Several years ago, I had the opportunity to spend multiple days rafting the Tuolumne River in California. It remains one of the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had on public lands.
What I did not fully understand at the time was that the wild landscape I was experiencing was not there by accident. The Tuolumne flows through and alongside inventoried roadless lands in the Stanislaus National Forest, including the Tuolumne River and North Mountain Roadless Areas. The Clavey River, which joins the Tuolumne in this remarkable canyon, is also surrounded in part by the Tuolumne River Roadless Area.
For days, we traveled through a landscape that felt enormous, remote, and genuinely wild. There were stretches where the canyon and river seemed completely removed from the developed world. That experience changed the way I think about public lands.
The Tuolumne itself has protections under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and I am grateful for those protections. But a river does not exist separately from the landscape surrounding it. The forests, canyon slopes, tributaries, wildlife habitat, and undeveloped lands surrounding a river are part of what makes that ecosystem—and that experience—whole.
That is why the Roadless Rule matters to me personally.
I live in Colorado, more than a thousand miles from the Tuolumne River. But I have stood in these roadless lands. I have traveled through that canyon. I know what it feels like to experience a place that has remained largely wild.
I want someone twenty, fifty, or one hundred years from now to be able to float that river and feel what I felt.
Once we build roads into landscapes like these, we cannot truly make them roadless again. We should be extraordinarily cautious about giving up protections that have helped keep them intact.
Please retain the 2001 Roadless Rule and the protections it provides to places like the Tuolumne River Roadless Area and roadless lands across our National Forest System.