I am one of millions of Americans who value our public lands. I stand against rescission of the “roadless rule”. This rule, which was implemented after nearly 1 million public comments and over 600 stakeholder meetings, provides important protections for clean water as well as fisheries and wildlife habitat. The proposed rescission makes no financial sense, since the US Forest Service is severely underfunded and cannot currently maintain existing roads. The other premise behind the rescission is that new roads are needed to fight wildfires. USFS studies have proven that roads increase wildfire risk. Building roads in inventoried roadless area will have a significant impact on iconic species such as elk which depend on roadless areas of public lands and predator species like the grizzly bear.
I am a North Carolinian and blessed to have national forests in each of the three geographic regions of the state. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forest contain abundant cold water fish habitat. Wild southern brook trout make their homes in the cold water headwater creeks of North Carolina’s high country. Specks as we call brook trout require highly oxygenated and sediment/pollution free waters to thrive. Building new roads would threaten these vital habitats.
One area that I like to “blue-line” (the term we use for fishing the tiny creeks on USGS indicated by a blue line) is the Wilson Creek drainage. There are several areas that would be impacted by the rescission of the roadless rule. I’ll focus on one of the larger inventoried roadless areas that I am familiar with and why it would be infeasible to build roads there:
Harper Creek is a 7,005-acre Inventoried Roadless Area in the Pisgah National Forest, in the Lower Wilson Creek watershed (HUC-12 030501010504), Grandfather Ranger District. This area is centered near 35.982N, 81.800W, with boundaries spanning roughly 35.948N to 36.014N latitude and 81.853W to 81.762W longitude. It drains into the Harper Creek. This IRA overlaps Wilson Creek Welcome Center, which could further affect the feasibility of road construction. 100 percent of this IRA (7,005 acres) has high erosion potential -- above 10 tons per acre per year based on the RUSLE model -- indicating high sensitivity to road building and other disturbance that could send sediment into downstream aquatic habitats. 22 percent of this IRA (1,569 acres) has a maximum road grade of 60% or greater, requiring high-cost engineered switchbacks or making conventional road construction infeasible.
In North Carolina alone there are over 50 inventoried roadless areas totaling over 173,000 acres. I strongly encourage the Forest Service to keep our roadless areas wild, productive and accessible for generations to come and support the No Action Alternative.