FS-2025-0001-326471

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