There’s a particular type of silence in the high desert of Central Oregon. A calmness that feels truly wild. Wind moving through bunchgrass, canyon wrens’ cascading calls into a dry wash, and the tea-colored John Day River carving through rimrock and painted badlands make this region something special.


In 2021, The Wildlands Conservancy acquired the historic Cherry Creek Ranch, a working cattle ranch near Mitchell, Oregon. Now known as Enchanted Rocks Preserve, the property was acquired as a strategic investment to protect Oregon’s Painted Hills landscape and its adjacent public lands.


The Preserve sits at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the John Day River, with 8 miles of creek and 2 miles of river frontage, nestled among public lands and forming a vital connective piece in a larger conservation landscape.

A beaver-engineered pool on Cherry Creek. Photo by Frazier Haney.


With the land protected, restoration work started immediately. We eliminated the intense, year-round cattle grazing. Then, in spring 2025, we removed a failing 1928 concrete dam near the confluence — a structure that had blocked threatened fish, including Middle Columbia River summer steelhead and Chinook salmon, from the entire Cherry Creek watershed for nearly a century. Its removal reestablishes natural stream processes and marks a significant step toward restoring habitat connectivity and ecological resilience.


And nature is responding: beavers are moving back into the watershed, playing a critical role as ecosystem engineers — slowing and storing water, reconnecting floodplains, and quietly rebuilding the health of the creek’s aquatic and stream-side habitat one bend at a time.


Opening Enchanted Rocks to free daily public access for hiking, fishing, camping, mountain biking, and other forms of passive recreation is central to our mission and the next step for the Preserve. To get there, we are building the infrastructure needed to bring that vision to life: a ranger station, researcher and staff housing, an office workspace, parking, interpretive signage, and trails. Primitive campsites along the John Day River are also planned, in keeping with the area’s growing draw for river recreation.


From landscape-scale restoration to free public access, this is the work your support makes possible, and we’d love to have you with us as it unfolds at Enchanted Rocks Preserve.