From the Field: The Hard Science

Wet snow starts to fall as Stan speaks again, “We’ll be pulling this one out too.” He points at a dirt track cutting through the lodgepole forest. “There’s a network of roads that heads back in there, it reconnects again just up ahead,” he continues. I look off to my right and wonder how many such networks spread through this part of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, each one pushing farther from the main road, each one a silent seduction for the folks who prefer motors to boots. Lazy, fat white flakes drift through the grey sky and fall in muffled thuds against the hood of my thin rain coat. I wasn’t prepared for snow.

Four hours earlier Adam Switalski and I had arrived at the Lewis and Clark Forest office in Great Falls to head out to the South Fork of the Judith River watershed with Stan VanSickle, a fisheries technician, Christina, his young road surveyor, and Bob, a University of Great Falls student who’d agreed to check our cameras for the summer. We had come to scout locations for a monitoring project on the Lewis and Clark. After the quick office introductions, we piled into trucks and rolled down the highway towards the Little Belt Mountains. Eastern Montana’s big sky stretched out to infinity, an undulating grey above the undulating green. To the north, the Highwood Mountains jutted grey and dark into the clouds. To the east, the Big Snowy Mountains lived up to their name. Drizzle slicked the road, reflecting the grey.

On the drive, Stan and Adam chatted about roads and decommissioning. In the lower valleys,
the meadows were thick with elk and mule deer. Late spring snows kept the high country inaccessible and the elk and deer stuck low and close to the meadow edges. As the truck bounced up the muddy dirt road, the conversation switched smoothly from how many elk we saw to the finer points of road   decommissioning: increased fish connectivity, decreased sediments, increasing numbers of black bears and elk – the two experts traded back and forth. Stan talked about working on the east side of the divide – about the drier conditions, the different forest type, and his desire to “do as much work as I can while this ‘Legacy money’ lasts.” It was this same “Legacy money” that had brought Adam and me to this  island mountain range so far from Missoula. In 2008, after decades of political apathy and apparent  indifference, Congress appropriated money for the Forest Service to deal with its crumbling road infrastructure, and the Legacy Roads and Trail Remediation Initiative was born. Legacy Roads was   designed to provide the agency with money it desperately needs to replace old culverts and bridges, to accomplish backlogged maintenance projects, and most importantly, to decommission unneeded roads. Adam and I had come to the Lewis and Clark to begin a monitoring project for roads that were to be  decommissioned with Legacy money. Days later, we would be heading to the Clearwater, the Kootenai, the Lolo, the Helena, and the Gallatin forests for additional study sites, where we will set up our motion-triggered cameras to monitor animal movements on roads before they are decommissioned. We will return after the roads are pulled and reset our cameras to monitor how animals respond to the treatment. It’s one of the first studies to examine how terrestrial animals respond to road  decommissioning and everyone seems excited by it.

As a fisheries tech, Stan knows the value of ripping roads. Native fish across the west are facing serious threats that range from warming waters, to hybridization, to reduced habitat, to competition from invasives, so when they finally battle high enough to spawn in the cold, snowfed creeks, Stan wants to be sure their eggs don’t die. Because sediment from roads can smother both the eggs and the juveniles that
live between the rounded cobbles of western streams, Stan’s anxious to get as many roads out as he can.

The truck lurches to a stop, and we pile out one by one. Stan wants to show us a seep – water spilling from a road cut down across the road. This formally subsurface water is exposed, or “daylighted” in road speak, when a road is cut into the side of a mountain. Once the water, often only a few feet or less under the ground, is freed by the bulldozer, it goes where it wants. And as Stan explains, water wants to go  down. So we stand in the cold rain and watch as sheets of water seep from the earth and slide down the
dirt cut bank, bringing sediment onto the road surface. When the road is recountoured, Stan explains, the seeps are buried, returned again to their subsurface journey, and the chronically bleeding sediment is finally staunched. We shake water from our coats before sliding back into the pickup. The windows fog  until the heater finally blows them clear. The day is waning, but one camera is mounted and we’re on our way to the second site. Stan’s excitement is palpable and hangs in the damp air during each lull in the conversation. He’s clearly and justifiably proud of the work he’s doing on the forest. In fact, although  we’ve driven by several dirt tracks that Stan told us were slated for decommissioning, we have seen just a small project area. Stan has several such projects spread across the forest.

A few weeks before this trip, Adam and I had met with Mark Story, a hydrologist on the Gallatin National Forest. He had brought maps of various project areas on the Gallatin that are Legacy funded, his excitement and pride evident as he described all the projects happening there over the next two  summers. Dave Callery from the Helena, Annie Connor from the Clearwater, Traci Syltie from the Lolo, Mark and Stan, each Forest Service contact I had called to talk about our project expressed enthusiasm and openness. Yes, we’d love to partner with your group. We’d love to get the results from your other
studies. We’re very excited about Legacy Roads and the opportunities it presents.

It was fantastic - half a dozen agency personnel enthusiastically offering an environmental non-profit access to their forest and help with a monitoring project. Even better, each of these folks knew a lot about road decommissioning and during the various phone conversations we chatted about techniques and Legacy Roads. With the critical influx of Legacy money, road decommissioning is no longer something a few folks on a few forests are engaged in. Rather, it has become a focus of dedicated professionals
across the country restoring watersheds one road at a time. As I spoke with each of them, I began to realize that at long last, decommissioning’s time has come.

I check the GPS unit as we start the walk to the final camera site. The road is punctured by deer and elk tracks. Dirt two-tracks split haphazardly from the main drag – they’ll be coming out Stan assures us.  Patches of old snow cling stubbornly to the coldest spots. We walk past a dry wash and then one carrying some water. Three-quarters of a mile in we find another creek crossing under the road and set the camera up on a tree nearby. In another year, the walk to this spot will be much harder, the road surface will be gone, slash piled askew across the road, reaching out to twist an ankle or catch a shoe lace. The culvert that runs beneath the road will be gone, the fill piled on the downhill side of the road will be
pulled up to form the natural slope of the mountainside. At first, things will look rough, scattered trees and boulders atop exposed red earth. But the native seeds cast by Stan’s crew will start to sprout and the wildflowers and shrubs will return in just a few short weeks after the earth is moved.

We’ll be back too, checking the cameras and repeating our vegetation surveys, adding to the science that has helped Stan and others sell decommissioning to their colleagues and supervisors. We’ll be back doing our part to help push Legacy funding from a year-to-year opportunity stiff with inter-agency   competition to an annual part of the Forest Service budget, one that allows forest managers to plan for multi-year projects and to finally begin the long and vital process of restoring our watersheds and right-sizing the forest roads system. Yes, we’ll be back helping to bolster with hard science the intuitive reasoning that screams roads in wildlands are bad and removing them is good.