I am a resident of South Lake Tahoe, California. I hike year-round in the national forests around the Lake Tahoe Basin, and I regularly camp and hike with my dog on trails and in undeveloped country that stay quiet because they are not laced with new roads.
I oppose the proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule by removing and reserving 36 CFR part 294, subpart B. I also oppose the draft EIS preferred alternative that would eliminate national roadless protections on inventoried roadless areas, including those on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, Tahoe National Forest, Eldorado National Forest, and nearby Humboldt-Toiyabe lands.
These are the places that make living here worth it. I use local trails and high country near South Lake Tahoe — including walks along the Upper Truckee and routes into the meadows, ridgelines, and backcountry that sit behind and above town. I take my dog camping and hiking in settings that still feel like forest, not a project area. Roadless protections are a big part of why those trips stay quiet, why streams run clearer, and why I can get off a trailhead and be in intact country within a short drive of home.
The 2001 rule does not lock these forests up. It already allows hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, existing road maintenance, Tribal uses, firefighting, and wildfire-resilience work, including thinning and fuels treatments. Hundreds of thousands of acres of California inventoried roadless areas have been treated since 2001. Local examples, including work in the Caples Creek area before the Caldor Fire, show that the current rule can accommodate fuels reduction without opening the last intact forests to a new road network and industrial logging. If the problem is implementation or funding for treatments already allowed, that is not solved by deleting the national standard.
What the proposed rescission would change is the default. Decisions would fall to individual forest plans and project-by-project review on more than 44 million acres nationwide, including roughly 4.4 million inventoried roadless acres in California and tens of thousands of acres in the Tahoe and Plumas country. Around Tahoe, that includes inventoried roadless ground on Tahoe National Forest (on the order of 147,000 acres in the original inventory, including Castle Peak and Grouse Lakes) and on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. New roads and commercial harvest in those areas would bring erosion into headwaters that feed Lake Tahoe, more sediment and noise on trails I use with my dog, and a slow conversion of quiet backcountry into managed access corridors. The draft EIS itself identifies potential water-quality, habitat, and quiet-recreation effects where roadbuilding and timber cutting occur. Those are not abstract impacts here. They are the difference between a Saturday hike and a Saturday next to a new road cut.
Local forest planning is important. It is not a substitute for a national sideboard on the last large undeveloped national forest blocks. The Forest Service is already stretched. Shifting every roadless decision to plan revision and project NEPA does not create more capacity for careful public involvement; it creates more pressure to punch roads for access, timber, and “management” in places that have stayed roadless for a reason.
I support active fuels work where it is needed, including near communities and in the wildland-urban interface around South Lake Tahoe. I do not support repealing the 2001 rule in its entirety in order to get that work done. The rule already allows it. Please retain the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, reject the proposed removal of 36 CFR part 294, subpart B, and select the no-action alternative in the final EIS.
Thank you for considering my comments.
Andrew Scott-Jester
South Lake Tahoe, CA