Soda Mountain Wilderness Area

About the Soda Mountain

Jewel of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument

In the southwest corner of Oregon, three ecoregions converge at the 114,000-acre Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. To the west rise the Siskiyous, an ancient range of ridges and peaks that were scraped up from the seafloor while the rest of Oregon was under the Pacific Ocean. Those crash into the snow-capped Cascades, all within site of the Klamath Basin, leading to an ecological convergence with a higher concentration of geologic and biologic diversity than most anywhere in the world. The Soda Mountain Wilderness is in the center of it. 

The Monument is where rare flowers form the Siskiyous bloom in spring. Wolves associated with the Cascades traffic through the area's most remote depths. Birds migrate along one of the grandest flyways in the world, the Klamath, as handfuls of butterflies hatch and take flight. 

The Monument also hosts rare plants, some that grow nowhere else in the world. Here there are endemic animal species as well, including a long-isolated population of red-band trout. Black oak woodlands, juniper scabs,, mixed old-growth forests. Stream bottoms that support broad leaf trees and shrubs. Rosaceous chaparral and oak-juniper wodlands.

Climbing from 2,000ft in the fertile valleys to 6,000 feet on top of the area's greatest summits, this vast wildland is an American treasure worth discovering.