Upper Wenatchee I FRB

Alongside our partners, in 2024 Blue Forest launched an initial FRB in the Wildland Urban Interface to protect these communities. The Upper Wenatchee I FRB footprint is within the planned and permitted Upper Wenatchee Pilot Project (UWPP), a landscape-scale restoration effort on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire to these communities and the surrounding landscape. Blue Forest recognizes that the project area makes up the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary homelands of the Yakama and Wenatchi Peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial, and the ceded territory of the Yakama Nation Treaty of 1855. Our partners hold relationships with the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the past, present, and future Peoples of the region.

The Upper Wenatchee I FRB project includes around 5,200 acres of fuels reduction and accompanying aquatic restoration activities across a 15,000-acre footprint, protecting communities, infrastructure, and habitat. Chelan County Natural Resources Department is leading project management and implementation of project activities, in coordination with the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and local partners. Activities in the FRB focus on forest health treatments including fuels reduction, prescribed burning, and associated watershed health improvements. The surrounding landscape is a popular recreation and tourism destination and home to multiple threatened and endangered species. In addition to reducing fire risk and increasing community fire safety, the project is expected to support the recovery of these species, protect critical infrastructure, protect and enhance water supply, and foster economic development in nearby communities.

Beneficiary funders for this project include Washington DNR, Chelan County, and Chelan Public Utility District. Support from local partners including the North Central Washington Forest Health Collaborative, Lake Wenatchee Fire Adapted Communities, and Lake Wenatchee Fire & Rescue was also essential to the creation and launch of the Upper Wenatchee I FRB.

The FRB project area is also part of broader landscape resilience efforts, including Washington DNR’s 20-Year Forest Health Strategic Plan and the Central Washington Initiative, an all-hands all-lands effort to implement the national Wildfire Crisis Strategy.