Fifteen years after the removal of the Elwha River dams began, Washington has an extraordinary opportunity to carry the river’s recovery forward.

The Elwha is one of the world’s great river restoration stories. The dams are gone, salmon are returning, the estuary is rebuilding, and the watershed is recovering. But the long-term health of the Elwha river depends not only on restoring the river—it also depends on protecting the forests, streams, wetlands, and other ecosystems that sustain it.

Today, approximately 800 acres of the watershed’s oldest, structurally complex forests remain on state-managed lands. These forests help regulate stream flow and temperature, protect clean water, support biodiversity, and provide habitat for salmon and numerous rare and endangered species.

Washington has already taken an important step. In 2025, the Legislature appropriated $250,000 to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to identify priority areas for conservation in the Elwha Watershed. DNR is now completing that assessment and on December 1, 2026 is expected to recommend boundaries for a new Natural Area to the Legislature.

We are asking Commissioner Dave Upthegrove and the Department of Natural Resources to think big and recommend a robust Natural Area boundary that protects the Elwha Watershed’s remaining older forests and the connected ecosystems that make this landscape so valuable.

The lands under consideration include older forests, wetlands, caves, tributaries, floodplains, and habitat for rare and endangered species—including Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies, threatened and endangered lichens, marbled murrelets, Pacific fishers, western toads, harlequin ducks, rare bats, and sensitive plants.

Protecting these lands would help safeguard clean water, salmon habitat, biodiversity, cultural resources, recreation, and the ecological connections that extend from the Elwha’s forests to the Salish Sea. Recovering Elwha salmon are also important to the recovery of endangered Southern Resident orcas, making the watershed’s continued recovery significant beyond the river itself.

Join us in calling on Commissioner Upthegrove and DNR to take a landscape-level approach and recommend a Natural Area that fully reflects the extraordinary ecological and public value of the Elwha Watershed.

Sign the petition today and help protect the Elwha for generations to come.