This year, mercifully, the forests of Wallowa County were not besieged with massive wildfires. And there was no natural disaster on the level of the August 2022 hailstorm that pummeled the city of Wallowa.

Those were such big news events that the Chieftain’s annual year-in-review section last year was headlined “A Year of Fire and Ice.”

At first glance, it may be a little harder to put a finger on the biggest news events of 2023 in Wallowa County — after all, huge wildfires and destructive weather events do tend to dominate the news.

But look a little harder at the news of 2023 (and it was another lively year for news in the county), and you start to pick up a trend or two underneath the currents.

In fact, a closer examination suggests that 2023 might be remembered as a year of transitions.

Consider:

• As 2023 ended, Wallowa County has its first new sheriff in nearly three years, as Ryan Moody was appointed to the job to fill out the remaining term of Joel Fish, who retired to care for his aging mother in North Carolina.

• The biggest employer in the county, the Wallowa County Health Care District, has a new leader as Dan Grigg was selected to succeed the retiring Larry Davy. Davy led Wallowa Memorial Hospital through two extremely challenging periods during his two separate stints as the CEO, so Grigg knows he has big shoes to fill. The hospital and Winding Waters Medical Clinic both opened new clinics in Wallowa, and Winding Waters announced plans to open a pharmacy in Enterprise.

• School districts in Enterprise and Wallowa have new leaders as well: Rebecca Nordtvedt left her post with the Wallowa County Education Services District to take the top job as superintendent of the Enterprise School District. Landon Braden moved up to take the top job at the Education Services District. Jennifer Johnson was selected as the interim superintendent in Wallowa. (If you want to look a little to the south, it might be worth noting that Eastern Oregon University named a new president, Kelly Ryan.)

• State Sen. Bill Hansell, R-Athena, who represents Wallowa County as part of his sprawling Senate District 29, said he wouldn’t seek reelection, and hands went up all through Eastern Oregon from people interested in the job. One of those hands belonged to Wallowa County Commissioner Todd Nash, who’s served seven years on the commission. Nash’s decision opened a seat on the county commission, and that job is attracting considerable interest as well — so 2024’s election is shaping up as a big deal.

• Speaking of elections, a Greater Idaho ballot issue in May calling for the county commissioners to, twice a year, discuss the merits of aligning Wallowa County with another state that could be more in tune with the county economically, culturally and politically, passed by an incredibly tiny margin. Regardless of how that discussion goes in Wallowa County, the issue of the rural-urban division that has prompted the Greater Idaho movement isn’t going away.

• It’ll take a long time for Wallowa County and the rest of the state to work their way out of the shortage of affordable workforce housing. But 2023 brought a burst of energy toward solving the problem — led, in many ways, by the efforts of Working Homes LLC, the new nonprofit created at the start of the year by Wallowa Resources.

• Wallowa County’s LGBTQ+ population emerged in a big way in 2023, staging the county’s first Pride march through downtown Enterprise during the summer and also showing up in the midst of a controversy over a sex-education pamphlet, geared primarily for LGBTQ+ youths, that was available — and will continue to be available — at the Enterprise Public Library.

• As the year ended, Wallowa residents opposed to a Dollar General store being built just outside town were looking for ways to stop the project, which would be among the first chain stores in the county.

• Wallowa County played an important role in convincing the Legislature to allocate the necessary money to connect Oregon with the AgriStress Helpline, a national service intended to offer immediate and confidential assistance to farmers, ranchers, foresters and other workers in natural resource industries who are facing stress. The discussion about the Helpline cast new light on the importance of mental health throughout the county.

So take a deep breath: That’s quite a list. Change is all around us.

But there are constants as well: Wallowa County still is a place filled with resilient communities and resourceful neighbors who will drop everything to lend a hand. None of that is changing.

And all of it — the constant change and, if you will, the constant constants — are part of the tapestry of another year in Wallowa County.

Our commitment at the Chieftain is to cover that news the best we can, and to remember the broader context behind it: communities that, year in and year out, demonstrate their toughness, their resilience and, yes, their compassion and willingness to pitch in to help neighbors whenever they need a hand. The news may change from year to year but that will endure.

From all of us at the Chieftain and the EO Media Group: Happy new year.