BEND, OR -- Sometime during the night of December 4, 2015, someone cut down and removed a 300-year-old Juniper tree at the Oregon Badlands Wilderness trailhead, 16 miles east of Bend. Larry Pennington of the Juniper Group Sierra Club tells KBND News, “The stump is right in the middle of the Flatiron Rock Trailhead parking area with kind of a little island. And it had three trees in it, all about the same age, I guess; this is one of those three that’s no longer there. So it is quite visible to anyone who goes to hike at the trailhead.”
He's asking that anyone who knows anything about the vandalism contact the Bureau of Land Management. “The destruction of any government property is a crime so we’d like to find whoever did it and hold them accountable but also say that this kind of behavior on government lands especially government lands set aside for the use of the people as a natural area has consequences.”