Dear Chief:
I am fortunate to live in an area that has easy access to the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit and the El Dorado and Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forests, and they are all spectacular places. I want the Department to understand that rescinding this rule forecloses something genuinely public and genuinely irreversible.
The Caldor Fire in 2022 required us to evacuate. The Forest Service and CalFire used existing roads to combat the fire.
I can see the destruction caused by the Caldor Fire from my home. There is active land management underway in adjacent and nearby areas that were not burned, and has been possible despite the existence of the roadless rule. Rescinding it will not make fire suppression or control any better.
Regarding the Dardanelles in the Eldorado National Forest, California:
Within Eldorado National Forest, the Dardanelles IRA provides habitat for Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog (Rana sierrae, G2), a species subject to 7.1 - Fire & fire suppression — a threat assessed at not assessed severity affecting not assessed of the population.
"We document over a one-quarter decline in bird abundance and almost complete avoidance by some species between noise-on and noise-off periods along the phantom road and no such effects at control sites—suggesting that traffic noise is a major driver of effects of roads on populations of animals. We replicated the sound of a roadway at intervals during the autumn migratory period using a 0.5 km array of speakers within an established stopover site in southern Idaho."
— Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (PMC), 2013
Road networks serve as vectors for the secondary impacts classified under 7.1 - Fire & fire suppression: they open previously inaccessible terrain to resource extraction, facilitate introduction of invasive species, and concentrate human disturbance along corridors through Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog habitat.
The roadless areas are critical to the overall heath of our environment. Proper fire and land management is not curtailed by the existence of the roadless rule.
With kind regards,
CommentID: RLC-20260927-8UUFBC