FS-2025-0001-546036

To: USDA Forest Service From: Luke Anderson Location: East Missoula, Montana I am writing as an East Missoula resident, local trail volunteer, and year-round backcountry mountain biker to state my firm opposition to rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I urge the Forest Service to adopt the No Action Alternative and keep Inventoried Roadless Area protections in place. For people who ride bikes in Western Montana, roadless lands are not an abstract policy concept. Under the Wilderness Act, mechanized travel is prohibited in designated wilderness. That means Inventoried Roadless Areas are virtually the only remaining public lands where mountain bikers can experience true primitive, self-reliant backcountry epics on singletrack. Around Missoula, within the Lolo, Bitterroot, and Flathead national forests, the rides that define this region depend entirely on unroaded landscapes. Just north of town, the backcountry terrain climbing up past the Rattlesnake corridor toward Mineral Peak and Stuart Peak provides high-elevation, technical riding with clean ridgelines and undisturbed wildlife corridors. Punching permanent or temporary timber haul roads through those upper slopes would fracture fragile soils, introduce cheatgrass and knapweed, and ruin the backcountry character of the entire basin. Further east along the Blackfoot and Clearwater drainages, remote loops like Spread Mountain, McCabe Creek, and Monture Creek give riders a chance to spend all day in primitive alpine terrain bordering the Swan Range and Scapegoat. These routes offer deep solitude precisely because they lack road development. South of Missoula, trails traversing the Sapphire Range out of Willow Creek, or routes cutting across high ridges near Carlton Ridge and the Lolo Peak Inventoried Roadless Area, rely completely on healthy, intact forest cover. Out west toward Ninemile and Fish Creek, the expansive unroaded terrain provides big backcountry loops that test navigation and physical endurance. Riding singletrack through the upper headwaters of Rock Creek and the Flint Creek Range is an experience made possible because those drainages have remained free of industrial road grids, which prevents heavy sediment runoff into premier trout streams and stabilizes the trails we ride. The claim that rescinding the rule is required for active management and wildfire mitigation does not hold up to operational reality. The 2001 rule already grants local managers clear authority to reduce hazardous fuels, execute treatments in the wildland-urban interface, and respond aggressively to fire emergencies. Building new industrial roads deeper into remote terrain does not make communities safer. It actually introduces new ignition vectors, creates corridors for invasive species, and spreads agency resources even thinner. The Forest Service already struggles to manage an enormous deferred maintenance backlog on its current road and trail network, so adding new road miles makes no fiscal or logistical sense. When an industrial haul road cuts across a remote singletrack or clears an intact canopy, that primitive backcountry experience is permanently lost. Please safeguard our public trails, our regional recreation economy, and these irreplaceable landscapes by keeping the 2001 Roadless Rule fully intact. Sincerely, Luke Anderson East Missoula, MT