Program Updates, Fall 2010

Restoration Program

Wildlands CPR continues to lead the national Legacy Roads and Trails campaign and we were particularly busy this summer, hosting field tours in Washington and Montana and monitoring restored roads in Montana and Idaho. In addition, our Restoration Campaign Director, Sue Gunn, coordinated a September award ceremony for the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative (WWRI) to honor our congressional and state/federal agency champions.

Congressman Norm Dicks (WA) and former Director of the Washington Department of Ecology, Jay Manning, received awards for their work to promote and fund Legacy Roads and Trails. Dicks started this Forest Service program when he was chair of the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee (he now chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, but still sits on the Interior and Environment Subcommittee). Sue, in handing Mr. Dicks the “Clean Water Hero Award” said that Mr. Dicks’ support of Legacy Roads is already considered a great environmental contribution to our nation. Manning was responsible for moving the WA Dept of Ecology to engage the Forest Service over road management, and he is responsible for the Department’s participation in the WWRI. He received the Environmental Champion Award. And finally, Tom Erkert, Regional Engineer for the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region, received the “Data Daylight Honorable Mention” for the 2005 cost estimate report he wrote on the funds needed to stabilize the national forest road system in Washington State.

Upon receiving his award, Congressman Dicks stated that one of his priorities is to make the Legacy Roads and Trails program permanent, which would provide the agency with longer-term consistency and stability for rightsizing their road system. We’ll keep you posted if and when that happens!

In August, Congressman Dicks joined Wildlands CPR and other WWRI members on a field tour of a Legacy Roads project on the Olympic National Forest (WA). Several reporters attended, resulting in a number of articles about the importance of the Legacy Roads and Trails program for both economic and ecological reasons. We hosted a similar field tour on the Helena National Forest in Montana, to look at Legacy Roads projects in the Northern Region. This tour resulted in stories on all three television stations in Helena, in addition to a great article and editorial in the Helena Independent-Republic newspaper.

There was one common theme from the Washington and Montana field tours: excavator operators on both projects talked enthusiastically about reclamation work and noted that their fathers had built roads in the very same forests.

In addition to organizing the Montana field tour, Sue has been building an informal coalition here in MT similar to the WWRI. This new Legacy Roads, Trails and Jobs Coalition is working to increase public support for Legacy Roads in Montana. It already has 27 members, including the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, Ironworkers, Laborers, and five other local unions, plus the Missoula area AFL-CIO, Montana Association of Conservation Districts, and numerous other state/local environmental organizations.

While Sue’s been leading the policy and advocacy components of our campaign, Staff Scientist Adam Switalski has been busy all summer with both Legacy Roads monitoring on MT and ID national forests, and Lolo National Forest (MT) road inventory work. To monitor Legacy Roads, Wildlands CPR partnered with the Forest Service and collected pre-project data to compare with post-project monitoring data in the future. With assistance from botanists and other scientists, Adam drafted an extensive monitoring protocol and field-tested it in the Kootenai NF (MT), one of our monitoring forests. The bulk of the field work was done by Greg Peters (who also coordinated the Helena Field Tour). Adam also hired several graduate students from the University of Montana to assist with the botanical monitoring in the fall. The field season will end shortly after this issue of The RIPorter is completed (end of September), but ideally Wildlands CPR will receive funding to continue this work for several more years.

Adam S. is also coordinating our Lolo National Forest road survey project, overseeing our 2-person field crew as they look for erosion problems, weeds, and wildlife on Forest Service roads, in addition to documenting the location and condition of non-system roads. Collecting this data will enable the agency to set priorities for restoration, maintenance and road reclamation - and identify potential Legacy Roads and Trails projects. The field season ends at the end of September, after which Adam S. will pull together a final report for the Lolo.

Transportation Program

Our Restoration Program is not the only one “gettin’ er done,” as our MT Transportation Coordinator Adam Rissien and our Legal Liaison and Staff Attorney Sarah Peters have been working hard as travel planning enters the home-stretch in MT and nationally.

For example, Sarah assisted activists and lawyers with travel planning processes on the Six Rivers (CA), Sierra (CA), Kaibab-Williams (AZ), Gunnison (CO), Humboldt-Toiyabe (NV), Klamath (CA) and Fremont-Winema (OR) National Forests.

Wildlands CPR also joined Klamath Siskiyou Wild to intervene on behalf of the Forest Service in litigation that off-road vehicle riders filed to challenge Smith River National Recreation Area (SRNRA) road decommissioning.

In addition to all of this travel planning work, Wildlands CPR filed a lawsuit against the Beaverhead-Deerlodge (B-D) National Forest (MT) to challenge their revised Forest Plan. Friends of the Bitterroot and Montanans for Quiet Recreation joined us on the suit, which claims that the agency failed to carefully plan for snowmobile use when they designated winter motorized recreation across 60 percent of the forest without undertaking a winter travel planning process. For example, the Centennial and Beaverhead Mountains of the B-D serve as a vital travel route connecting wolverines between Idaho and Greater Yellowstone, while providing crucial wolverine denning habitat. Mt. Jefferson, however, has become a destination for extreme snowmobilers coming over the border from Island Park, ID. Allowing heavy snowmobile use may cause wolverines to abandon dens and preclude their ability to travel safely through these important areas. Missoula attorney Jack Tuholske is representing us in the case.

But winter planning isn’t the only challenge on the Beaverhead- Deerlodge. Adam R. has been overseeing two field staff collecting data on off-road vehicle damage on both system and unauthorized motorized routes. Some of that data collection has already resulted in the closure of unauthorized routes! We’ve also been able to document certain situations where no motorized use is occurring but the Forest Service thinks otherwise. Adam is using the data collected to create google earth maps that include damage photos – he’s been focusing on roadless areas within the B-D. Keep an eye on our website for these maps, available soon.

Adam R. has also been continuing our work on the Bitterroot National Forest (MT) as they finalize their travel plan. He has partnered with diverse allies like mountain bikers, hunters and equestrians to keep them engaged in the travel planning process. We expect that the Bitterroot will release their new travel plan sometime around the new year. Keep an eye on our website to stay informed about that final decision.