USDA resends 25 year old “Roadless Rule” restriction.
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Now if they just had the road crews to maintain them here in R5
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I never dealt or had to deal with this during my career, and I freely admit to not having either the facts nor the expertise to weigh in. At the risk of a discussion going sideways, it would be interesting for a couple of well-versed folks who understand both sides of the equation discuss what this really means. But I certainly don’t want to see the mods have to step in and shut it down because it turns political or into a rantfess.
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We did a video on this topic last year.
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Funny, you were on the super short list I was hoping to hear from… 
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Was it long? Yes, was it worth it? Definitely. You did a great job of digging into the obvious questions and separating the “smoke” as you called it from the fire.
These are the kind of discussions with SME’s that you will never find on Watch Duty. Each platform has its place and functions.
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This is a classic example of to much swinging hard to, to little. There will never be enough funding to open these roads back up. NEVER! But maybe we could open and maintan a few critical roads on each forest to start. Fire roads are absolutely needed for many important reasons. When i was a kid just starting out with the USFS Iworked on a road crew, each district had a crew with road equipment ie road grader, dozer, backhoe and dump trucks. Been gone for drcades and it’s never coming back. This will not be reconciled in my life time and the next administration may swing back to roadless. There is a lot to unpack here. I whish them all the best. FS Roafs used to be good to tvl on, not so much these days. Peace.
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I agree. Changing the designation on the planning map won’t change the scale of backlogged maintenance on the literally hundreds of thousands of miles that the Forest Service already has on the books. The Forest Service currently has a hard time managing their campgrounds and keeping their barracks from caving in, let alone taking on more maintenance or new road construction.
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When the timber industry collapsed in the 90s those USFS Rd departments saw their budgets dwindle and disappear. (Speaking for California)
The Roadless act further encouraged no need to fill behind retired operators and the fire dozer era took over. Emergency maintenance is performed by Fire HEOs and that’s about it still to this day, if your lucky
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My grandfather was a Cat skinner and my dad did some work in the woods too.
I remember my dad shaking his head that all the work his dad had done, building roads for various purposes, now going to waste. Some places I went they were taking steps to actively obliterate roads.
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For over two decades, questionably mounted on my adult beverage refrigerator in the shop, I’ve had a ticket that an LEO gave me for going around a gate and riding on a “decommissioned” road on my dirt bike. It’s been on the refrigerator all that time because it’s such a novelty and almost priceless in meaning. Now it’s definitively priceless!(Again)! 
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Who said this would get political, haha
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What isn’t now a days?
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Those tires are exempt from that law
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