FS-2025-0001-607694

Here's your comment, ready to copy: As an Idaho hunter and angler, I oppose the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (RIN 0596-AD66). My special place is the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness and the roadless country surrounding it in central Idaho. I have hunted and fished that country — the high basins, the cold clear tributaries of the Salmon and Middle Fork — and what makes it extraordinary is precisely that you reach it on foot, not by road. The elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and native cutthroat trout there depend on large, intact, unfragmented habitat, and the solitude of the experience depends on the absence of roads. The inventoried roadless areas bordering the Frank Church are what buffer and connect that wilderness. They are not empty acres waiting for development — they are functioning wildlife habitat, clean headwater streams, and some of the finest backcountry hunting and angling opportunity left in the Lower 48. Once roads are punched in and the timber cut, that character cannot be restored, not in our lifetimes. There is also a fiscal case against rescission. Opening tens of millions of acres to new road construction adds to an already enormous Forest Service road maintenance backlog rather than reducing it. Taxpayers would foot the bill for roads into country that is currently providing habitat, clean water, and recreation at no cost. The Roadless Rule exists because 1.6 million Americans asked for it through the most extensive public process in Forest Service history. Rescinding it from the top down, against that record, would trade a permanent public inheritance for short-term extraction. I urge the Forest Service to retain the 2001 Roadless Rule in full. Sincerely, Jared Mattravers Nampa, Idaho