PUBLIC LANDS -- A 15-year-old rule that prevents road-building into otherwise unprotected inventoried roadless areas of national forests has essentially been upheld by the nation's high court.

The high court opted not to hear the Alaska state government’s appeal of a U.S. 9th Circuit Court decision upholding the 2001 Roadless Rule. While the decision applies only to Alaska’s attempts to manage federal timberland, the rule affects all Forest Service land in the United States. Montana has the third-largest inventoried roadless area in the nation, after Alaska and Idaho.

“The Roadless Rule was developed because of concern that if you didn’t look at these lands from a national perspective, you might gradually lose the ecological services these areas provide,” said Brian Riggers of the Forest Service’s Region 1 headquarters in Missoula. “Projects developed at a local level may not identify the importance of big pieces of land without looking at it from a national perspective for things like watershed quality, wildlife habitat or ecosystem health. Also, we had a road maintenance backlog, and no money to maintain the roads we had.”

The 9th Circuit decision denied Alaska’s attempt to create a local exemption for the 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest, the largest federal forest in the nation. About 1.5 million acres of that land is roaded, according to Owen Graham of the Alaska Forest Association, which supported the state’s legal challenge to the Roadless Rule.

Alaska has one remaining challenge aimed at the heart of the Roadless Rule, questioning the federal government’s ability to impose it in the first place. That suit rests before Washington, D.C., District Judge Richard Leon, coincidentally the same judge hearing the dispute over drilling rights in the Badger-Two Medicine area south of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana.

While the Forest Service dominates federal land ownership in the western U.S., it’s a bit player in Alaska. It oversees about 22.4 million acres in the Tongass and Chugach national forests. But the Bureau of Land Management covers 82.5 million acres, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has another 79 million. About 52 million acres are in national parks. The state manages 89 million acres, and Native American tribes control 38 million acres.

The timber industry there has also shrunk. Graham said up to the 1990s, loggers and mill workers totaled about 4,000 employees serving five major lumber mills and two pulp mills. Today, Graham said, those figures have shrunk to about 400 workers and one major lumber mill, along with about a dozen small-scale mills.

“In that country, most of the harvestable forest exists on the fringe of the ocean,” said John Gatchel of the Montana Wilderness Association, who has studied the Roadless Rule for years. “Once you go inland, a whole lot of the Tongass is ice and snow.”

The Roadless Rule grew out of two nationwide inventories in the 1970s and ‘80s that identified most federally owned parcels larger than 500 acres with no or little road development. In Montana, that totals about 6.5 million acres, or about 7 percent of the national forest land here. That figure does not include roadless acres in places like Glacier National Park or BLM-managed national monuments. It does include wilderness areas recognized by Congress, but not all Forest Service-designated wilderness study areas.

The Roadless Rule prohibits construction of new permanent roads into inventoried roadless areas, although it does not prohibit timber harvest. It also does not affect recreational access, including motorized off-road vehicles. It applies to about 58 million acres in 38 states.

“But lots of timber sales don’t happen unless you can build a road,” said Peter Aengst of The Wilderness Society in Bozeman. “Most people won’t do horse logging or helicopter logging.”

Idaho and Colorado successfully developed exemptions to the federal Roadless Rule, giving their local governments more say over the management in federal roadless areas on about 13 million acres.

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