Middle ground on forest roads

It’s not often that environmentalists agree with Siskiyou County’s position on National Forest management issues. Where conservationists like to see beautiful forests, natural heritage and clean water, the County often sees two-by-fours and dollar signs.

So I was pretty surprised to find myself agreeing with Siskiyou County Natural Resource Specialist Ric Costales’ April 7 opinion piece. Mr. Costales makes a great case for dispersed camping in the Klamath National Forest. He’s right that there is nothing like getting away from the crowds and finding your own little piece of paradise for a night or two on our public lands.

In fact, dispersed camping is so widely valued that the recent Record of Decision for the Klamath National Forest travel management plan added 191 user-created routes accessing such sites to the Forest transportation system. Those 191 routes are in addition to the hundreds of dispersed camping sites that can be accessed by existing Forest Service roads. That’s a heck of a lot of dispersed camping access. Yet the County appealed the Forest Service decision anyway.

While it seems a little odd that Mr. Costales would write an opinion piece on dispersed camping and choose not to mention that the Forest Service added roaded access to 191 recreation sites, what seems really weird is that dispersed camping is the only forest roads management issue he mentions at all. There are a lot of other important issues at play:

• Most long-time Forest visitors have seen first-hand the increasing backlog of road maintenance on the Klamath. As Forest Service budgets shrink every year, more and more roads have unrepaired damage and more and more culverts outlive their usefulness. Some trailheads and campgrounds that used to be accessed by a pleasant drive are now a teeth-clenching ordeal.
• Extreme off-road use has skyrocketed in some portions of the Forest. The Humbug Creek Watershed is a prime example. Rogue ORV trails now crisscross the watershed, going through creeks and streams and cutting across unstable slopes and erosive granitic soils.
• Poorly placed Forest Service roads that required large cutbanks, or those that involved multiple road/stream crossings, produce large amounts of chronic sediment each and every rainy season. Old roads are literally falling apart across the Forest and dumping sediment into creeks and streams.

Unfortunately the Forest Service’s travel management decision largely ignores concerns about inadequate maintenance and ongoing harm to water quality. Instead the Forest Service decision greatly expands the road system by adding a number of ORV thrill routes located on “highly unstable grantic and schist soils” that will further increase the maintenance backlog and the water quality impacts of the road system.

This is the wrong direction.

Reasonable people could come together to identify a Forest road system that: (1) provides for dispersed camping; (2) we can afford to maintain; and (3) protects water quality. Such a middle-ground solution would require the County and the Forest Service to acknowledge the economic and watershed impacts of the current road system and environmentalists to embrace roads that are needed for recreation and management.

It’s no secret that the environmental values of public lands have long received short shrift from both the County and the Forest Service. It is also pretty obvious that we need a Forest road system that provides for recreation and access. Perhaps we all need to meet up and talk it over like adults at one of our favorite dispersed campsites.

– George Sexton is the Conservation Director for the Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center.