Conservation groups, hunters, hikers and Wyomingites carrying on family conservation legacies are resisting the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate the 2001 Forest Service Roadless Rule.
At the close of the 21-day comment period Friday, the U.S. Forest Service received 625,737 responses to the rollback plan. Opponents also wrote Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who oversees the agency, advocating for roadless landscapes that nurture wildlife, clean air and water.
“We see firsthand how roads are the single greatest threat to wildlife,” Jackson Hole resident Kathryn Turner, a wildlife artist and valley native wrote in response to the proposed rollback. “They fragment habitat, block migration corridors, and increase collisions,” she wrote.
Turner’s father, John, led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1989-1993. Kathryn Turner is the fourth generation to be raised at the Triangle X Ranch in Grand Teton National Park and serves on the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation board.
“Tourists do not come to look at clear cuts and strip mines.”
Lee Ann Inberg-Schuff
Lee Ann Inberg-Schuff carried the conservation torch for her late brother, Kirk Inberg, a Wyoming Game and Fish warden who died in 1991 in a plane crash in the Teton Wilderness while tracking radio-collared grizzly bears.
“Tourists do not come to look at clear cuts and strip mines,” Inberg-Schuff wrote. “Recreation and tourism can be easily quantified and in Wyoming alone, is a $4.9 billion industry.
“Extractive industries are boom/bust at best and so very shortsighted,” she wrote. “Keeping Roadless areas makes the most financial sense.”
Citizens want protection
Considered by Sierra Club “one of the most important conservation wins,” the Roadless Rule rankled Wyoming government from the get-go. The state sued to overturn the protection of 3.2 million Forest Service acres — land owned by all Americans — located in Wyoming. The state’s campaign ended unsuccessfully in 2021 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up an appeal.
The roadless rule generally prohibits roadbuilding and logging across 44.7 million acres nationwide, not counting national forests in Colorado and Idaho, which have their own roadless regulations. The Roadless Rule does not prohibit motorized travel and, by definition, is not a program to close existing roads.
Expanded road access is necessary, the Department of Agriculture said in a notice proposing an environmental impact statement authorizing elimination of the Roadless Rule, because “insect and disease and wildfire activity, especially within the [wildland-urban interface] affects important resources, neighboring infrastructure, and communities.”
Whether roadless areas are at increased danger of wildfire and its most serious effects is widely debated. Instead of scrapping the rule, the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service should instead alter it slightly to address fires, one former Forest Service official opined.
“The Trump administration could update the rule to permit temporary roads in roadless areas that are near neighborhoods along the wildland-urban interface to allow for forest thinning or other ecological restoration,” Robert Bonnie, a former high-ranking Agriculture Department official, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.
In Wyoming, there’s also disagreement over whether logging is sustainable in the state’s semi-arid climate or more akin to “timber mining” than harvesting.
Many Wyoming agencies, however, fell in line with the Trump administration’s plan. Many citizens did not.
“The public lands around the Wind River Range are the driving force of our [business] and we need them to stay protected,” wrote Jake Dickerson, co-owner of Wild Iris Mountain Sports in Lander. Repealing the rule, “would have a negative impact on the entire economy of our town and the many thousands like it across the west.”
Roadless areas are “[t]he last best places to hunt in Wyoming, and probably the West,” said Lander resident Nathan Maxon.
“Roadless areas are where source populations exist that produce [wildlife] migrants into the surrounding landscape where we can encounter them,” wrote Merav Ben-David, a professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wyoming. Based on decades of experience and study, she said eliminating the roadless rule “will only harm those of us who rely on wildlife for our livelihood and enjoyment.”
Some commenters did not sign their submissions. One 81-year-old said he started visiting national forest lands as soon as he was old enough to drive. He said there are enough roads in national forests already, 370,000 miles of them, “enough to circle the Earth nearly 15 times.”
Another unsigned comment read that once Wyoming land is developed, “it will never return to its natural state.”
Owners of a 56-year family sporting goods business near Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest said the rollback “will do nothing but negatively impact the Tourism and Recreation sector without any guarantee of significant gain in economic activity.”
A member of a “small rural community in Wyoming” said it was difficult for his fellow villagers to speak up.
“Most residents do not have the ability or knowledge to find this obscure website to make public comment,” the anonymous writer said. “For every person in my community that comments, there are hundreds more who feel the same way and are adamantly against irresponsible policies like this proposal.
“However,” he wrote, “we will all vote.”
State agencies align
Wyoming State Forestry Division’s comments were typical of those made by Equality State agencies. “We are supportive and fully endorse the current proposal to return management discretion of [inventoried] roadless areas to local land managers,” officials at the division said.
Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality said it would continue to enforce pollution guidelines in roadless areas. “The proposed rule recission still requires [that] site-specific impacts comply with applicable state and federal regulations,” an agency official wrote.
“Wyoming State Parks aligns with other Wyoming agencies to support the rescission of the Roadless Rule,” wrote Chris Floyd, deputy director of the Division of State Parks, Historic Sites & Trails and the Office of Outdoor Recreation, all part of the agency Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources.
The Saratoga-Encampment-Rawlins Conservation District wants the rescission’s environmental impact statement to include more than two options — no action and rollback. It called for the ability for Wyoming and other states to forge their own roadless conservation rules.
In Converse County, commissioners support “reconsideration of [the Forest Service’s] current and misguided nationally driven planning strategy and urges the agency to instead empower local forests with greater authority.”
Teton County has supported protection of roadless areas since 2018 and reiterated its position in a letter opposing rescission of the rule.
Conservation groups and scientists
Wyoming and national conservation groups and scientists filed extensive comments.
“In Wyoming, when things aren’t working quite right, we fix them — we don’t throw them away,” the Wyoming Wildlife Federation wrote. The group likened rescission to “the sticker shock of buying a brand-new truck when all you really need is a repair.”
In contrast to the just-expired 21-day comment period, the 2001 rule was forged after 430 meetings and 1.6 million public comments, the group said. Trout Unlimited, the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership signed on to the comment.
An analysis of early submissions showed that 99% of commenters oppose rolling back the Roadless Rule. The Center for Western Priorities, a Colorado nonprofit, made that analysis based on 5,000 randomly selected comments submitted by Friday’s deadline morning.
Protection for wildlife was a major theme of comments. Fully 70% of Wyoming’s roadless areas provide spring, summer and fall range for elk, Nat Paterson, policy director for the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, wrote.
“In Wyoming, 60% of our roadless areas provide irreplaceable habitat for native trout.”
Samantha Beard
The 70% figure “comes from our partners at Trout Unlimited who did an analysis of GIS layers looking at Wyoming Game and Fish Department data of elk seasonal range and inventoried roadless areas in Wyoming,” federation Executive Director Craig Benjamin wrote in an email.
The existing rule protects 11,337 climbing routes and boulder problems, more than 1,000 whitewater paddling runs, 43,826 miles of trail, including parts of the Continental Divide Trail, another Wyoming coalition wrote. Wyoming Wilderness Association, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Teton County Backcountry Horsemen, Wyoming Outdoor Council, National Outdoor Leadership School and the Council for the Bighorn Range also said the rule protects 20,298 mountain biking routes.
“In Wyoming, 60% of our roadless areas provide irreplaceable habitat for native trout,” Wyoming Trout Unlimited Council chair Samantha Beard wrote.
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers said the rule protects “strongholds that hunters and anglers rely on for healthy fish and wildlife habitat, unparalleled opportunities in the field, and clean water.” It called for adopting a permanent safeguard — a measure stronger than the existing administrative rule — through the proposed Roadless Area Conservation Act.
The Natural Resources Defense Council had about 100 cosigners to its exhaustive comments.
A rollback would “dramatically harm wildlife areas … negatively impact the forested areas … and allow for corporations to have unchecked access to protected wildlife areas,” the Society for Conservation Biology wrote. It referenced a rare study of the effectiveness of the Roadless Rule.
“Many [roadless areas] are among the most wild, undeveloped areas both in the nation and within their respective states,” according to the study “Conservation value of national forest roadless areas,” which included about 15 pages of references to science papers. Roadless areas “protect drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people [and] add significantly to the total carbon captured by existing protected areas.”
The Forest Service will analyze the comments, favoring those that are constructive, information-rich and that clearly communicate and support their claims. It will use those to inform an environmental impact statement on the proposed rescission. The final rule, EIS, and record of decision are expected to be released in late 2026, the agency said.
I served on Forest Service land management planning teams from the inception of the rational planning model in 1980 until 2011 when I retired as Forest Planner. Those of us who spent 20 years patiently, optimistically working to craft forest plans that were true to our multiple use, sustained yield mission for the greatest number over time were appalled at the process imposed on our agency by Vice President Al Gore through Undersecretary Jim Lyons and Chief Michael Dombeck.
We had worked in good faith with interest groups of every stripe, and individuals as diverse as the Great Outdoors, with local people, and wide national interests, to to determine best and highest uses for average national forest units of 2 million acres. And we had succeeded. Everybody won some and lost some, and everybody had a chance to participate through years of comment periods and public meetings, field trips, and law suits.
The most difficult period of public service for many people inside the agency was the cynical overthrow of that planning process and the subsequent imposition of the Roadless Rule process. It was crystal clear the decision to impose the Rule had already been made before we ever started. Jim Lyons ordered Regional Foresters to write opinion editorials in support of the rule, ethical malpractice that compromised and harmed the agency to the present day by destroying trust in the once most-trusted agency in government.
National environmental groups had grown impatient and conspired to short circuit the tedious planning process when their champion, Mr. Gore, came to power. Political expediency and moral hubris resulted in a one size fits all scheme to limit America’s access to 58 million acres of the public commons. Famously, the well funded National environmental interests created a mass of form letter comments that resulted in the bulk of over 200,000 comments. Ai helped these same groups achieve three times the comments today. But land management planning is not a plebiscite. It’s not a democratic mob exercise. It’s a systematic, intentional, deliberative process and it takes time.
Al Gore and his cynical supporters got their way as no one doubted they would. Time has moved on. New administrations come and go and, inevitably, the chickens have come home to roost. The tide has turned. A new sheriff has decided to overturn the Rule and return planning for those 58 million hijacked acres to forest plan revisions. It was never a vote. It was ever a process of building the informed consent of the governed. After a brief interlude of 24 years, I welcome this opportunity to reengage in the legitimate process of deliberative rational planning.
Repealing the roadless rule can make the risk of wildfires worse with more vehicles with hot tailpipes venturing further into the forest. And it disturbs the wildlife more & then people wonder where all the wildlife are, they’re getting pushed out by noisy roads.
For those who support rescinding the Roadless Rule, may I add a few thoughts and bit of information. There is no safer haven for wildlife than large landscapes protected from human developments, be they roads, large-scale timber harvesting, mining or energy developments and most recently, expanding motorized recreation. Open roads impact the landscape more than just the roadbed itself. It’s about how they’re used. Motor vehicles on unpaved roads create dust that can spread tens- to hundreds of yards from the roadway, impacting plant health and even plant composition by interfering with photosynthesis, stomata function and plant transpiration. Emissions from motor vehicles can impact plant chemistry, damaging leaves and the soil, and interfere with pollinators by degrading plant scents. Public land roads and their construction are a major source of runoff siltation and pollution of our waterways. Roads are major sources of habitat fragmentation, interrupting or eliminating annual wildlife migrations as well as important daily movement patterns. Studies have also shown that motorized use can displace elk up to 500 yards. And roads are known to push birds and mammals back from roadways, with some studies reporting that impact zones can reach as far as a hundred yards on either side of the roadway. And motor vehicles are a major conveyance of invasive plants. Recent studies have also shown that noisy mountain bikers and hikers can displace birds and large mammals from trail side habitats. It’s not just motorized vehicles.
For perspective, the Forest Service administers over 374,800 miles of roads (nearly 8-times our entire Interstate System), not including an estimated 60,000 miles of unauthorized, user-created “two-tracks.” If for example, we consider that various impacts can be measured a very minimum of 50 yards on either side of a gravel/dirt road (a 300-foot-wide swath of land), then every mile of open road potentially impacts about 36.4 acres of land. Multiply that by the Forest’s 374,800 miles of road and we have approximately 13,643,000 million acres, or 21,320 square miles of public land impacted to some extent- an area considerably larger than two times the size of the state of Maryland. If you think that an exaggeration, cut it in half and we still have an area greater than one Maryland.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open 45 million acres of protected land to multiple use. God only knows how many miles and acres of new roads, trails, timber sales and energy developments would follow.
What is the purpose and need: to give more people the freedom to roam more conveniently into the far corners of some of our nation’s last wild lands, all the while diminishing habitat values and its dependent wildlife populations? Is it to diminish water quality, on sight and downstream? Is it to diminish some of the most sought-after hunting areas? Is it to permit some would-be entrepreneur to try and cash in on a wildlands business? Is it to eliminate yet another area of solitude and quiet? Is this to be the chapter of this generation’s idea of land stewardship? Whatever the purported reasons to rescind the Roadless Rule, these will be but some of the forever impacts. Where is our land reverence? Where are our conservation leaders? Clearly not in the executive branch of government. Our Roadless areas have served the nation quite well for a quarter-century. I hope the day never comes when our nation is so poor that we have to cash in on the last of our wildland heritage. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken.”
Thank you for your article. I live in Oklahoma but did comment to not let the roadless rule be repealed. I am glad to know how many also felt this way and the organizations that spoke up to keep our wilderness areas pristine as possible.
Forrester for everybody not just the elite Sierra club crowd which obviously wyofile is part of is despicable everyone should be able to enjoy the forest not just Craig lovers
What are Craig lovers?
This article tries to frame the Trump administration’s attempt to roll back the Roadless Rule as an assault on conservation, wildlife, and tourism. But the argument is one-sided, overlooking critical realities about land management, fire prevention, and local governance. A clear rebuttal can be made on several grounds.
The claim that “roads are the single greatest threat to wildlife” ignores that many of these roadless areas already border extensive road networks. The Forest Service manages roughly 370,000 miles of existing roads—more than enough to “fragment habitat.” Adding limited, temporary access roads for fire mitigation, thinning, or selective harvest is not comparable to building an interstate. Roads can be removed and reclaimed; catastrophic wildfires cannot be reversed. The real “single greatest threat” to wildlife habitat today is megafire, often worsened by hands-off management tied to rigid rules like the Roadless Rule.
The suggestion that tourists will abandon Wyoming if logging or mineral activity occurs is more rhetoric than reality. Wyoming’s history, culture, and economy are rooted in a mixed use of its lands—ranching, mining, timber, outfitting, and tourism together. National parks and wilderness areas already offer vast roadless protection. To say visitors will stop coming because portions of national forest are locally managed is a scare tactic that dismisses the state’s long tradition of multiple-use stewardship.
The economic argument for roadless preservation is overstated. Tourism is important, but it is also seasonal, service-oriented, and vulnerable to downturns. Extractive industries, while cyclical, provide high-wage jobs and essential materials for modern life. Framing them as “shortsighted” ignores the fact that nearly every piece of equipment used in recreation—cars, bikes, skis, climbing gear—comes from mined resources. A truly “shortsighted” approach would be to pretend conservation and industry are mutually exclusive.
Fourth, federal overreach is a real issue. The 2001 Roadless Rule was crafted through a national political process, not local decision-making. Wyoming’s own forestry division, parks department, and county commissions have called for flexibility. Returning management to state and local authorities allows for adaptive strategies that reflect on-the-ground realities. The claim that rescission means unchecked exploitation is a straw man; state and federal environmental regulations remain in force regardless.
Finally, conservation does not mean locking lands away indefinitely. Wise use—selective harvest, thinning, mineral development, grazing, recreation—can coexist. The alternative is to let vast areas sit unmanaged until beetle infestations and drought set the stage for the kind of wildfires that erase both habitat and recreation value for generations. That outcome is neither conservationist nor fiscally responsible.
In short, opponents of the rollback romanticize roadless areas while ignoring practical stewardship, economic balance, and local governance. Real conservation is not about freezing the landscape in time; it is about managing it wisely for both present and future generations.
“The Forest Service manages roughly 370,000 miles of existing roads—more than enough to “fragment habitat.”
They may manage them but some of them are heavily neglected, probably because the Forest Service isn’t allocated adequate funding to keep them up. Drive to the Upper Boat Dock at Fremont Lake or to the Green River Lakes for examples. If the roads currently in operation now can’t be maintained, why should we have more?
Whether you have deep conservation roots or not, you should oppose eliminating or altering the roadless rule. Your children , grand children and beyond must be allowed to see Wyoming in the wild, un-altered / unmoslted state.
To think that a lot of people didn’t comment, though they wanted to, breaks my heart, because they understand what’s at risk if the RRA is rescinded.
We can do better, going forward let’s make use of public libraries and let the community know to go to their local library, use the computers there to submit comments and ask staff to help people log on & navigate the public comment portals.
The study referenced in this article is worth reading now- “Conservation Value of National Forest Roadless Areas” https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.288
In 2017, the Department of the Interior received over 2.8 million comments during the public comment period for the review of 27 national monuments, which included the proposed reduction of Bears Ears.
An analysis of 1.3 million of the publicly available comments found that 95.6% opposed the proposed reduction of the Bears Ears National Monument.
The administration did it anyway and overwhelming public comments that disagreed with a reduction had no impact. The point is public comments are not a vote and thus may not always count. Think of comments as poll.
Tourists don’t come to look at two hundred thousand acres of ash either.
Look at the 1988 fires in Yellowstone. Some viewed it as the end of the park. Instead the fires created a much more productive environment. Many years of putting out all fires has contributed to the issues of today.
Yes, because wasting a few billion board feet of lumber in the name of all natural is genius right?
Get real. Wasting a few billion on building roads at the public trough is genius right?
It’s the constant roar of side-by-sides and four-wheelers blasting music and kicking up dust that truly makes our outdoor places “great”.
RL- Is the term ” fire ecology ” in your lexicon ? It should be…