Keeping Roads Where Roads Belong
An Update on TU's Public Land Initiative

by Chris Hunt

Dave Petersen had been employed by Trout Unlimited for less than three weeks, when, this past May 5, he was plunged headlong into a battle where success or failure could shape the long-term future of fishing and hunting throughout the American West.

The story starts two years ago when TU launched a new, far-reaching campaign to bolster the Western Water Project’s ongoing efforts to assure clean, cold, fish-filled waters in perpetuity throughout the West. Going far beyond the stream banks to engage broader watershed issues, TU’s Public Lands Initiative, or “PLI,” comprises a three-pronged campaign:

Restoring public lands damaged by hard-rock mining
Limiting ecological damage resulting from poorly planned public lands gas and oil exploitation, and
Keeping roadless, public wildlands wild and roadless.

After two trial years with promising results, TU expanded the three-person PLI team this past spring to a dozen full-time staff spread across the West. These hand-picked innovators include specialists in wilderness and public lands issues, gas and oil exploration and drilling, grassroots organizing, media, and conservation policy. At the core of PLI’s strategy is a bold effort to organize not only anglers for conservation, but hunters as well. The latter, quips Petersen, a lifelong hunter himself, “is like herding porcupines.” Toward that challenging goal, every member of the PLI field team is an experienced and respected sportsman or woman.

Directing this expanded West-wide PLI effort from Durango is Brian O’Donnell, who brings a wealth of experience in grassroots organizing and conservation politics. Sharing office space with O’Donnell is PLI roadless organizer Petersen. A 25-year rural Colorado resident, Dave is a passionate hunter and dry fly fisher and a nationally acclaimed hunting ethicist and outdoor writer (Ghost Grizzlies: Does the Great Bear Still Haunt Colorado?).

This brings us back to May 5, when roadless issues made front-page national news. A press release issued by national TU that day summarizes the origins and scope of this insidious threat to hunting and angling, cold-water fisheries and wildlife:

WASHINGTON – Trout Unlimited (TU), North America’s largest coldwater conservation organization, today expressed extreme disappointment with the Bush Administration’s removal of protections for 58.5 million acres of public land.

The new rule gives individual state governors 18 months to develop recommendations for state-specific levels of roadless area protection.†These recommendations would then be sent through a national advisory committee, before being considered in statewide rulemakings by the Department of Agriculture.††

The 58.5 million acres of roadless areas on National Forests are of vital importance to fish and wildlife, and hunting and fishing.†For example, more than 70 percent of remaining bull trout and 60 percent of West Slope cutthroat strongholds are found in roadless areas.†Roadless lands also provide crucial habitat for elk, mule deer, and other fish and game.

The Forest Service already maintains a backlog of more than $10 billion on the more than 386,000 miles of roads that traverse National Forests and Grasslands.†“It makes little sense to build new roads when the Forest Service cannot take care of its existing road network,” said Chris Wood, TU’s Vice President for Conservation Programs. “

Officially, a roadless area is any road-free parcel of national forest land 5,000 acres or greater. Colorado’s 11 national forests boast almost 4.5 million inventoried roadless acres, all of which was protected from commercial exploitation under the original Roadless Rule. Of that total, only 935,619 acres, a mere 21 percent, remain protected following the current administration’s intervention. The remaining 79 percent--3,497,634 acres--are now vulnerable to roading, logging, mining, gas and oil exploration, and the destructive ecological fallout such heavy-handed human activities inevitably bring.

That’s a potential eventual loss of more than three-quarters of Colorado’s remaining non-wilderness national forest lands--unsettling news for hunters, anglers, and others who care about healthy forests and watersheds and value pristine nature over convenience of access. Ironically, as TU’s Petersen points out, “An abundance of unroaded backcountry is invaluable even to anglers who never venture there, since the cold, clean streams critical to the recovery of all three native Colorado cutthroat trout head in or flow through unroaded public lands. Likewise, the headwaters of Colorado’s most celebrated trout fisheries begin in roadless high country. Roads prompt erosion and increase sediment, fill pools, pollute, raise water temperatures, and harm fisheries in many additional ways.”

Regarding hunting, Petersen points out that “big game animals have four basic requirements: food, water, cover, and room to roam. No matter how rich a road-chopped landscape may be in forage and water, when wild animals experience stressful disturbance, they flee. And nothing stresses elk like motorized traffic. Thus, the farther from a road, the better the hunting, in quality as well as quantity. For example, the two top-scoring Colorado record mule deer bucks both came from national forest roadless areas, while elk are equally fond of solitude. Numerous studies confirm hunters’ observations that elk try to avoid roads--including ATV trails--by at least half a mile, especially during hunting season when backroad traffic radically increases. Ironically, because animals move around a lot, even timid hunters who never get far from roads often benefit from the ‘trophy pump’ effects of backcountry habitat, where bulls and bucks can survive long enough to grow exceptional antlers.”

The PLI’s strategy to protect roadless areas in Colorado, says Petersen, “is multi-faceted, but relies ultimately on the active support of hunters and anglers, volunteer activists willing to write letters and attend public meetings so that our collective needs and positions remain foremost in the minds of decision-makers and the public. It’s tragic that things have come to this, yet TU and a coalition of state and national hunting and angling groups we’ve organized look forward to working with Gov. Owens and the Roadless Area Review Taskforce toward preserving our state’s precious and irreplaceable treasure of wild public lands.”
Following a round of meetings with forest supervisors this fall and winter, next spring and summer the roadless taskforce--a 13-member governor’s advisory panel--will hold public meetings at each of the eight national forest headquarters around the state. Hunters and anglers, says Petersen, “need to make a good showing at every meeting, as well as in their local media. With the help of the CTU Council, chapters, and members, we can and will make a positive difference.”

In conjunction with its roadless protection efforts in Colorado, PLI is working to safeguard fish and wildlife habitat on the Roan Plateau and in the HD Mountains roadless area, both threatened by rampant oil and gas development. PLI is also actively involved in abandoned mine clean-ups throughout Colorado.

As issues develop, HCA will keep you informed on how you can help. Dave Petersen can be reached at dpetersen@tu.org.

About the Author

Chris Hunt is the Public Land Initiative media coordinator for Trout Unlimited.