Treehuggers International » The Wilderness Society

Exploring the Roadless Area Conservation Rule

tommy — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:23:58 +0000

Mike Anderson from the Wilderness Society

Treehuggers International is very pleased to welcome Mike Anderson, the Senior Resource Analyst from the Wilderness Society’s Pacific Northwest office in Seattle, to talk about roadless areas and the Wilderness Society’s role in the creation of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

Special thanks to Greg MacArthur and the staff at the CBS Radio cluster in Seattle for their assistance in helping make this program possible. Additional thanks to Andrea Imler at the Wilderness Society.

Entering the Buckhorn Wilderness via the Dungeness River Valley, Olympic Peninsula.

Vast Expanses

Some 58 million acres of National Forest lands in the United States are made up of inventoried roadless areas. These are areas where no marked inroads of civilization have occurred, and the land remains in a truly wild, primitive state. The character of these lands ranges from vast expanses of apparent nothingness, to high-value aesthetic and natural resource-laden lands, often adjoining National Parks or designated Wilderness. The drinking water of 60 million Americans begins in some 2,000 watersheds in the nation’s National Forests, and most of those watersheds are in roadless areas.

In the case of roadless areas, a road is described as any kind of thruway constructed for motor vehicle use, generally intended for mining or logging operations on public land. While paved roads also cross National Forests, most forest roads are dirt or gravel in varying degrees of maintenance, and were typically built for the intention of resource extraction over a limited period of time.

Unless specifically signed otherwise, generally in the case of mining and logging operations, roads may be used by the public to access recreational trailheads for hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, and backpacking. Forest roads are also permitted for off-road vehicle use. In fact, over the last 10 years, off-road vehicles have become an increasingly frequent sight on National Forest roads. In some cases, individual National Forests have re-graded or even re-routed hiking trails in order to make them accessible to off-road vehicles (off-roaders typically pay larger fees for National Forest use), thereby modifying a trail into a road.

More Miles Than the Interstate Highway System

Because of the primitive nature of many of the 386,000 miles of Forest Service roads, in 1967 the Forest Service began cataloging every roadless area in the National Forests for consideration as Wilderness. According to the 1964 Wilderness Act, areas to be considered for Wilderness designation must be “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” and where no human activity or infrastructure building has occurred. While an addendum to the Wilderness Act in 1975 does allow for some previous modification by man for eastern National Forests, the rule of thumb is, if there’s a road, the area is no longer wilderness by definition, and therefore, cannot be considered.

While some Forest Service managers and resource extraction operations have deliberately constructed roads in order to negate an area from wilderness consideration, the road-building process is generally tightly-controlled because of the expense the Forest Service must put forward in the years after the road is built for maintenance, and to a lesser extent, safety. Simply building a road brings with it issues of erosion and resource degradation, and over time traffic on these roads leads to litter, pollution of adjoining waterways, increased amounts of silt, species loss, and what is politely described as the loss of “aesthetic” appeal.

Today, the Forest Service has infinitely more miles of roads on its hands than it can possibly afford to maintain, and a movement has been afoot to allow some seldom-used roads with little or no trailhead access or remaining resource use to “go back to nature” by no longer mainitaining them. However, with the rise in popularity of thrillcraft and other off-road vehcies which can literally scale mountains and chew across the land, leaving vast swaths of ruts in their wake (something the first dirtbike enthusiasts never dreamed of and likely never intended 60 years ago), abandoned or seldom-maintained forest roads still enable entry for ORVs into primitive, wilderness-quality backcountry areas. If a roadless area is severely compromised by unregulated or illegal ORV use, it too, may no longer be considered “untrammeled by man” and removed from wilderness consideration.

Former U.S.F.S. Chief Mike Dombeck

Beginning in 1998, under the leadership of supervisor Michael Dombeck, the Forest Service undertook its most intensive public policy discussions and comment periods since the 1960s in order to come up with a cohesive plan for managing National Forest roadless areas.

More meetings were held and feedback cards returned than any other project undertaken by the Forest Service since the initial passage of the Wilderness Act, and the response from communities and citizens around the nation called for a steep reduction in the amount of new roads constructed into roadless areas, and for remaining roadless areas to remain wild.

Roadless Area Conservation Rule

In what became the most far-reaching federal land management document since the Wilderness Act, the resulting roadless study was presented to President Bill Clinton on January 12, 2001, and adopted by the Department of Agriculture, the parent agency of the U.S. Forest Service. Detailing a plan to conserve 58 million acres of National Forest areas from almost all logging and road construction, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule did not specifically put a moratorium on new road-building or set aside all roadless areas from potential development, but it did call for current roadless areas to remain wild and subject to Wilderness consideration, and for old forest roads to “go back to nature” with new bans on road construction, logging, and mining.

Despite the immense savings to taxpayers with the abandonment of no-longer needed forest roads, the new administration of President George W. Bush put the Roadless Rule on hold with days of taking office, saying it wanted to explore other options in the implementation of the act. In 2005 the Bush administration put forward a convoluted plan to allow state governments to designate their own roadless areas, which required governors to petition the federal government if they wanted to protect National Forest areas in their states, reducing the in-depth, three-year Forest Service study and public comment workshop to a mere guide for consideration.

The following year, the Bush plan was struck down by a federal court, which said it “established a new regime in which management of roadless areas within the national forests would, for the first time, vary not just forest by forest but state by state. This new approach raises a substantial question about the rule’s potential effect on the environment.” The same court followed up its initial ruling two months later with a ban on road construction in connection with hundreds of oil and gas leases issued by the Bush administration in areas which would have been protected under the Roadless Rule in Colorado, Utah, and North Dakota, a result of Vice President Cheney’s secret meetings with the nation’s commercial energy leaders in 2001.

Demand Permanent Protection for Wild, Roadless Areas

Currently, Agriculture Secretary Mike Vilsack has been granting the Roadless Rule yearlong extensions, and while we at Treehuggers International appreciate the administration’s willingness to at least abandon Bush-era plans for roadless management, the science and public response detailed in the roadless study remain intact, and to us, trumps all else, and should be enacted as it was intended at the end of 2000. The current trend of yearlong extensions simply appears designed to leave this thoughtful piece of science, management, and policy in a state of permanent limbo.

So lace up your boots this week and head into a roadless area near you, and after experiencing the wild character of your chosen locale, go home and write a letter to your elected officials in Washington D.C. and urge them to lean on the Obama administration to adopt the Roadless Rule in full.

The Forest Service has done a great job of modernizing their website and making information more accessible, and you can click HERE to see a list of inventoried roadless areas to find one near you.

Find the address for your U.S. Senator HERE and Representative HERE, and remember, while e-mails are convenient, nothing beats a phone call or an actual letter, hand-signed and sent in the mail to your lawmaker.

Some natural sound mixed into this show courtesy of Richard Nelson and Salmon In the Trees.

Namesake Kalmiopsis leachiana in the Kalmiopsis Roadless Area, Siskiyou National Forest.

Sen. Boxer Moves to Elevate Pinnacles National Monument to National Park Status

tommy — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:26:46 +0000

Springtime along Condor Gulch Trail at Pinnacles National Monument.

The landscape of Central California is some of the most sublime in the nation, especially in early spring when the hills and valleys are equally green and lush with new grass and colorful poppies from winter rains. But as placid as the oak tree-dotted landscape is, it is also deceptive. Whether entering Pinnacles National Monument from the west side via the agricultural Salinas Valley, or the rugged, but no less idyllic east side, dominated by the nearby San Andreas Fault, nothing can prepare you for the outright primeval weirdness of the Pinnacles.

National Parks vs. National Monuments

First set aside as a National Monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, Pinnacles may see a promotion in status and become California’s first new National Park since Death Valley and Joshua Tree were given similar boosts in status from monuments to parks in 1994. While similarly managed by the National Park Service, the difference between parks and monuments isn’t necessarily in terms of management, but in how the units are set aside.

National Monuments are typically established by presidential decree under the 1906 Antiquities Act, and can be designated as such without Congressional approval if the natural character or qualities of the area may be threatened, or if the president feels Congress is moving too slow to declare the area a National Park.

While National Parks are generally afforded a higher level of protection and tend encompass whole ecosystems, the Antiquities Act stipulates “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” are suitable for consideration as National Monuments, but “shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” As a result National Monuments tend to be smaller than National Parks, but that hasn’t stopped presidents from creating monuments for varying criteria when the mood, political need, or desire may strike them.

Theodore Roosevelt went on a spree of creating numerous, yet modest-sized National Monuments in the early 1900s as an enthusiastic conservationist, including Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and Petrified Forest in Arizona (now also a National Park), but the Antiquities Act has also been used to set aside vast areas of federal land as protected areas, particularly by Jimmy Carter in 1978, when he set aside an extraordinary 15 areas in Alaska totaling nearly 80 million acres, almost all of which became National Parks two years later with the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

Wild Landscape On the Move, Home to Condors

In conjunction with legislation introduced last year by Congressman Sam Farr of California’s 17th district, Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a comparable Senate bill to make Pinnacles a National Park. According to the Salinas Californian, the bill

would change the site’s designation and add nearly 3,000 acres of the monument to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

The Californian adds

The 26,000-acre Monument [is] recognized for its ancient volcanic spires, colorful cliffs, numerous caves and diverse wildlife. It’s now a release site for the critically endangered California condor.

It’s fitting California condors call the prehistoric crags of the monument home. Pinnacles makes up the southernmost extension of the Galiban Mountains, a small, inland sub-range of the larger California Coastal Range, running along the border of Monterey and San Benito counties, and are remnants of the ancient Neenach Volcano, which last erupted some 23 million years ago. But the Pinnacles aren’t bizarre simply because of their volcanic origin, but because of where the volcano was located: 195 miles to the southeast, in the Mojave Desert near the present-day location of Edwards Air Force Base.

Rainbow along the Juniper Canyon Trail.

Over time, as the Pacific plate on the west side of the San Andreas Fault moved to the northwest relative to the North American plate, the Neenach formation, which erupted and grew on top of the San Andreas, was neatly bisected, with the western end carried off on an amazing journey which continues to this day.

The Pinnacles look nothing like the hills and and valleys surrounding it, and while the appearance and natural character of Central California has grown into a Mediterranean climate of chaparral, grasslands, and oak-woodland forests, the Pinnacles have retained their harsh, tortured, desert-like appearance, literal relics of another age and another climate deposited (for the moment) on the edge of the Salinas Valley.

The Pinnacles have also managed to retain their wild quality because of a wise decision against running a road through the length of the park. With U.S. 101 offering access to the west through Soledad, and State Route 25 offering access from the east along a dramatic route following the San Andreas Fault zone, the temptation certainly existed among area boosters and pre-war road builders to construct a “scenic” route through the monument. Now the decision against the road may be the monument’s strongest hand in consideration for full National Park status, as the area remains as it was when set aside in 1908. Much of the monument was also designated as wilderness in 1976.

Another component in the Monument’s wild quality are the features of the Pinnacles themselves, which have managed to avoid some head-on erosion processes by virtue of being located about 40 miles east of the coastal Santa Lucia range, which act as a rain shadow and keep the region slightly drier than the rest of Central California. As a result, the sharp volcanic rock features and prehistoric character of the monument persist into the 21st century. In an article on the condors of Pinnacles National Monument, author Tom Bentley wrote in the Los Angeles Times

[It is] an otherworldly place of jutting rock spires and twisted towers that looks as though it was wrenched from dinosaur times. ‘Wrenched’ is fitting: The park’s craggy upthrusts [are] a landscape in which a pterodactyl might choose to make its home.

We at Treehuggers International offer our thanks and support for Pinnacles’ proposed change in status to Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Sam Farr, as well as David Edelson and our friends at the California/Nevada office of the Wilderness Society, along with the Wild Heritage Campaign and the California Wilderness Project.

Photos by kind permission of Miguel Vieira.

The High Peaks from the monument's Chaparral ranger station.

Fresh Wilderness and Wild and Scenic River Opportunities In the Golden State

tommy — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:02:59 +0000

Rocky outcrop near the Mt. Waterman summit, San Gabriel Mountains.

It’s an exciting time for wilderness and outdoor advocates in Southern California, as three different conservation initiatives are underway in the southern half of the Golden State, including wild areas in the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles County, a pair of remote locales in northern San Diego County, and a vast expanse of currently unprotected land in the Mojave Desert, including multiple wilderness expansion proposals, numerous Wild and Scenic River designations, and two new National Monuments.

On this edition of Treehuggers International, Daniel Rossman from the Wilderness Society’s Los Angeles office, and Steve Evans, the Conservation Director from Sacramento-based Friends of the River, talk about the remarkable amount of conservation opportunities already underway in Southern California, and those under consideration.

San Gabriel Mountains

Pitch leaks from a freshly cut limb.

Led by the Wilderness Society, Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and other organizations in the San Gabriel Mountains Forever coalition, the current San Gabriels plan calls for additions to the range’s three established wilderness areas: the Sheep Mountain, Cucamonga, and San Gabriel Wilderness in the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests.

Significant Wild and Scenic River designation is also being proposed on the San Gabriel River’s East, North, and West forks, as well as Lytle Creek, Little Rock Creek (on the range’s north side), and San Antonio Creek, including San Antonio Falls, located along one of the proposed additions to the Sheep Mountain Wilderness near Baldy Notch.

Also, with the extraordinary and still-growing recreation use of the area, a plan is being proposed for a new San Gabriel Mountains National Recreation Area in conjunction with the National Park Service.

The park service has already done a feasibility study on the possibility of a National Recreation Area, which would be especially valuable to lower income and ethnically diverse areas at the base of the range. Currently, the Wilderness and Wild and Scenic package needs the support of Congressman David Dreier from California’s 26th district in order to get aboard “the legislative train.”

2010 California Desert Protection Act

Backed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Desert Protection Act is of significant size, and would include the proposed Sand-to-Snow National Monument, rising from the western end of Joshua Tree National Park into the forested high country of the San Bernardino Mountains, and includes one of several proposed Wild and Scenic River designations in the area for the Whitewater River, which flows through the proposed monument’s length into the Coachella Valley basin.

To the north, the proposed Mojave Trails National Monument would protect wild and historic locales along both sides of historic U.S. Rt. 66, along with a sizable chunk of the Mojave Desert west of the Mojave National Preserve, and another sizable area west of the Arizona state line near the Colorado River and Needles. Several proposed wilderness areas are also part of the package, and would provide an opportunity to enhance wildlife corridors between Death Valley National Park, the U.S. Army’s Fort Irwin, and Mojave National Preserve.

An upcoming show featuring David Lamfrom from the National Parks Conservation Association will go into more detail about this proposal, one of the largest land management initiatives ever undertaken in the lower 48 states.

Northern San Diego County

Springtime flowers in oak woodland country.

We at Treehuggers International were pleased to learn Congressman Darrell Issa, who represents California’s 49th District in San Diego’s inland North County, had introduced legislation in December to expand the current Agua Tibia and Beauty Mountain Wilderness areas in Riverside County into adjoining wild areas in his district in San Diego County.

Passage of the bill will add 7,796 acres to the Agua Tibia Wilderness and 13,635 acres to the Beauty Mountain Wilderness, originally established by Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack and Sen. Barbara Boxer in the California Desert and Mountain Heritage Act.

Crisscrossed by canyons with oak woodland and chaparral-covered slopes, the areas are intensely rugged and heavily bouldered, with the Cutca Trail marking the main human passageway through the region. As has become the case with recent wilderness proposals in areas with private property patchworked into public land, the legislation allows for the continued use of a popular campground at the end of a pre-exisiting road “cherry stemmed” into the wilderness, and will also permit a corral along the edge of the Beauty Mountain Wilderness boundary.

Another modern wilderness concession is an allowance for mechanized firefighting efforts in the areas, though the Agua Tibia Wilderness in particular has already burned four times since the late 80s, most recently in the Poomacha Fire in October 2007. Several proposed Wild and Scenic River designations are also being considered as part of the overall legislative package, including the upper Santa Margarita River (before it flows into Camp Pendleton) and the San Diego River Gorge.

For more information on these ongoing initiatives, contact the Wilderness Society’s Los Angeles office at (213) 514-4030, or Friends of the River in Sacramento at (916) 442-3155.

Rugged vistas of the San Gabriel high country abound along the trail to Chilao and Twin Peaks.

David Edelson from the Wilderness Society

tommy — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:01:41 +0000

View from Mt. Baden-Powell into the drainage of the East Fork San Gabriel River.

An environmental attorney and public land conservation specialist, David Edelson is the Regional Director for the California and Nevada office of the Wilderness Society.

David previously served as lead attorney for the Sierra Forest Legacy, where he played an important role in blocking the Bush Administration’s 2004 forest management plan, which called for a drastic increase in the commercial logging of large, old-growth, fire-resilient Ponderosa, Jeffrey Pine, and White fir in the Plumas National Forest. A federal court later found the management plan in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

Hedgehog Cactus in bloom, Mojave Desert.

David also worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he led the NRDC’s efforts to improve management of national forests in the Sierra Nevada and Pacific Northwest.

The Wilderness Society has long been a champion of conservation and the environment, and specifically, setting aside the last remaining wild places on public lands in the U.S., including lands overseen by the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Wildlife Refuge System.

In addition to wilderness advocacy, the Wilderness Society also works to ensure appropriate, responsible management of the nation’s public lands. Founded in 1935, the Wilderness Society led the way and was instrumental in the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System and the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act under President Johnson, which elegantly describes wilderness as “an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Today, over 100 million acres of federal land have been set aside for all Americans as wilderness, and with the passage of the Omnibus Public Lands Act in March 2009, an additional two million acres in nine states have come under wilderness designation. Along with the economic benefits in the rise of tourism and outdoor recreation as a result of these special places, wilderness provides breathing room for watersheds, climate regulation, and biodiversity, and also provides room for humans to de-pressurize and re-connect with the ebb and flow of the natural cycles of the earth and the wild.

San Antonio Falls, San Gabriel Mountains.

With last year’s legislative successes in mind, wilderness advocates are hoping for success this year with several initiatives, most notably the Sen. Dianne Feinstein-sponsored California Desert Protection Act, which would create or expand five wilderness areas in the Mojave Desert and nearby portions of adjoining mountain ranges, and also create two new National Monuments: the Mojave Trails National Monument between Joshua Tree and the Mojave National Preserve, and the Sand to Snow National Monument, which would preserve adjoining areas of Joshua Tree National Park into high country in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains.

The act would also add expansions to Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley National Park, and the Mojave National Preserve, with the new wilderness areas and National Monuments acting as buffers around the National Parks, thereby preserving wildlife corridors between the parks and across the Mojave at a variety of elevations.

Proposed additions to the Agua Tibia and Beauty Mountain Wilderness areas in northern San Diego County sponsored by Congressman Darrell Issa have also been a welcome development, and the proposed additions to the Cucamonga and Sheep Mountain Wilderness areas and Wild and Scenic River designation for the east and north forks of San Gabriel River, San Antonio Creek, and Lytle Creek in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles have also found a favorable response (and will be explored in upcoming shows).

Conservationists are also engaged in ongoing wilderness initiatives in California’s Sierra Nevada, the Carrizo Plain, and the Klamath Mountains in Northern California (which contains the largest network of roadless wilderness remaining in the Pacific Northwest), as well as in Colorado with the Hidden Gems and San Juan Mountains wilderness proposals, in Oregon with the Molalla River Wild and Scenic bill, and in Pennsylvania in the long-running campaign to create new wilderness areas in the Hickory Creek, Allegheny Front, and Tionesta wildlands of the Allegheny National Forest.

Spring wildflowers on the Carrizo Plain, San Luis Obispo County.

On the Verge of the Wild Sky Wilderness

tommy — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 01:57:32 +0000

Wild huckleberries are one of nature's great treats, Wild Sky Wilderness.

In his preamble for what would become the Wilderness Act, creating what would become the National Wilderness Preservation System, Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society wrote, with great eloquence, “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Beargrass along the Skykomish River.

Sadly, Mr. Zahniser died in May 1964, just four months before President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law.

With the spirit of Mr. Zahniser’s words in mind, Treehuggers International is pleased to present a conversation with Bob Freimark, Senior Policy Analyst for the Pacific Northwest office of the Wilderness Society, about the impending designation of the long-awaited, low-elevation temperate rainforest Wild Sky Wilderness in Snohomish County.

After languishing in Congress for years with little help from GOP legislators, the Wild Sky bill received a shot in the arm in January 2007 when it was re-introduced by Senator Patty Murray and Congressman Jay Inslee. Once the Wild Sky becomes official, it will become Washington’s first designated wilderness area since 1984.

Over 106,000 acres in size, the proposed Wild Sky Wilderness lies north of Index and Skykomish off US Highway 2, flanks the North Fork of the Skykomish River and the Beckler River, and adjoins the higher-elevation Henry M. Jackson Wilderness to the east and northeast. The area is key not only as a wildlife corridor, but also as one of the few remaining roadless areas in Western Washington which has never been subject to major logging operations.

An enthusiastic proponent of the National Wilderness Preservation System, Bob also talks with Tommy about the details of the 1964 Wilderness Act, stewardship issues, what constitutes “wilderness,” and why wilderness left on its own is as valuable a long-term resource as timber or minerals, to say nothing of the refuge and solace it provides in an increasingly impersonal, detached, overly plugged-in modern society.

Treehuggers International is happy to report the Wild Sky Wilderness became a reality on May 30th, 2008.

Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rick Larsen dedicate the Wild Sky.

Treehuggers International » The Wilderness Society

Exploring the Roadless Area Conservation Rule

Mike Anderson from the Wilderness Society

Vast Expanses

More Miles Than the Interstate Highway System

Roadless Area Conservation Rule

Demand Permanent Protection for Wild, Roadless Areas

More about this post at:

Sen. Boxer Moves to Elevate Pinnacles National Monument to National Park Status

National Parks vs. National Monuments

Wild Landscape On the Move, Home to Condors

More about this post at:

Fresh Wilderness and Wild and Scenic River Opportunities In the Golden State

San Gabriel Mountains

2010 California Desert Protection Act

Northern San Diego County

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David Edelson from the Wilderness Society

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On the Verge of the Wild Sky Wilderness

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