After years of planning, campaigning, feuding and finger-pointing, Oregon's fight over new national monuments seems to be coming to a close - for now.

In his final days in office, President Barack Obama announced a massive expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon last Thursday, but a proposal for a monument at eastern Oregon's Owyhee Canyonlands has run out of time.

The decision to act on one of Oregon's two national monument proposals is something of a compromise for the local conservationists and natural resource companies involved. And while the compromise would seem to settle the monumental debate locally, recent history and the road just ahead both suggest the issue is far from over.

Friday's inauguration of President Donald Trump ends the rash of national monument designations made under Obama, swiftly shifting the issue to new - potentially untested - grounds.

LAWMAKERS AND LAWSUITS

Both of Oregon's senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, supported and applauded the 48,000-acre expansion of Cascade-Siskiyou, calling it "a great day for southern Oregon" in a joint release on Jan. 12.

That sentiment wasn't shared by Rep. Greg Walden, however, already a staunch critic of federal land management, who called the new designation "rigged from the beginning."

"With this designation, the outgoing administration is locking up more of our public lands through a process that cut out many in the surrounding communities," he said in a press release last Friday. "I will work with the Trump Administration to do what we can to roll back this midnight expansion."

Walden hasn't offered any details about how or when he might work to undo the expansion. His office declined to comment beyond the written statement.

The new boundaries of Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, expanded by President Obama on Jan. 12, 2017

Also jumping into the fight is the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry trade group that contends President Obama misused power granted by the 1906 Antiquities Act in the expansion.

Travis Joseph, president of the group, told OPB last Friday that the expansion improperly includes at least 7,000 acres of land prioritized for logging. The Bureau of Land Management assured that all existing timber contracts will be honored, but Joseph is still considering challenging the legality of the Obama administration's action.

"Can an administration come and change the meaning of a statute through the Antiquities Act?" he told OPB. "That's the legal question, and our answer is no."

The most likely road to a roll-back runs not through a lawsuit, but through Congress and the White House. There's no precedent for the removal of a national monument designation, but it is conceivable that the Cascade-Siskiyou expansion could be revoked.

Sitting presidents and Congress both have the authority to scale back national monuments, according to a November analysis by the Congressional Resource Service, and have done so several times before. The Mount Olympus National Monument in Washington, for example, was reduced in size three times before Congress designated it as Olympic National Park.

The new Republican-led Congress could conceivably do the same in southern Oregon, essentially undoing Obama's Cascade-Siskiyou expansion by reducing it to its previous boundaries.

President-elect Trump hasn't said much publically about the national monument debate - and neither has his pick for the Secretary of Interior, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke - but lawmakers in Utah, furious over Obama's designation of the controversial Bears Ears National Monument, have met with both, coming away confident that the fight over monuments will carry on.

CONSERVATIONISTS CONTINUE

Jack Williams feels conflicted. As a senior scientist with conservation group Trout Unlimited, he was part of a vocal group that pushed for the Cascade-Siskiyou expansion, and while that effort was a success, he can't help but imagine what could have been.

"I don't think anybody got what they hoped for out of this," he said. "I think there's a lot of people that were pleased that we did get the expansion, [and] I think that there is some concern."

That's concern about the other areas of the Cascade-Siskiyou, the areas environmental scientists said should be protected, but weren't included in the expansion. The result is an imperfect solution and an uncertain future.

Under President Obama, conservationists enjoyed a leader that protected more land, established more national monuments than any other. Under President Trump, that mindset most definitely change. That's cause for concern among those involved in the movement, but many are taking a "wait and see" approach.

"It's premature to articulate what we might expect might happen," said Nicole Cordan, a Portland-based director with The Pew Charitable Trusts. "Honestly I don't know what this incoming administration may or may not do in terms of national monuments, either here or elsewhere."

Cordan said her team, which works on Pew's America's Wilderness project, will keep doing what they've been doing: bringing the community together to protect public land.

For all the marketing and campaigning, both for and against national monuments, the breakdown between the two sides of the debate hasn't changed for generations, and isn't likely to change now.

The debate has been going on as long as settlers have pushed west, clearing forests and mining mountains on their way - a vast harvest of natural resources that inspired the American conservation movement at the end of the 19th century.

In 1910, just after President Theodore Roosevelt established the Mount Olympus National Monument, Seattle-based prospector F.H. Stanard spoke out about the "brainless restrictions" that "cursed" the land. In 1940, The Oregonian wrote that a Hells Canyon National Park proposal "runs head on, like a locomotive collision, into the economics of Wallowa County."

A similar pushback almost certainly doomed an Owyhee Canyonlands National Monument, but conservationists aren't done looking for a solution.

"Let's look at this from an Oregon solution, it's a state that has prided itself historically on trying to find a balance," said David Moryc, a senior director at American Rivers. "Instead of this pendulum swinging back and forth ... we can actually have an adult conversation."

Both Moryc and Cordan stressed that love of land is not the issue. They recognize that local ranchers have as much passion for the Owyhee Canyonlands and Cascade-Siskiyou as conservationists do. The issue is how best to protect that land: Presidential action? Vote of congress? Local control?

That's an issue the Pacific Northwest has debated for more than a century, and will continue to debate through President Trump and beyond.

"The thing I do know is that Oregonians have a really deep and strong connection to public lands," Cordan said. "What a gift we have in this country of these spectacular places that we all own. We all own them. They're a part of our heritage, they're shared history."

--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB