Forest Service Program Returns Miles of Wilderness Roads to Nature

Loggers built a dirt road across Jumbo Creek, on the western flank of the Cascade Range, 30 years ago so they could convert Douglas firs in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest into timber riches.

But in 1996 heavy rains dumped giant boulders, trees and mud down the mountain and washed away a section of road. There is a 60-foot-wide canyon where the road across Jumbo Creek once was.

Now Forest Service workers are finishing the job nature began.

They are using excavators, dump trucks and a bulldozer to firm up the canyon walls, pull out a smashed culvert and churn up the roadbed on either side of the creek.

They will put 60-by-12-foot nets made of nylon and coconut fiber on the canyon walls to prevent erosion. And they will plant a seed mixture of ryegrass, lupine and creeping red fescue to make the former roadbed on either side of the canyon more wild.

“We’re definitely restoring it to the forest,” says Bob Klatt, a district engineer at the Gifford Pinchot.

The Forest Service has a road network of 386,000 miles across 192 million acres of federal forests. Many of the roads were built by loggers during the timber heydays of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Nowhere are the roads thicker than in the Pacific Northwest, once the nation’s logging hub.

But with projects like the one at Jumbo Creek, the Forest Service is slowly getting rid of roads that are considered dangerous, unnecessary or environmentally harmful.

The agency has erased 25,000 miles of roads in the last decade and is on track to abolish nearly 3,000 miles this year alone.

With logging down 70% in the last decade, agency officials say there is no longer a need to expand an expensive road system that was built for loggers.

“Our road system is nearly complete,” Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck told journalists this summer.

While building few new miles, agency officials could step up the pace of abolishing roads.

The Forest Service hopes to finalize a rule this year that would make it more difficult to justify construction of new roads while calling on agency officials to “aggressively” abolish roads that are not needed or environmentally troublesome. Agency officials unveiled the proposal last March.

Chris Wood, an aide to Dombeck, said it is difficult to predict how many roads will be abolished under the new rule because the proposal sets a policy direction that local agency officials carry out.

“We’re not proposing running around the forest willy-nilly closing roads,” he said. “We intend to work hand in glove with folks at the district-ranger and forest-worker level. . . . It doesn’t set a quota.”

The proposed rule, along with President Clinton’s proposal to prohibit road-building in 43 million acres of roadless national forests, has drawn complaints from loggers, recreation advocates and western Republicans.

“More and more Americans are being denied access to our national forests,” said Larry E. Smith, a consultant for Americans for Responsible Recreational Access in Washington, D.C. “Who are these forests for?”

The group of recreation-industry and user groups formed last spring, saying Clinton’s roadless plan would lock up too much land.

Tom Crimmins, a retired Forest Service employee and trails consultant from Hayden Lake, Idaho, said local agency officials increasingly have little choice but to make unpopular closure decisions. “The roads are being closed by edict from Washington,” he said.

Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), who chairs the forests and forest health subcommittee in the House, has a bill pending on the House floor that would require the Forest Service to consult with local officials before closing any roads.

Among other things, the bill would require agency officials to describe traffic patterns as a result of the closure and to say how the closures would affect forest users.

Doug Crandall, chief of staff for Chenoweth’s House Resources Committee panel, said many agency projects to erase roads make sense for safety and environmental protection.

But many other projects seem driven to appeal to Clinton’s base of environmentalists, he said. Crandall wants the agency to close problem roads rather than erase them, in case the agency decides later the road is needed to fight fires or provide access to the public.

Ken Rait, an environmentalist and director of the Heritage Forests Campaign in Portland, Ore., said the Forest Service isn’t moving fast enough. He and other environmentalists complain that the roads sever wildlife habitat and direct sediment and debris into streams, hurting water quality and fish.

“They have a horrendous environmental impact,” Rait said of many of the roads. “In certain areas, [abolishing roads] is absolutely going to have to be done.”

*

On the Net:

Forest Service proposed roads rule: https://www.fs.fed.us/news/roads/

Congressional Web site: https://thomas.loc.gov/

Chenoweth’s bill number is HR 1523.