GRANTS PASS — The U.S. Forest Service has endorsed designation of a new wilderness area near Reedsport. It’s in an area of the Coast Range known for a remote waterfall called the Devil’s Staircase.

The agency’s deputy chief, Joel Haltrop, appeared Thursday before a congressional subcommittee in Washington, D.C., in support of the bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., offered a similar bill in the Senate.

The bill would create the Devil’s Staircase Wilderness on 30,000 acres of federal land east of Reedsport, doubling the area of the Coast Range protected as wilderness. It also would designate Wasson and Franklin creeks as wild rivers. Most of the area is on the Siuslaw National Forest.

Haltrop said the land located between the Umpqua and Smith rivers provides critical habitat for northern spotted owls and marbled murrelets, two threatened species, and is an outstanding example of the old growth forests that covered the Coast Range before logging. The Forest Service has no plans to log it.

Andy Stahl of the conservation group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics said the 30,000 acres of federal land has escaped logging because it is very steep and prone to landslides. A lawsuit thwarted plans by the Forest Service to log it in the 1980s. It was later designated as an old growth forest reserve under the Northwest Forest Plan.

“This is just a fabulous piece of the way Oregon used be,” Stahl said. “This is the most wild, the most rugged place in Oregon. If anything deserves to be designated as wilderness, this is it.”

The area has no formal trails, and DeFazio once described an all-day bushwhacking trek to the falls as the toughest hike of his life.

The bill also calls for wild and scenic river protection for the Mollala River, which flows into the Willamette River and provides drinking water for Canby and Mollala.

Stahl said there was no testimony against the bill at the hearing.