ONDA staff, along with many hard-working volunteers have conducted wilderness inventories across eastern Oregon, from the Owyhee Canyonlands to the John Day Basin.  We covered millions of acres, documenting the presence or absence of roads and identifying areas that offer outstanding opportunities to recreate in a natural area.  In these wild places, we were often amazed by views of vast sagebrush landscapes, deep canyons, wild rivers, and the many plants and animals we saw along the way. 

Through this process of on-the-ground inventory, we identified more than seven million acres that are suitable for Wilderness designation, but have never been considered by Congress.  These inventoried lands form the foundation for the Oregon High Desert Protection Act, a citizen-based Wilderness proposal to protect, forever, some of the last great places in Oregon's Outback.

In 1976, the BLM was required by law to identify and inventory all public lands having wilderness characteristics and values, and to study them for possible recommendation as Wilderness.  Those lands that were suitable for Wilderness were identified as Wilderness Study Areas (WSA), to be studied and managed to protect Wilderness values. Most of these wilderness inventories were carried out by the BLM in the 1980's, but the WSAs have never become Wilderness.  Conditions in many places have changed since the original inventories and ONDA's recently completed "citizen-conducted" inventory of Oregon's desert lands provides the most up to date information regarding areas that are suitable for Wilderness designation.

We conducted our inventories using the protocol BLM itself developed in its 1978 and 2001 wilderness inventory handbooks.