguous United States, a population that spent decades teetering between persistence and local extinction before disappearing from the country entirely. The forest also supports mountain goats, lynx, wolverine, grizzly bear, and one of the more intact populations of bull trout in the region. The ecosystems here are more closely related to Canadian boreal forest than to the Douglas-fir zones to the west.

The Inland Empire, a regional term for the agricultural country around Spokane and the upper Columbia basin, was developed around wheat farming, timber, and hardrock mining. The Colville forest holds the remnants of several mining districts, including the Republic mining area in Ferry County and the historic Sullivan Mine deposits near the Idaho border.

The forest is named for the Colville Agency, which was itself named for Andrew Colville, a governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, which operated in the region before the United States claimed it. The Colville Indian Reservation, which borders the forest on the west and south, is home to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, twelve distinct peoples brought together by federal decree in eighteen seventy-two.

By twenty nineteen the herd had dwindled to its final few animals, and the last one was captured and relocated to Canada, ending wild caribou presence south of the border.