Forest Road Closings Meeting Opposition Moves Aid Watershed And Fish, But Backers Not Vocal
The slashed sacks of seed said it all: People were outraged that the Forest Service was taking out a road and replanting the roadbed.
Vandalism hasn’t reoccurred since Ed Lider and Wade Jerome pulled out the road on the East Fork of Steamboat Creek in 1992. But public sentiment toward closing roads is still caustic.
“We have roads going right up the bottom of a stream that negatively affects erosion, fisheries, and flooding downstream,” said Lider, a fisheries biologist for the Panhandle National Forest. “We propose to remove the road and restore the channel and the public comes back and demands we keep it open.”
Some critics even allege road removal is part of a United Nations plot, Lider said. “We don’t hear from the people who say, ‘Take out the roads because it helps the watersheds and the fish.”’
North Idaho has some of the most pressing national forest road problems in the United States. Road-related slumps and slides on the Clearwater National Forest from 1996 floods may number in the thousands.
The Coeur d’Alene River basin, the most heavily roaded national forest in the nation, counted some 300 road failures. That tally would soar if the Forest Service had the money to do a thorough inventory.
The Fernan-Wallace District has about 8,000 miles of roads, about half of which receive intermittent maintenance and half that never are maintained. The district gets only enough money to fully maintain 730 miles of road.
It doesn’t take freak winter rains turning the snowpack into gully washers - as happened in February 1996 - to cause roads to fall apart. Forest Service roads have problems even in drought years. That means problems for fish, water and people.
There is little natural erosion in the Coeur d’Alene basin, according to Forest Service scientists. The millions of tons of dirt and rocks being washed into the streams and rivers come from roads that have been developed here since miners started driving wagons up creek bottoms in the 1870s.
The sediment fills stream and river channels, grinds up fish and reduces the channel’s ability to handle large volumes of water. That means worse floods downstream, in more populated areas.
So a mile at a time, Lider and Jerome are going after problem roads, removing culverts that are prone to plug and wash out roads. They also are digging out tons of dirt and rock that were packed into narrow valleys to ferry roads across stream channels. Those fills are mudslides waiting to happen.
In some cases there has been sufficient money to return the land to its original contours. In other cases they are able to only partially resculpt the roadbed. On problem hillside roads, they may only be able to close the thoroughfare and install ditches that direct water off the road and slow erosion.
Some critics have worried that recontouring roads would create unstable piles of dirt ready to wash into streams. It hasn’t.
“It’s quite stable,” said Jerome, also a biologist. “The water is able to go right down into it and the vegetation comes back pretty fast.”
The Forest Service closed 69 miles of road and removed 50 stream crossings with Lider and Jerome’s first project along the East Fork of Steamboat Creek. They’ve taken that success other elsewhere, pulling an estimated 3 million cubic yards of material out of stream channels “and we haven’t even touched the ground,” Lider said.
They’ve polished their approach for dealing with the public. Now they make it clear when one road is closed, there will be another route to drive to those same favorite hunting, fishing or huckleberry-picking spots.
“We are not going to shut the forest down,” Lider said. “We don’t want you to drive up the bottom of the creek anymore.”
Alternate routes can present unpopular complications. For example, the 1996 flood washed out the road along the East Fork of Eagle Creek in the Murray area.
The Forest Service must do something about the closed road because it’s needed to provide access to a mine that must be cleaned up, as well as access to the Idaho-Montana border.
The agency wants to relocate the road instead of rebuilding it. Its alternate proposal, however, clips an old-growth stand of trees and that’s unpopular with environmentalists.
Paying for road obliteration also is a source of controversy.
It is 1-1/2 times as expensive to remove a road as it is to build it. And, because money is so tight, most of the road obliteration work is tied to timber sales. Companies are often required to pull out certain roads as a condition of harvesting timber.
That raises the ire of environmentalists, who say it’s just a ruse for logging.
Pete Bengeyfield, former Panhandle forest hydrologist, said “an overall philosophy of let’s cut a bunch of trees to close a bunch of roads won’t work.”
Roads are only half of the problem. It is equally important to re-establish the forest canopy, Bengeyfield said.
Trees use the water, catch snow and allow it to evaporate before it hits the ground, and block winds that redistribute snow to meadows and clearcuts. This reduces peak water flows, which in turn lessens the erosion, road blowouts, flooding and other problems, Bengeyfield said.
“It’s a matter of scale,” Bengeyfield said.
“If you are doing things on the scale that caused the problem in the first place, it doesn’t help.
“The problem on the Coeur d’Alene is there are so many roads that I’m not sure you can close enough to make a difference,” Bengeyfield added. “Not that you shouldn’t try.”
Lider acknowledges tying road obliteration to logging isn’t perfect. Much of the logging proposed in the Coeur d’Alene basin involves 5- to 10-acre clearcuts that encourage the return of white pine.
He agrees that those openings increase the amount of runoff, and that can cause more road problems.
Still, “I think we are better off with small openings and getting rid of roads,” Lider said. “That puts us miles and miles ahead of if we just let them sit.”
Timber companies also often are required to rebuild roads that won’t be closed, Lider noted. Many of those roads have undersized culverts that plug easily or roads that are built on top of slash piles that rot and give way.
Tying road obliteration to logging is likely to continue. There are no powerful political action committees giving money to congressmen in the name of road removal. Meanwhile, Forest Service budgets are expected to continue shrinking.
Yet, not dealing with the road problem also is expensive. The Forest Service estimates it’s spent more than $800,000 repairing flood damage on the Steamboat Road system between 1964 and 1996. And that covered only some of the needed repairs.
So how much money would it take to just get rid of the problem roads? Lider shakes his head.
“First of all, I don’t even know of all the problems,” he said. “But if you wrote a check for $100 million I bet we could spend it.”
Despite these odds, Lider and Jerome approach their task optimistically.
“When I started out, we spent a week pulling a log down a hill, digging a trench and putting it in the stream,” Lider said. “Now we are removing roads that are causing the problems.”
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