Recreational Access and Conservation - Conservation and Public Service Activities

| Introduction | News | Notices | Activities | Education | Forums | Columns | Links | Dedicated to conservation and multiple use of public lands for recreation opportunities. Edited by: John Stewart

Endangered Trails List

4x4Wire believes that responsible off-highway recreation and trail use does not cause significantly more irreparable harm to non-sensitive areas than any other human activity does. As such, we believe that there should be provisions allowing for both continued and expanded reasonable access to non-sensitive areas by people enjoying both non-motorized and motorized off-road activities.

Due to increasing political and environmental pressures, many recreational opportunities are being lost. Trails are being closed without required public hearings. Other trails are endanger of being closed while awaiting public hearings.

"Closed" = motorized travel prevented through signage and/or physical barricades including gates or "tank traps"
"Obliterated or Decommissioned" = road is ripped up and replanted with grass or other vegetation, once obliterated, it's gone forever.

• 19,078 miles of roads decommissioned since 1991.
• There are currently 76,300 miles of FS roads closed = 1 mile of every 5 miles of Forest Service roads are closed!
• According to the 1997 Forest Service Resource Planning Assessment (RPA) less than 2% of forest visitors visit Wilderness areas, yet 18% of all NF lands are designated Wilderness. Compare that to the fact that driving for pleasure has increased 1,000% (one thousand percent) on national forests since 1950, and roads take up less than 2% of all national forest land. In 1997, the public drove over 13 million miles PER DAY on Forest Service roads.
• It is 59 times more expensive to obliterate a road than it is to maintain it. The Forest Service could maintain 8,850 miles of road per year instead of obliterating 1,500 miles for the same cost. Given the increase in recreational demands, this would make a lot more sense to maintain them then to obliterate them.

Statistics are more difficult to obtain because the BLM does not track road closures, but rather they close geographical "areas" to motorized uses. Furthermore, the BLM has no records on dollars spent for road (or area) closure. However, a search of Federal Register notices for closures as instructed by the BLM provided the following figures:

In 1997, 1998, and 1999, the BLM has closed to motorized vehicles:

• 202,109 acres of land
• 37.25 miles of named roads
• 50 roads of untold miles
• 22 areas of untold acreage