Read the comments.

I am writing in opposition to the plan of rescinding the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Wilderness areas without roads are precious and untouched land embodies the American spirit. The roadless rule protects national forests from logging and has preserved irreplaceable wildlife habitats, sources of clean water, and provided places for Americans to recreate. Repealing the Roadless Area Conservation Rule would destroy all of these protections, both now and for future generations. This would ruin American land, thus this proposal is downright un-American. National forests protect over 45 million acres of National Forest System land (according to the US Forest service). This includes beloved places such as Tongass National Forest, Mt. Hood National Forest & Payette National Forest. Visit these places even just once, and you will understand the need to preserve these lands. Land preservation begins with untouched wilderness. In fact, peer-reviewed evidence shows that roadbuilding increases wildfires with 80% of wildfires occurring within 800 meters of roads. This proposal will not act as a wildfire-prevention measure despite the proposal’s intended purpose. Additionally, cutting down large old trees to create roads or increase timber production increases wildfire chances as older trees are most resilient to wildfire. Ecosystems and old-growth trees take hundreds of years to regrow. This will impact carbon absorption as the trees standing in our forests today have power to lessen the effects of climate change. National Forests should not be a place used for industry. National Forests serve their own purpose as a National Forest- land to recreate. People use these lands to fish, get water, watch for wildlife, hike, backpack, canoe, camp and more. The National Forest land provides a window into the true American frontier, and allows us as modern citizens to experience America’s finest and truest form. Roads will ruin National Forests. Within the current protections, fire roads are allowed to be created and maintained, thus the addition of more roads will ruin and pollute our National Forests. Instead of rescinding the Roadless Area Conservation act, consider other methods of wildfire prevention, such as funding wildlife protection agencies. National Forests should remain land for all Americans, not only the timber industry. I urge you to keep the Roadless Rule in place to protect the true spirit of the American wilderness.

Subject: Oppose rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule - Docket FS-2025-0001 To the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I am writing to express my strong opposition to the proposal to fully or partially rescind, weaken, or roll back the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. As a third-generation Idahoan, and registered Republican, I’m horrified by these attacks on our public lands. I am a Volunteer Coordinator that organizes trail construction and maintenance projects within Roadless Areas, and I was previously a Backcountry Ranger for the Deschutes, Payette, and Inyo National Forests. While working on the Payette National Forest, I was exclusively within areas protected by the Roadless Rule. I’ve hiked thousands of miles within Roadless Areas and none should be opened to development. These lands are essential sources of water, food, and recreation for hundreds of millions of Americans. Roadless areas reduce fire risk, improve wildlife habitat, and increase recreation opportunities. Not to mention, our protected open spaces is what makes the Western United States the best place in the world. These last undeveloped swathes of land help preserve the wild Western American identity, they’re sacred to us all. To summarize, fully or partially rescinding the Roadless Rule would threaten unfragmented backcountry landscapes, wildlife habitats, clean water sources, and increase wildfire risk. Roads fragment ecosystems in ways that cause long-term ecological harm, and dismantling these protections undermines the integrity of our public lands. And on top of all that, it would fundamentally undermine the Western American identity. I urge the Forest Service to drop the proposed rescission and instead support Alternative 1 (the No Action alternative) to maintain full, permanent protections for all the currently designated inventoried roadless areas. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this important issue, and for extending the comment period to allow for more voices to be heard. Sam Woosley Eagle, ID - 83616

I oppose the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, and I urge the Forest Service to select the no-action alternative and retain the rule as written. I am a wildlife biologist on the Payette National Forest in McCall, Idaho, where I lead wildlife monitoring and management for threatened, endangered, and sensitive species across two ranger districts. I hold an M.S. in Ecology and have spent more than a decade in the field on species from wolverine to woodpeckers to sage-grouse. I have written biological evaluations and assessments and contributed to the wildlife sections of EAs and EISs under NEPA, ESA, and NFMA. These comments are my own and do not represent the position of the Forest Service or the Department of Agriculture. Roadless areas are some of the last intact refugia for sensitive wildlife. Early in my career I worked on a multi-year wolverine study examining how winter recreation affects home range use and reproduction. I trapped, collared, and tracked wolverines, and I attended the USFWS public hearing on the species' listing. Wolverines need large, connected, lightly disturbed landscapes with persistent deep snow, and they respond to human access. The same is true of Canada lynx, fisher, grizzly bear, and gray wolf. Roads bring motorized access, development, and disturbance into the remote country these species use for denning and dispersal. The 2001 rule is the main safeguard keeping that habitat intact. Roads are among the most reliable predictors of habitat degradation. The research on roads and wildlife is consistent. Road density reduces effective habitat for elk and other big game, raises mortality and harvest vulnerability, and fragments movement corridors that carnivores need to maintain genetic connectivity. Roads deliver sediment to streams, harming bull trout and other native fish, and they are a primary pathway for invasive plants. Their effects persist for decades, long after use declines or maintenance stops. Few management decisions are as hard to reverse. Climate change raises the value of these lands. Species will need large, connected, minimally disturbed landscapes with elevation gradients and cold-water refugia to shift ranges and persist. Roadless areas provide that. Removing their protection now would foreclose options that managers and the public will need in the decades ahead. The rule already allows needed management. I work daily with fire, fuels, timber, and planning staff, and I support active management where it is needed. The 2001 rule already allows fuels reduction and restoration activities in appropriate circumstances. The agency has not shown that the rule, rather than funding, workforce capacity, and prioritization, is what limits fuels treatment near communities. Nationwide rescission would remove protection from millions of acres where no such need exists. Case-by-case management is a poor substitute for a national standard. Wide-ranging species cross forest and state boundaries and cannot be conserved through disconnected plan-level decisions. Forest-by-forest management is also more exposed to shifting local pressures and offers far less certainty for wildlife populations. A decision of this magnitude deserves a public process proportionate to the one that produced the rule, which drew more than a million comments, most in support. In the 2025 scoping period, more than 99 percent of comments opposed rescission. The Roadless Rule has served wildlife, water, and the public for 25 years. I urge the agency to retain it in full. Respectfully, Dylan Hopkins Wildlife Biologist McCall, Idaho

There is an established and growing list of benefits supporting maintaining our remaining intact forests without further road building. From mitigating climate warming, sustaining biodiversity, providing clean water, invasive plants mitigation, mycelial forest support, big game populations, genetic resilience of predators, carbon sequestration, and the list continues to grow as science unveils more. For years in Idaho I was a volunteer, and as now and decades ago I vehemently support, for a plethora of established scientific reasons, the USFS's nationwide "Roadless Rule". It is humans causing 87% of wildfires, and roads are the major culprit of these human agency atrocities of both wildlife, people and property. With every mile of new roads comes people, their fires, ATV's, fireworks, and fire prone noxious invasive plants. Thus I strongly oppose the U.S. Department of Agricultures proposal to repeal or weaken the landmark Roadless Area Conservation Rule that has protected wild, un-fragmented forests for more than a quarter-century. The rationale offered for doing so isnt supported by science. This action would harm not help our national forests. I oppose your plan to roll back the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I urge you to reverse course and save forests. Gutting the Roadless Rule would risk more polluted drinking water for over 25 million Americans, increased flooding, and more landslides. It would imperil recreation areas where people hunt, hike, camp, fish, climb, and paddle. It endangers irreplaceable habitat for iconic animals. And it would jeopardize the integrity of incomparable places like Alaskas Tongass National Forest, the worlds largest intact temperate rainforest and the nations largest old-growth forest. If anything, the Rule should be strengthened to better protect all the extraordinary natural values of our essential forests. I am not letting our forests go without a fight. Preserve the Roadless Rule and protect national forests for communities who rely on them and for generations to come. I am an avid outdoor recreationist, Roadless Rule advocate and decades long volunteer who regularly visits roadless areas across Idaho and America's national forests, being vehemently supportive of taking the No Action alternative in the current DEIS. Opening up tens of millions of acres of U.S. forests in cherished public lands like Californias Tahoe National Forest, the Boise and Payette NF's, segments of the Appalachian Trail, Montana's Bitterroot, the GYE's Centennial Forest, and more, all to destructive logging and road building is reckless, unscientific, and goes against millions of Americans like myself that loudly voiced support for the RR in the 1990's. I strongly support maintaining the Roadless Rule as is. Outdoor recreation is a crucial part of our country's economy, and rescinding the Roadless Rule is unpopular and unnecessary. I urge you to keep the Roadless Rule in place exactly as it is. Like millions of Americans who have spoken out since 2001, I support the Roadless Rule and value our country's public lands and waters, including 44.7 million acres of undeveloped forests. I am not sanctioning the piecemeal dismantling of our forests without a concerted fight. Preserve the Roadless Rule and protect national forests for communities who rely on them and for generations to come. As outlined above, I am deeply concerned with the idea of rescinding the Roadless Rule, which is extremely important to my physical and mental wellness, the outdoor recreation community and the outdoor recreation economy. The rescission would remove important protections for approximately 45 million acres of backcountry national forests, including more than 25,000 miles of trails, 10,000 climbing routes, nearly 1,000 miles of whitewater, and more than 10,000 miles of mountain biking. The Roadless Rule safeguards clean drinking water for millions of Americans, provides vital habitat for threatened species and sustains old-growth and mature forests that serve as critical carbon sinks. It also protects access to popular climbing, fishing, hiking, backcountry skiing, mountain biking and paddling sites. Please keep the Roadless Rule intact and help protect our legacy of public lands by following Alternative 1 (No Action). Thank you, Mr. Richard A Rusnak Jr

I oppose the proposal to fully or partially rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I live in Vermont, near the Green Mountain National Forest, and I previously worked as a silviculture technician on the Payette National Forest in Idaho. As someone who has worked for the Forest Service, I understand the importance of National Forest’s multiple-use mission and the positive impact sustainable logging can have on forest communities and local economies. Rescinding the roadless rule, however, will negatively impact national forests and the American people that use these spaces. Building new roads will significantly inflate the existing road maintenance backlog, and higher road density is linked to human caused wildfires. Studies have found that wildfires are 4 times more likely to start near a road than in a roadless area. This proposal also heavily prioritizes resource extraction within National Forests over recreational uses. Undisturbed forests are an asset in world that is continuously losing natural spaces, and it should be a priority of our government to protect these areas.

RIN 0596-AD66, https://www.regulations.gov, identified by docket number FS-2025-0001 or RIN 0596-AD66. I support the Rescission of the Roadless Rule! The Roadless Rule bypassed the official Congressional designation of Wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964. These quasi-Wilderness areas have been essentially managed as Wilderness. Millions if not billions of dollars have been spent on closing, re-contouring, removing culverts and bridges, and gating roads in these areas. Until Roadless areas are designated by Congress as Wilderness, they should be returned to General Forest designation and kept open to public access, logging, and recreational use and development. In context to the amount of Wilderness and Roadless Areas in our National Forests, they are disproportionate to the amount of non-wilderness in acres and use. Wilderness and Roadless Areas make up nearly ½ of all National Forest lands, totaling 46 to 48 %. Of that, total Roadless areas are shown to be 58.2 million acres which is 30 % of all National Forest land. The National Visitor Use Monitoring Program shows that only 9 percent of Recreation use occurs in the Wilderness of the United States. Even more revealing is the Visitor use on the Payette National Forest of Idaho, my home forest. Wilderness area on the Payette National Forest occupies 790,000 acres or about 1/3 of the Forest. Of the 519,000 visits on the Payette National Forest in the 2018 monitoring year, only five thousand visits were in the wilderness. That is a 0.96 % use rate, or less than 1 %. Designated Roadless occupies 1.7 million acres. Combined, Wilderness and Roadless designation makes up 74% of the total Forest acres. If those numbers hold true, 514,000 visits occur on 26 percent of the Payette National Forest, leading to overcrowding and overuse. As a result, the opportunity for multiple use is very limited and restricted. Recreational businesses in these areas are very depressed. I am very much in favor of rescission of the Roadless rule, and increasing roaded recreation. In addition, I challenge the statement that 0.5 to 1 mile per section of roads exists within our national forest system. If 74% of the forest is Roadless or Wilderness designation, this statement cannot be true. This measure is misleading and unreasonable. The numbers above do not support that statement. In addition, I would support rescission of the Roadless Rule in Idaho. As a retiree Forest Service employee, I volunteered to be an Access Management Collaborative Team Member. The process that I was a part of is flawed and dominated by payed environmental groups, tribes, and likeminded members that have closed most of Forest Service designated roads on the Payette National Forest. Membership and goals of these groups represent only a small percentage of the population of Idaho and the nation. As an example, the Nez Perce Tribe only has 3,500 designated members. The collaborative process needs to be restructured. The roads that remain open on the Payette National Forest resulting from these collaborative processes are the ones protected by law and managed by the County. These roads access communities and are primarily “pass through” travel ways. This road strategy does not support distribution of recreation use or development of reasonable forest access portals. The current (and past) collaborative processes provide very little if any multiple use access. Nearly all Forest Service Roads built for logging, which cost millions of dollars to construct, have been closed. Our Roadless areas are extremely steep rugged mountainous terrain. They are very difficult to access and manage fires without portal access roads. These Roadless Areas are beyond most people’s capabilities to physically access. The extremely low use rates support this reality. We the public need a better balance. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I hope these comments are seriously considered and a better, fairer access strategy can be developed for the rest of the 1.7 million Idahoans, and nearly 350 million US citizens, rather than those represented in these collaborative groups.

I am opposed to the changes in the Roadless Rule. I live and play near the Payette National Forest in Idaho. This has been tried before, has been negated by the courts, is bad for fisheries, and is nothing more than a taking on our public lands for greed. Please do not let this go forward.

I am very strongly opposed to the proposed rescinding of the roadless rule on our National Forst lands. I live in Idaho. Our roadless areas have some protections, other areas do not. On the Payette National forest, which surrounds the town I live in, much of the land has been and is heavily roaded and logged. These areas have been permanently altered. They are not pleasant to visit for people or animals. The cover and browse has been irrevocably altered for the animal species that used to inhabit these areas. Some wildlife can adapt to these degradations, most cannot. Roads fragment and degrade animal habitat. Water quality is degraded at the heads of many watersheds. We value our clean, clear water and continuing to hack new roads through forests to cut more tress is inconsistent with this shared American value. Some lands are more valuable left as they are. Logging interests will cut trees if new roads are built and still want more. Destroying the roadless areas is forever. The monetary benefits to a few corporations if roadless areas are opened up is fleeting, short term and benefits only a few. Please allow this very popular safeguard of some of our remaining unroaded areas to stay in place. It is the right thing to do. Margo Conitz

Dear Colleagues, I am writing to ask you to protect the 2001 Roadless Rule and oppose efforts to rescind it. I am a writer, hunter, hiker, and fire lookout in Idaho. From my lookout on the Payette National Forest, I spend my days watching a landscape that stretches farther than I can honestly describe. I see roads and rivers, old burns and new fires, mountains folding into mountains. I watch elk move across distant slopes and weather travel for miles before it reaches me. And I see something increasingly rare: large areas where the dominant marks on the land are not ours. Those unroaded places are havens for animals. They are also havens for hunters, anglers, hikers, backpackers, and others willing to enter them on their own power. There is a particular feeling that comes when you walk far enough from a road that the mechanical world disappears. William Kittredge wrote of wilderness as a place where one might feel that one had arrived somewhere safe. I understand that feeling. As a woman who has spent much of her life alone in the outdoors, I know the complicated meaning of safety. There is a safety I feel when the engine noise disappears, when I have walked beyond easy access, when the only way into a place is on foot. It is not that wild country is without danger. It is that its dangers are honest. There is room enough to hear birds, water, wind, animals moving through brush—and eventually, if I am quiet long enough, myself. We need places like this because they remind us who we are, or at least who we can be. But human need is not the only reason to protect them. I have watched what roads do to land. I have watched sediment enter streams salmon need to remain cold, clear, and clean. I have seen roads interrupt habitat and migration corridors and the scars they leave across slopes. Even after a road is obliterated, its line can remain for decades: a trespass cut into the mountain. A road is not simply a way to get somewhere. It changes the place it enters. Some places should remain difficult to reach. Some are sacred places. Some are spawning grounds, migration routes, and refugia. Some are places where animals can live beyond the constant pressure of our machines. Their value does not depend upon how efficiently we can extract something from them or how conveniently we can enter them. We have become so accustomed to mechanical advantage that we rarely stop to ask whether advantage is what it actually gives us. Faster. Farther. Easier. More. And what if restraint is also an advancement? What if leaving a mountain unroaded is not a failure to use it, but an act of wisdom? What if accepting that some places require effort—or that some places are not meant for us at all—is part of becoming better inhabitants of this country? The Forest Service already manages hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and billions of dollars in deferred maintenance. We do not need to add roads through some of the last intact landscapes in the National Forest System. We need to care for what we have already built and have the courage to leave some places alone. Roadless areas protect clean water and salmon habitat. They give elk, mule deer, and other wildlife room to move. They give hunters country where hunting still requires intimacy with landscape rather than mechanical advantage. And they preserve something increasingly difficult to measure: the experience of entering a place where human convenience has not become the organizing principle. I want future generations to walk until the road noise disappears. I want them to stand beside a cold stream where salmon still return and know we valued their passage as much as our own. I want them to look across a mountainside without a road carved through it. I want sacred places to be treated with humility and restraint rather than regarded as terrain awaiting greater access. And I want tribal nations and Native communities to have the sovereignty and power to protect their ancestral homelands with the same vigor others bring to opening, extracting from, or reshaping them. Those relationships to place are older than our roads, older than our agencies, and deserve more than consultation after the fact. I want there to remain places where animals do not continually have to accommodate us. We do not have to go everywhere. We do not have to make everywhere easier to reach. We do not have to turn every distance into a problem that a machine can solve. Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do with our considerable human power is choose not to use it. Please keep the 2001 Roadless Rule in place. Protect these remaining unroaded landscapes—not only for hunters and anglers, recreation, clean water, or those who will come after us, but out of some modicum of respect for the other living beings with whom we share this planet. Some places should remain reachable only by foot. Some places should simply be allowed to remain. Kindly, CMarie Fuhrman McCall, Idaho

There is an established and growing list of benefits supporting maintaining our remaining intact forests without further road building. From mitigating climate warming, carbon sequestration, sustaining biodiversity, providing clean water, invasive plants mitigation, mycelial forest health, big game populations, genetic resilience of predators, and the list grows as science unveils more. For years in Idaho I hunted elk and was a volunteer, for conservation groups, and now as decades ago, I vehemently support, for a plethora of established scientific reasons, the USFS's nationwide "Roadless Rule". It is humans that cause 87% of wildfires, and roads are a major culprit of these human agency atrocities, which destroy both wildlife, people and property. With every mile of new roads comes people, their fires, ATV's, fireworks, and fire prone noxious invasive plants. Thus I strongly oppose the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s proposal to repeal or weaken the landmark Roadless Area Conservation Rule that has protected wild, un-fragmented forests for more than a quarter-century. This administrations rationale offered for doing so isn’t supported by science. Roadless forests incursions would harm the national forests where I recreate, like Idaho's Payette, Boise, and especially the GYE's Centennial, Caribou Targhee and Gallatin NF's. Along with millions of Americans that supported the Roadless Rule in the early 1990's, I oppose your plan to roll back the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I urge you to reverse course and save forests for future generations of all lifeforms including humanity. Opening up tens of millions of acres of U.S. forests in cherished public lands like California’s Tahoe National Forest, the Boise and Payette NF's, segments of the Appalachian Trail, Montana's Bitterroot, the GYE's Centennial Forest, and more, all to destructive logging and road building is reckless, unscientific, and goes against millions of Americans like myself that loudly voiced support for the RR in the 1990's. Gutting the Roadless Rule would risk more polluted drinking water for over 25 million Americans, increased flooding, and more landslides. It would imperil recreation areas where people hunt, hike, camp, fish, climb, and paddle. It endangers irreplaceable habitat for iconic animals. And it would jeopardize the integrity of incomparable places like Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest and the nation’s largest old-growth forest. I staunchly affirm that the Rule should be strengthened to better protect all the extraordinary natural values of our essential forests. I am not sanctioning the piecemeal dismantling of our forests without a concerted fight. Preserve the Roadless Rule and protect national forests for communities who rely on them and for generations to come. I am deeply concerned with the idea of rescinding the Roadless Rule, which is extremely important to the outdoor recreation community and the outdoor recreation economy. The rescission would remove important protections for approximately 45 million acres of backcountry national forests, including more than 25,000 miles of trails, 10,000 climbing routes, nearly 1,000 miles of whitewater, and more than 10,000 miles of mountain biking. I strongly support maintaining the Roadless Rule and/or strengthening this landmark conservation measure. Outdoor recreation, not logging is a crucial part of our Idaho's economy, and rescinding the Roadless Rule is historically unpopular and unnecessary. Thank you for taking my concerns into consideration.

To the Roadless Rule Rulemaking Docket: For someone who spends time in the backcountry and knows what road access does to a landscape over time, this proposed rescission is the kind of decision that looks different in hindsight than it does on paper today. The Secesh has influenced and shaped me as a person more than I thought possible. It's also in the woods where I grew up, horseback riding as a kid in Idaho, and watching salmon spawn near Warm Lake. I can point to one experience that captures all of it. The Secesh River is the backpacking trail I planned my first solo backpacking trip on, with my soul dog, Chief. This trail is so wild and beautifully preserved because it only has one dirt road that you have to drive multiple hours down in order to access it. I was able to spend multiple days backpacking without seeing another soul, while feeling safe at the same time due to the Forest Service management log at the trailhead. That relationship to these lands is not peripheral to this proceeding — it is the substance of the public interest the Department is obligated to weigh. Regarding the Secesh in the Payette National Forest, Idaho: Without the protections of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, Suckley's Cuckoo Bumble Bee (Bombus suckleyi, G2) in the Secesh Inventoried Roadless Area, Payette National Forest, loses its primary buffer against 7.3 - Other ecosystem modifications, assessed at Extreme or 71-100% pop. decline severity across Restricted (11-30%) scope. The persistence of Suckley's Cuckoo Bumble Bee in Secesh under current threat levels presumes continued roadless conditions. Road construction fundamentally alters this baseline, converting the landscape from one that constrains 7.3 - Other ecosystem modifications to one that accelerates it. NEPA requires the agency to take a hard look at the effects of rescission on Suckley's Cuckoo Bumble Bee (Bombus suckleyi) in the Secesh IRA. The DEIS fails this standard without site-specific analysis of 7.3 - Other ecosystem modifications at the severity and scope documented by NatureServe. "Grazing by domestic herbivores is the most widespread land use on the planet, and also a major global change driver in grasslands. We show that aridity partly explains the responses of biodiversity and multifunctionality to long-term livestock grazing. Grazing greatly reduced biodiversity and multifunctionality in steppes with higher aridity, while had no effects in steppes with relatively lower aridity. Long-term grazing had no effects in meadow steppes with relative lower aridity, but reduced biodiversity and multifunctionality in desert steppes with higher aridity." — Nature Communications, 2023 Rescission is unwarranted; the Department should allow the 2001 Rule to stand. With determination, CommentID: RLC-20260823-SU0EAT