Forest Service supervisor pushes for national policy to protect roadless areas

Scott Sonner

Saturday, Feb. 26, 2000 | 9:33 a.m.

FALLON, Nev. - The Forest Service's new supervisor in Nevada says it is important to establish a national policy for protection of roadless areas in national forests.

But Bob Vaught, head of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, said Friday the agency is a long way from determining how far the protection should go or how existing roads would be treated.

An agency analyst said the options range from making the roadless areas "totally open to totally closed" to motor vehicles.

Vaught urged Nevada state lawmakers and county commissioners to make their concerns known in the form of formal comments on President Clinton's roadless initiative when it is made public later this spring.

"It is important we wrestle with this roadless issue as a nation," he said, acknowledging some of the more restrictive alternatives could limit access to large sections of national forests in Nevada and the West.

Environmentalists have praised the effort aimed at protecting undeveloped lands as one of the century's most ambitious conservation efforts. Republicans have criticized Clinton for bypassing Congress, accusing him blocking access to many of the nation's 192 million acres of public forests.

More than half the 6.3 million acres of national forest in Nevada have been identified as meeting the agency's criteria as roadless.

"There are lots of potentially very difficult possibilities," Vaught told the Legislature's Public Land Committee meeting in Fallon.

"But it is important not to be too negative too soon," he said.

Disagreement over what to do with roadless areas has been "very much a part of the controversial aspect of public land management for a long time," said Vaught, who has been on the job for two weeks after transferring from the Colville National Forest in Washington state.

Clinton has directed the Forest Service to come up with a formal proposal to provide "appropriate protection" for "most or all" of the estimated 54 million acres of national forests across the country currently considered roadless.

That 54 million includes nearly 3.4 million of the 6.3 million acres of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

Critics fear agency officials will propose all of that land be made off limits to motor vehicles and that existing roads accessible only to four-wheel drive vehicles will be closed.

Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko, said he fears the initiative could lead to the closure of the popular Lamoille Canyon Road that leads from Lamoille near Elko into the Ruby Mountains.

"You will be wiping out rural Nevada because we won't be able to access these lands to hunt, or fish or camp or sightsee," Carpenter said.

Forest Service officials said it has not been determined whether any roads would be closed or what type of restrictions would exist within the roadless areas.

"If the decision is made as narrowly as John described, there would in fact be problems for rural Nevada and people who use national forests," Vaught said.

Most likely, he said there will be "a range of alternatives, from probably a narrow interpretation to a broader one" of what constitutes a road or a roadless area.

Under the Forest Service's current definition, only "constructed" or "improved" roads" - those accessible to passenger cars - would eliminate an area as roadless.

An area is still considered roadless if it contains "temporary" or "unimproved" roads used by high-clearance vehicles, including two tracks, lanes and four-wheel drive jeep trails.

How those roads are treated under a roadless protection plan has yet to be determined, said Rick Connell, a forest analyst in charge of computerized mapping for the Forest Service in Sparks.

The protection plan may go only so far as to recommend that no new roads be constructed in roadless areas, Connell said.

"Under that version, you wouldn't necessarily be restricted from using these unimproved roads," he said.

"On the other end of the spectrum, there might be no motorized access of roadless areas," he said.

Regarding Carpenter's concern over Lamoille Canyon, Connell said that road leads to picnic areas, trail heads and a campground and provides the only motorized access to a region where such travel is largely prohibited.

"I can't imagine we'd be closing that road," he said.