Forest Roads: The Future (MBSNF meetings)

Uberuaga nemesis Ron Judd on USFS road access; interesting comments:
seattletimes.com/html/pacificnw/20214185...iescover0811xml.html
Live chat on same topic:
blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2013/08/liv...d-areas-be-repaired/

Great article!

I have a little story to tell: about a week ago my wife and I were standing on top of Flower Dome (next to Buck Creek Pass) admiring the expansive view from the glacial headwaters of the Suiattle River to the deep valley far to the west. The only other person up there, a fit but older backpacker, started talking to us. After some prattle it was clear that he was deeply involved in local recreation and conservation groups, and that he had a lot of great stories. He was also clearly one of the "Golden Lions" mentioned in the article. I mentioned the only other time I had made it into the Glacier Peak Wilderness was in the '90's via Suiattle Pass, Miners Ridge, and out the Suiattle trailhead. We got to talking about how that trip is basically not possible anymore, and money and road issues. Before we parted ways he said, "you know, one of the things we never envisioned when we were fighting big timber companies back in the day was the unintended consequences of winning.....we took the road network for granted."

That is a very well written, cogent article.  The only mis-stated point I could see is the labeling of the anti-access groups as "closed to everyone but us"; certainly some of the group are exceptionally fit with lots of time and might not mind hiking an extra 13 miles :, but, IMHO, many of the group are "armchair" wilderness devotees who simply love the thought of very large areas truly inaccessible to people.  Some, if not many, of these also believe there is no place in "nature" for people--that people, by their very presence destroy nature.  This belief system is quite common (but far from universal)  among "conservationists" and academics in the field of Conservation Biology (some leading figures have suggested moving all the people out of the greater PNW), but, as the article implies, is quite at odds with the philosophies of those who conceived of, and fought to establish national parks and wildernesses.

Great article!

... one of the "Golden Lions" ... said, "you know, one of the things we never envisioned when we were fighting big timber companies back in the day was the unintended consequences of winning.....we took the road network for granted." 

The timber voices warning about loss of access with loss of timber harvests (and even retaliation in the form of curtailment of recreational access) were indeed barely heard above the clamor for reform of the environmentally destructive timber program. The Chief of the Forest Service at the time of greatest harvest later said something like "Any fool could have calculated on the back of a napkin that we were overharvesting [in violation of the National Forest Management Act and the earlier Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act]."

Congress set the harvest limits (and, in the case of a good proportion of the Olympic NF, exceedingly extravagantly devastatingly high harvest limits on the Shelton Sustained Yield Unit) and USFS managers worked hard to meet them. When the disastrous cumulative effects started to become apparent and conservationists started objecting, they were routinely deceived by senior FS administrators and hand-shake agreements violated. This led then to litigation and development of a cadre of analysts who were more technically competent in NEPA and, sometimes, in forest management and forest ecology than the FS staffs. What should have been a consensus to follow the law devolved into fierce battles and finally the Clinton summit in Portland, and the subsequent exceedingly expensive and frought-with-problems NW Forest Plan; the battle-hardened advocates on both sides are still alive and well today.

I believe at least some of the resistance to repair and maintenance of any FS roads is based on the belief that as soon as the road is repaired the FS will begin logging old growth or logging in the wilderness.

It will be critical to quantify the present and future monetary impacts of non-motorized recreation in these regions wher FS road closures are impacting access. As this past weekend's rains demonstrated, maintaining FS and even WADOT roads is an expensive ongoing process. Without reasonable access, winter or summer, the public's interest in a distant place, whether Wilderness or not, will wane and the demand for funding will continue its downward spiral.

Access to the woods has been the foundation of the American outdoor experience. In a landscape composed of such vastness, well considered access is important. The Wilderness areas were planned with these access points serviced with the roads in question as a resource; should those roads be permanently closed, those Wilderness areas' status should be reconsidered...

Uberuaga nemesis Ron Judd on USFS road access; interesting comments:
seattletimes.com/html/pacificnw/20214185...iescover0811xml.html
Live chat on same topic:
blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2013/08/liv...d-areas-be-repaired/

Thanks! The article rambles a bit, but the territory it covers is worth the read.