FILE - This 2023 photo shows closure notices by Deschutes County at an encampment in the Juniper Ridge area. This week, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced they'd be closing 40 acres of public land nearby due to camping.
Joni Land / OPB
The Bureau of Land Management plans to close 40 acres of public land Sunday in Central Oregon due to public camping.
The area, located between Bend and Redmond, is being closed to all public uses because long-term camping by about six people has created health, safety and environmental concerns, according to the agency.
The BLM posted closure notices in the area on April 23, said Suzannah Burke, a public affairs specialist with the agency’s Prineville District. The six people had been living there “several years,” she said, but currently no one is living in the area. BLM rules generally limit overnight camping to 14 days.
The closure takes effect one month after the U.S. Forest Service closed about 25,000 acres of the Deschutes National Forest for fuels management and wildfire mitigation. That closure evicted about 200 people from an area south of Bend, including a well-known homeless encampment where people had been living for years.
Bend announced this week it had cleared people from about 500 acres of land north of the city, part of a larger 900 acre closure. The move reduces the Juniper Ridge encampment to about 170 acres of city and county-owned land. The plan to reduce the encampment’s footprint was decided in a joint meeting with the Bend City Council and Deschutes County Board of Commissioners last fall.
As with the Forest Service restrictions, the BLM closure north of Bend applies to all users. The agency said in a press release that “hiking, driving, mountain biking and dispersed camping,” will be prohibited.
“Over the years, we’ve seen accumulation of trash and human waste, the creation of unauthorized routes, fence damage, and loss of native vegetation,” BLM Deschutes Field Manager Lisa Clark said in a statement.
The push to move long-term campers off of public lands has long been building in Central Oregon, even as cities like Bend have said they do not have enough resources to shelter all of the people currently in need.
The BLM manages 245 million acres nationwide, and 1.65 million acres are managed by the Prineville District in Central Oregon, according to a U.S. Department of the Interior website.
Prineville District staff said they do not know when the closed area will reopen.
