Road Closures Loom For Cda Forests Forest Service Taking Extensive Look At Heavily Roaded District

As all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles become as common as elk hunters in the Panhandle, the Coeur d’Alene River Ranger District is contemplating more road closures.

Such planning makes motorized recreationalists edgy, but Forest Service officials say never fear.

The district, which is the old Fernan and Wallace ranger districts combined, has 6,000 to 8,000 miles of forest roads, of which 3,200 miles are maintained.

The maintained roads include about 1,000 miles that have some kind of restriction on them.

“We no longer need that density,” said Ranger Susan Jeheber-Matthews. “We can still maintain access to those areas.”

For the first time, the Forest Service is planning its restrictions and road closures on a basin-wide scale. The public is invited to provide input at two meetings next week.

“Over the many decades we’ve had many individual decisions on access, so it’s given us a maze of access use out there, and some inconsistencies as a result,” Matthews said.

The Forest Service also wants to reduce its road densities to provide wildlife corridors and reduce sedimentation problems in the streams.

Another motivation is a shrinking budget to maintain roads, said Kerry Arneson of the ranger district.

“We get somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the funding that’s needed” for road maintenance, she said.

Environmentalists are pleased that the agency is doing something about the rash of roads that’s spread through the forests in the past century.

“It’s the most densely roaded forest in the United States and so many of these roads are in bad shape,” said Larry McLaud of the Idaho Conservation League. “Yes, we need roads in the national forest, but let’s be reasonable.”

As far as Esther McDonald of the Panhandle Trail Riders Association is concerned, the road density is reasonable, and any reduction is a problem.

“The trend is toward eliminating public access to our public lands,” she said. “Roads are the attraction for all recreation, whether camping, or scenic driving, hunting or fishing or whatever.

“If you take out roads, you greatly diminish the recreational experience for many people.”

McLaud disagrees.

“There ought to be a balanced approach, where there are places to get away, where there is some solitude, where you don’t have to listen to motors,” he said.

While Forest Service officials try to appease the growing ranks of motorized recreationalists, they’re also trying to make the forest livable for fish and wildlife.

Sedimentation and erosion from streamside roads are commonly blamed for the destruction of fish habitat. Roads, a recent Forest Service study found, were to blame in at least half of the mud slides that plagued the Clearwater National Forest in the winter floods of 1995-96.

The Forest Service also is considering closing certain areas instead of certain roads for the sake of wildlife security.

“We have an opportunity to provide bigger blocks of habitat or connect blocks of habitat,” Arneson said. “Another area would be opened up” for public access, she explained.

No specifics will be available at the meetings. Instead, agency officials are gathering information from the public to help them decide what areas should and shouldn’t be restricted. An environmental assessment on the plan may be ready for public comment by February, and a new travel map could be ready by next summer.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: PUBLIC COMMENT The meetings are scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Panhandle Forest headquarters, 3815 Schreiber Way, off Kathleen Avenue in Coeur d’Alene, and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Forest Service office in Silverton on Sather Field Road.