Former USFS workers: Roadless Rule doesn’t hinder management
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) The Roadless Rule doesn’t restrict federal forest management, but it does require that foresters preserve recreational and wildlife values in roadless areas, according to former federal employees.
On Friday, representatives of the Public Lands Defense Coalition met with three former U.S. Forest Service employees at the Grizzly Trail trailhead near Rock Creek to view the mountainsides where logging and prescribed burning is being carried out in the Silver King Inventoried Roadless Area as part of the Forest Service’s Tyler’s Kitchen Fuels Reduction Project.
In December, the Lolo National Forest approved the 33,400-acre Tyler’s Kitchen project east of Rock Creek and south of the Clark Fork River and Interstate 90 in Granite and Missoula counties.
The southern 18% of the project area covers part of the Silver King Inventoried Roadless Area. Brian Riggers, retired Region 1 Roadless Coordinator and fisheries biologist, said that’s where work is being carried out differently than in other parts of the project area, but the work is still happening.
“When you say roadless areas, some people think we can’t do anything in those areas. The Roadless Rule was established to limit or restrict new roads in these areas that don’t have roads. It wasn’t designed to say you can’t go hiking, you can’t do fire management activities. In fact, in this area back here, there’s a lot of activity planned for fuel reduction,” Riggers said. “It makes it a little different in terms of how you approach it, but there weren’t many instances - if any that I can recall - where we couldn’t do projects. (The rule) wasn’t so you couldn’t do stuff - it’s so that you protect these unique characteristics of roadless areas when you do stuff.”
The Forest Service proposed the roadless rule in 2000 toward the end of the Clinton administration. The rule was proposed partly to stem the growing backlog of costs associated with maintaining more than 386,000 miles of roads across the national forest system. During more than 600 public hearings nationwide, the public provided more than 1.6 million comments in favor of adopting the rule.
In Montana, the Forest Service hosted 31 public meetings during the 15-month public process and received comments from almost 16,000 Montanans, 78% of which supported the proposal.
However, in June, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced she was rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule. During the public comment period in September, almost 656,000 people commented, and again, more than 99% opposed the rule’s repeal, according to a Center for Western Priorities analysis of around a third of the comments.
One of the justifications the administration gives for rescinding the Roadless Rule is that more roads are necessary to reduce wildfire risk, either by enabling more logging or by providing response routes for firefighters. But Julie Shea, retired Forest Service fire behavior specialist, doesn’t buy that completely.
“I’ll push back in terms of there are a lot of roads we have right now that fire suppression resources can’t maneuver on. So I don’t buy that argument. Also putting in roads really increases the human-caused fires. Human-caused starts, according to the Forest Service databases, account for easily 75% of our fires every year,” Shea said. “Roads are going to open up dispersed camping and increase the fire risk. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t buy the fire-risk argument to get rid of the roadless rule.”
The Tyler’s Kitchen project is reducing wildfire risk while maintaining roadless area characteristics including high-value scenery, clear streams and wildlife habitat. To preserve those values, the Forest Service planned for 2,000 acres of prescribed fire using helicopter ignition on the ridge, but they wanted to keep the fire away from the Grizzly Trail down below. So first, they did about 200 acres of thinning to get rid of the ladder fuels so they could better control the fire, Riggers said.
“This was successful in achieving the goals of reducing fire risk, but it looks completely natural. But if that wasn’t a roadless area, if we didn’t have those guidelines, then the typical project would have ended up with roads across the hillside and a lot more timber harvest. So it would look different. Not only would it look different, but the habitat for fish and wildlife, your opportunity to go up there and be in a remote area - it would all be different,” Riggers said. “The American public has said those areas are important to keep for us.”
The Silver King roadless area is doing its part to preserve Rock Creek, a popular angling stream that depends on the cold, clean water of its tributaries to keep trout populations healthy. Grizzly Creek is one of the tributaries that parallels the Grizzly Trail before it joins Ranch Creek, which feeds into Rock Creek. If logging roads had zigzagged up the hillsides above Grizzly Creek, they might have sent sediment down to cloud the little stream and possibly harm local trout.
Shane Hendrickson, former Forest Service fisheries biologist, said studies that compared streams in roaded areas to those in roadless areas have shown that fisheries are more healthy and diverse in roadless areas. Native fish, such as westslope cutthroat trout and threatened bull trout, need cold, clear water to live and particularly to spawn in. Key spawning reaches are always found below roadless areas, Hendrickson said.
As summers get warmer, stream temperatures are also rising, which imperil bull trout. So preserving spawning reaches by maintaining roadless areas gives bull trout a fighting chance to produce another generation.
“It’s imperative. If we’re going to hang onto our native fish populations, we really need a distribution of unroaded areas across the landscape,” Hendrickson said. “Once you get over a certain road density, the watershed can’t respond to natural disturbances - fire, floods - and it’s less resilient. In a managed watershed, those roads are rigid and there are long-term impacts. You think about a bull trout generation as roughly five years but those road impacts are decades long.”
Montana has almost 6.4 million acres of inventoried roadless areas, according to a U.S. Forest Service summary. Only two other states have more: Idaho with 9.3 million acres and Alaska with 14.7 million. Those three states also have the most abundant and varied fish and wildlife populations.
However, many Montanans don’t know much about roadless areas or realize that they often hike or camp in them because they’re more remote regions where people can get away from traffic and more populated areas. Riggers said he’d talk to hunters who didn’t realize that the big blocks of unroaded areas where they wanted to search for elk were inventoried roadless areas.
“The Forest Service - we have not done a very good job, in my career, of really touting what and how we manage for the public, whether it’s areas for multiple use versus the unroaded areas versus the wilderness study areas versus wilderness areas,” Shea said. “We just have our heads down and are doing our work, in a lot of cases.”
Although some people might be unfamiliar with roadless areas, a recent poll found that 65% of Westerners oppose the concept of building more roads in undeveloped areas.
The Public Lands Defense Coalition wants to build upon that. Because the Forest Service hasn’t responded to a recent petition asking for public meetings on the repeal of the Roadless Rule, the Coalition is holding public meetings of its own in seven Montana towns to take public comment in early March. In Missoula, it's at 6 p.m. on March 9 at the Public Library. The Public Lands Defense Coalition includes the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Trout Unlimited and Wild Montana among others.
Riggers said the Roadless Rule has worked for 25 years and he hopes it can survive at least another 25 to help some places remain undeveloped as human pressures increase.
“What the rule does - it doesn’t take out the flexibility - it says, ‘Consider this first and make sure that you can show the public that you’re doing a good job of maintaining these things.’ Without that, the flexibility thing becomes more of who's in the position at the time, and it kind of goes in a one-way direction.”
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.