January/February 2002.

Volume 7 # 0 The Quarterly Newsletter of Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads

Inside…
Down the Road…. Page 2
ORV Monitoring in Montana. Page 3-5
Depaving the Way: A Tale of Two Roads,
by Bethanie Walder. Page 6-7
Policy Primer: The “Existing Routes Exception.”
Page 8-9
Odes to Roads: The Landscape of Desire,
by Greg Gordon. Page 10-11
Biblio Notes: Evaluation Of Wildlife Crossing
Structures, by Maureen Hartmann.
Page 12-14
New Resources. Page 14
Regional Reports & Updates. Page 15
Legal Notes: The Forest Service and Categorical
Exclusions, by Jim Bensman. Page 16-17
Activist Spotlight: Brian Scherf, Page 17
Around the Office. Page 18
Resources & Membership. Page 18-19

Mount Cowan, in the Absaroka-Beartooth Off-Road Vehicle

Wilderness. A trail just to the east of this peak
is often used illegally by motorcycles trying to
cut through the wilderness.
Monitoring in Montana
— Phil Knight Photo.

Many groups in Montana were out in the field this summer documenting
ORV and user created route damage from escalating ORV use and abuse
and ground-truthing the effects of the new Forest Service Tri-State Off-
Highway Vehicle Plan (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota).
Check out our website at: Here are their summaries.
www.wildlandscpr.org — See article on page 3 —
 A Look Down the Road… Wildlands
C
Center for
Whether it’s roadless protection or new “restoration” plans (more realistically
P
Preventing
known as salvage sales), the Bush Administration is doing its best to circumvent the R
Roads
public process and existing environmental laws. In mid-December, the Forest Service
took yet another hatchet to what minimal protection for roadless areas still re- Main Office
mained. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth issued a directive that effectively P.O. Box 7516
circumvents the National Forest System Transportation Policy protections for roadless Missoula, MT 59807
areas. With this Bosworth directive, the Bush Administration and its players may (406) 543-9551
nullify the effort by the previous administration to protect roadless areas. But there is WildlandsCPR@wildlandscpr.org
one thing Bush doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge: Those efforts were not www.wildlandscpr.org
undertaken because Clinton was such a big fan of roadless areas, but because the
American public wants roadless areas protected. Bush, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Colorado Office — Jacob Smith
Veneman and Bosworth can undercut these policies all they want, but that won’t stop 2260 Baseline Rd., Suite 205
Boulder, CO 80302
the American public from speaking up and speaking out to protect our public lands. (303) 247-0998
And sooner or later, Bush is going to have to pay attention to the American people. prebles@indra.net
In this issue of the Road-RIPorter, we provide you with some new and helpful Wildlands Center for Preventing
information to use to ensure that your government is following it’s own laws. To Roads works to protect and restore
continue the theme of public process gone awry, our “Legal Notes” section includes a wildland ecosystems by preventing
thorough explanation of the Categorical Exclusion (CE) process and an update on the and removing roads and limiting
status of a current case challenging the abuse of CEs. The newsletter opens, however, motorized recreation. We are a
national clearinghouse and network,
with a cooperative article that highlights the multi-tiered monitoring and documenta- providing citizens with tools and
tion efforts going on in Montana. The importance of these monitoring efforts are strategies to fight road
made clear through our new “Policy Primer” section. In it, we highlight the extremely construction, deter motorized
insidious practice of allowing off-road vehicle use to continue on existing, unautho- recreation, and promote road
rized routes. Much of the Montana monitoring was designed to collect just this type removal and revegetation.
of information. (And though this issue does have two features about Montana in it, do
not fret, we continue to be an organization with a national perspective and we will Director
continue to cover articles from all over the country. Nonetheless, it had been a long Bethanie Walder
time since we promoted the excellent work of the folks in our own backyard.) Development Director
Tom Petersen
The remainder of the newsletter centers on a different theme — sprawl and
mitigation. DePaving the Way looks at some of the biodiversity costs of sprawl, and ORV Policy Coordinator
Jacob Smith, Nicky Phear
provides a curious comparison of the drastically different planning/mitigation efforts
used during the expansion of a road in western Montana. The mitigation theme also Roads Policy Coordinator
appears in both the Odes to Roads essay by Greg Gordon and the excellent Bibliogra- Marnie Criley
phy Notes about mitigation structures by Maureen Hartmann. And finally, to bring Natural Trails & Waters Coali-
things full circle, Mike Anderson from the Wilderness Society provided us with an tion Grassroots Coordinator
informative analysis of the Bosworth directive mentioned above. Lisa Philipps
So read on, enjoy, learn something, and please, keep in touch with us about our Program Associate
newsletter and features or topics you’d like to see in future. Jennifer Barry
Newsletter
Dan Funsch & Jim Coefield
Interns & Volunteers
Editors’ Note Benjamin Hart, Maureen Hartmann,
As you’ve probably noticed, The Road-RIPorter has taken on a bit of a facelift! Emily Yeomans, Roiann Matt,
After around 5 years of the same old format, we’ve decided to start making some Erich Zimmerman, Brian Crawford,
changes: some subtle, and some not so subtle. In this issue, we’ve moved to a slightly Amy Barry
heavier paper, so as to prevent so much bleed-through, but it’s still 100% post- Board of Directors
consumer waste and is process chlorine free. We’ve changed the look of the front Katie Alvord, Karen Wood DiBari,
cover somewhat, and look for further changes in the format and presentation in Sidney Maddock, Rod Mondt,
upcoming issues! Greg Munther, Cara Nelson, Mary
We’ve also added a few new sections: the Policy Primer, where Wildlands CPR O'Brien, Ted Zukoski
staff provide info about some of the finer points surrounding road and ORV policies;
Advisory Committee
and the Activist Spotlight, where the RIPorter highlights the work of an individual Jasper Carlton, Dave Foreman,
who excels at fighting the hard battles out there. Keith Hammer, Timothy Hermach,
And last, but not least, we’ll be moving to a quarterly format after this issue — Marion Hourdequin,
our final bimonthly Road-RIPorter. But don’t worry, each issue will consist of 24 Kraig Klungness, Lorin Lindner, Andy
pages of hard-hitting material to fill your road-fighting desires. We’ll also be adding Mahler, Robert McConnell, Stephanie
more diverse material, but more on that in the next issue. Mills, Reed Noss,
So we hope you all enjoy the changes, and as always, please let us know how Michael Soulé, Dan Stotter,
we’re doing — a little constructive criticism, or a few kudos now and then are Steve Trombulak, Louisa Willcox,
always welcome! — Jim & Dan. Bill Willers, Howie Wolke
© 2002 Wildlands CPR

2 The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002

 Off-Road Vehicle
Monitoring in Montana
Quite a few years ago, the US Forest Service and the to existing roads and trails. The Code of Federal Regulations
Bureau of Land Management got together in Montana, North also has very strong language regarding use of and monitoring
Dakota and South Dakota to talk about off-road vehicle (ORV) of ATVs — were it only enforced.
management. They did so, partially, at the request of the BLM
resource advisory committees who were frustrated by the
spread of weeds from ORVs. The BLM and Forest Service Data Gathering and Monitoring
eventually decided to undertake a joint planning process that We have developed and refined techniques for field
would change ORV management on 27 million acres of land monitoring, and have a standardized set of forms and codes
in the three states. They called this the tri-state OHV plan. for recording photographs, GPS points, trail and road numbers,
Because the BLM and Forest Service had different levels of types and severity of damage, and habitat types. This informa-
knowledge about their ORV route systems, they devised a tion is being entered into a comprehensive database.
solution that would apply to all the lands, even if some were
already at a higher level of management. Finally, they decided All is not Lost
that they would allow ORV use to continue on any routes that Many strategies aimed at battling destructive motorized
existed on the ground, but all other cross-country ORV use recreation are coming together on the Gallatin. They include
would be prohibited. (See “Policy Primer” p. 8-9 for a com- field surveys and documentation, training volunteers, collect-
plete explanation of this item.) ing evidence, refining field monitoring, litigating over impacts
But then the BLM became engaged in a national ORV
effort and they pulled out of the tri-states plan. So when the — continued on next page —
Forest Service went ahead with the plan, which affects 17
million acres of land in the area, activists decided it was time
to get more people on the ground conducting ORV inventories.
Though the tri-states plan affects almost all the National
Forest lands in the region, other factors also influenced the
scope and direction of this summer’s Montana field invento-
ries. These issues ranged from the impacts of ORVs on grizzly
bears to the illegal incursion of ORVs in wilderness, to ORV
trespass in roadless areas and wilderness study areas pro-
tected under the Montana Wilderness Study Area Act. All told,
it was a big summer of data collection in Montana, and
activists in the region are still coordinating the results of the
summer surveys and determining the best possible way to
utilize the data. Please read on, in their words, about this
summer's monitoring efforts…

The Wild Trails Campaign

Documenting the Damage
By Phil Knight, Native Forest Network

In May the Native Forest Network, in conjunction with

Sierra Club Grizzly Bear Ecosystems Project, launched the
Wild Trails Campaign to document the damage caused by
motorized recreation on the Gallatin National Forest in
southwest Montana. The burgeoning popularity of dirt bikes,
ATVs and snowmobiles is wreaking havoc on public forests,
especially in otherwise wild roadless areas.
We found trash (most of which we packed out), bullet
shells and shot-up targets, rutted meadows, and trampled,
overused campsites. We found abandoned cars, trucks and
trailers. We found evidence of illegal motor vehicle use in
several locations, including the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilder-
ness. We almost never saw Forest Service people out there
checking things out, talking to users, cleaning up messes or
packing out trash. It’s a free for all.
Recent agreements by the Forest Service give us consider-
able leverage in limiting motorized travel. The Forest Service
has agreed to manage off-trail travel in occupied grizzly bear
habitat. In addition, wheeled motorized use is now restricted Great Burn Roadless Area. Photo courtesy of the Great Burn Study Group.

The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002 3

on grizzly bears and Wilderness Study Areas, coordinating miles inside the roadless area, was severely damaged by up
environmental groups, reaching out to the public, and to 60 ORVs per weekend. The Forest Service allowed a half-
pressuring the Forest Service to deal with this growing mile section of the State-Line Trail #736 to remain open to
menace. We are working to secure restrictions in the areas these machines even though the State-Line Trail is desig-
where the worst abuse is occurring. nated off-limits to ORVs in Forest Plans.
This winter and spring, when the snow piles deep in the * Numerous cases of unsigned or improperly signed trailheads
remote backcountry, we will be out there on skis and snow- and vandalism to existing restriction signs.
shoes, and in airplanes, watching for and recording evidence * Heavily impacted outfitter camps complete with roughly
of lawbreaking by snowmobilers who illegally ride their built furniture, latrines, and lodging structures, hitching
machines in designated wilderness and other closed areas. poles nailed to trees, large corrals built with sapling poles
and/or strung with electric fencing wire, and tarps and other
Damage Photos Available Online equipment stored in the woods. These sites covered large
Please visit http://grizzly.sierraclub.org/wildtrails.htm to areas devoid of vegetation.
see photos of some of the worst examples of public lands
abuse we found this summer. You can also download copies of ORV management in the Great Burn is a complicated mix
our documentation forms. Start your own monitoring project of open and closed trails resulting from differing management
to document the damage! philosophies of the Lolo and Clearwater National Forests (the
Join us next season as we expand our efforts to stop the Lolo NF portion is closed to all motorized use, while 75% of
abuse of our fragile public lands by motorized wreckreation. the Clearwater’s trails are open in proposed wilderness).
Contact me at pknight@wildrockies.org to get involved. Significantly, the project discovered that motorized use is
occurring virtually everywhere in the Great Burn, regardless of
restriction, terrain, or distance.
The Great Burn For more information about the Great Burn, to obtain
copies of the Project Report or to get involved in this ongoing
Citizen Monitoring of ORVs project, contact:
By Bob Clark, Great Burn Study Group Great Burn Study Group
1434 Jackson Street
The Great Burn Proposed Wilderness is a vast expanse of Missoula, MT 59802
wild country along the Montana/Idaho border in the northern or call 406-721-6438
Bitterroot Mountains. This primeval landscape burned heavily
in the Great Fire of 1910, leaving charred snags, grassy slopes,
and expanses of sub-alpine tundra-like meadows. High
cirques, impressive stands of mountain hemlock, and dozens
of clear lakes adorn the high country. Elevations within this
300,000 acre roadless area range from 3200' to 7900' provid-
ing critical year-round habitat for a variety of species listed as
threatened, endangered, or sensitive.
Unfortunately, and to the great concern and dismay of
conservationists and some land managers, motorized use has
sharply increased in this area (since the early 1990s).
Responding to this situation, two local grassroots organi-
zations — the Great Burn Study Group and Friends of the
Clearwater — developed and implemented the 2001 Trail
Monitoring Project. This project gathered information on off-
road vehicle (ORV) and other recreational uses in the Great
Burn, including impacts to natural resources and potential
user conflicts. Carried out by more than 35 dedicated volun-
teers, who logged hundreds of hours on more than 15 field
outings, with financial assistance from the Natural Trails and
Waters Coalition, the project was truly an inspirational effort.
The project has yielded hundreds of photos, reports, and
summaries outlining the types and level of motorized recre-
ation, user conflicts, illegal activity, resource damage, user-
created trails, conditions at trailheads and backcountry
campsites, proper signage, and vandalism. Some of the more
significant observations include:

* Evidence of illegal motorcycle use on several trails at remote

locations within proposed Wilderness. Volunteers also
encountered two motorcyclists deep in the backcountry on
the State-Line trail (restricted) in the Cache Saddle area.
* The conversion of Fish Lake, just off the Bitterroot crest on
the Idaho side, into an ORV playground. Sadly, the Forest
Service itself did the “converting.” Forest Service develop-
ments at the lake include three port-a-potties, two docks,
and ORV parking areas. This beautiful subalpine lake, six

Motorcycle track in the Great Burn Proposed Wilderness Area.

Photo courtesy of the Great Burn Study Group.

4 The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002

Predator Conservation
Alliance Field Monitoring
By Shawn Regnerus, Predator Conservation Alliance
PCA’s summer monitoring focused on road and off-road
vehicle impacts in grizzly bear habitat, not just in MT, but in
ID, WA, and WY.
After completing the road inventory in the Selkirk grizzly
bear recovery zones in WA, and ID, our field crew went south
to the Targhee NF in WY to survey user-created roads and ORV
trails. The Targhee has a long history of heavy motorized use
that has hampered the recovery of grizzlies on the western
edge of Yellowstone, but with its last forest plan the Targhee
committed to close roads and restrict motorized use to
“designated” routes. Our field crew looked at two areas to
ensure that the Forest Service is living up to its promises.
Finally, our field crew went into the backcountry north of
Yellowstone to document user-created routes on the Gallatin.
Aaron Schuerr, one of our field workers who inventoried Rock
Creek for ATV routes, was amazed by the user created routes
he found. “I thought I might find a few scattered ATV tracks
but instead I found that the user created trails were promi-
nent, well established ruts that were more visible than the
official trail.” Shuerr returned a month later to complete the
work and found that “even though the ATV riders had already
created obvious trials, they still didn’t follow them. Every-
where there was a difficult spot in the trail there were numer-
ous muddy detours around it. The amount of damage even a
few ATVs could do was amazing.” All of the trails our field
crew found in Rock Creek are inside grizzly bear core habitat,
which the Gallatin is required to protect from all wheeled
vehicles under the settlement terms of PCA’s recent lawsuit.
For more information contact Shawn Regnerus at 406-
587-3389 or shawn@predatorconservation.org.
The Pryors
Monitoring Roads and User-Created Routes
By Marnie Criley and Benjamin A. Hart
In the summer of 2001 Benjamin A. Hart, an intern with
Wildlands CPR, conducted a systematic survey of roads in the
Pryor Mountains, located in south central Montana within the
Custer National Forest. The Pryors are one of the most
complex and interesting areas in Montana; all of the ecosys-
tem types from Great Basin desert and sub-alpine forest exist
within them. The reasons we chose to survey this area are
twofold:
1) The Custer National Forest is in the process of ground
truthing all their transportation structures and we wanted to
check the accuracy of their mapping.
2) A couple of years ago the Custer classified nearly 2000
miles of unclassified routes without going through a NEPA
process. Wildlands CPR wanted to check the on-the-ground
status of roads and see what type of roads they classified.
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
Data Gathering
Benjamin used data forms to record critical information
about each road. He recorded the date, location by global
positioning, initial road width, presence of exotic invasive
plants, severity of erosion and other details. He took photo-
graphs and kept a photo log to keep track of information.
Benjamin attempted to show both the average conditions of
each road and the most damaged areas. Two questions were of
primary concern: 1. What is the condition of existing roads in
the Pryors? 2. Are roads being illegally created in the Pryors?
User Created Routes
The topography and vegetation in the Pryors welcome
user created routes: the sub-alpine meadows and sage
dominated desert offer little protection from off-road vehicles.
Routes have been created by individuals accessing mining
claims and by cattle ranchers checking on their stock; after
these routes are created they become part of the ever-
increasing network of recreational ATV routes.
Erosion
All of the roads inventoried in the Pryors were rated at
their most eroded spots on a scale from 0 to 4.
Of the 122.507 miles of roads surveyed, Benjamin didn’t
observe any that didn’t have level 2 erosion (which includes
water channeled down the roadbed) at some point or another.
Many of these roads have become nothing more than a
playground to challenge four wheel drive vehicles.
ORV Use
ORVs have left their mark on the fragile Pryors. Benjamin
estimates that over half of the user created routes were made
for and by ATVs. They have caused significant erosion on both
user created and legal roads. ATVs leave a distinct track, which
over time has changed many roads from a double to a wider,
triple track.
Road Widening
One of the largest threats posed by roads in the Pryors is
road widening. Sub-alpine roads quickly reach erosion levels
that make them too challenging to drive on. Individuals begin
driving outside of the ruts, creating new ruts. Over time roads
in the Pryors have gone from a few feet to dozens of feet wide.
Wildlands CPR is still in the process of analyzing
Benjamin’s data and checking his mapping against the Forest
Service’s. For more information on this project contact Marnie
Criley in the Wildlands CPR office.
Pryor Mountains road washout. Photo by Benjamin A. Hart.
5
A Tale of Two Roads
By Bethanie Walder
“Before any design concepts for
the road were conceived, it was
essential to get a better
understanding of the land, what
makes it unique, and how the
Salish and Kootenai people
relate to the land.
The design of the reconstructed
highway is premised on the idea
that the road is a visitor and
that it should respond to and be
respectful of the land and the
Spirit of the Place”
A small snake at the Lee Metcalf
National Wildlife Refuge. The Metcalf
parallels Highway 93 for several miles
in the Bitterroot Valley, and is home to
a diverse array of wildlife.
File photo.
6 The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
W
hen a new road invades a native ecosystem, like the
southern California foothills, or the Big Bend of northwest
ern Florida, or rural West Virginia, it brings development,
death and destruction. The development of houses, shopping malls,
banks, schools and post offices means the death of plants and animals
that had taken refuge in that natural place, and the destruction of wild
character. This is more commonly known as sprawl.
Sprawl, after all, is about urban, suburban and rural areas. It’s not
about wildlands and it’s not about nature. Or is it? Undeveloped lands,
whether private or public, protected or not, provide important and often
critical habitat for native plants and animals. But protecting habitat
from sprawl is difficult, partly because of the scarcity of legal opportu-
nities to limit development on private lands. This article looks first at
some of the impacts of sprawl, and then at the stark contrast between
the redevelopment plans for one road in two different areas.
Sprawl, whether for resource extraction or new housing, doesn’t
happen without roads, and it doesn’t depend on new road construction.
Sprawl is often fueled by paving an existing dirt road, or by widening or
lengthening an existing rural road, increasing the ease of access and
hence, the desirability of traveling to and fro. And with increased access
comes exploitation and degradation.
This degradation is happening on a grand scale: two to twenty
percent of the species loss in the lower 48 states is caused by habitat
conversion to urban, suburban or agricultural development (Biodiversity
Project: Getting On Message About Sprawl). Poster species like grizzly
bears and wolves may rely on protected federal lands, but only ten
percent of all threatened species live on such lands (ibid). Before white
settlers populated the west, these species lived everywhere, from the
plains to the mountains. It was sprawling development, and white
settlers’ refusal to share their land with wild predators, that lead to the
extirpation of grizzlies and wolves from most of their native habitat.
And the roads continue to roll through what little remains, impacting
species far less photogenic than wolves and grizzlies.
Western Montana provides a tale of two roads: Highway 93 north
and south of Missoula. This road travels the length of Montana from the
Canadian to the Idaho border west of the rocky mountain divide. It
separates the Mission Mountain Wilderness from the Mission valley, and
bisects the Bitterroot valley, separating the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness
from the Sapphire Range. It’s already a significant barrier to wildlife
movement and has been slated for upgrading (widening) for years.
The US Federal Highway Administration (FHA) and the Montana
Department of Transportation (MDOT) have conducted studies, fought
citizen lawsuits, and negotiated with the Confederated Salish and
Kootenai Tribes over road reconstruction. But the outcomes north and
south of Missoula are as different as fire and water.
Highway 93 North - The Missions
The Salish and Kootenai Tribes recognized that if Highway
93 was reconstructed as planned, to an undivided four to five
lane highway, it would destroy the remaining rural character
of the reservation and dramatically increase habitat fragmen-
tation. After difficult negotiations with the FHA and MDOT,
the Tribes succeeded in forming a committee to consider
highway redesign in a more culturally and environmentally
sensitive manner. According to the Memorandum of Agree-
ment (MOA) signed by all three parties in late December 2000:
“Before any design concepts for the road were conceived,
it was essential to get a better understanding of the land, what
makes it unique, and how the Salish and Kootenai people
relate to the land. The design of the reconstructed highway is
premised on the idea that the road is a visitor and that it
should respond to and be respectful of the land and the Spirit
of the Place” (MOA, US 93 Evaro to Polson, 12-20-2000).
These are incredible words for a highway development
document; the language refers to the road as a visitor, and
directs that the road respond to the place, not the other way
around. The result is a redesign incorporating two lane, three
lane and four lane segments depending on terrain and traffic,
in addition to dozens of wildlife crossing structures. The MOA
also explains the impacts the existing highway is having on a
migratory bird wetland, and it offers options for re-aligning
the highway to remove the worst part of the road from the
Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge.
While the redesign of HWY 93 north is a success story, it
will still be a bigger, faster highway, and it will still fragment
critical wildlife habitat (see Bibliography Notes this issue re:
mitigation). But by foregoing a standard 5 lane construction
for the project’s 53 miles, the upgraded road will not increase
sprawl or habitat fragmentation as much
as the original design would have. The
catalyst for this change was the fact that
the agencies were forced to negotiate
with the Tribes for right-of-way access.
They had no such mighty foe along HWY
93 south through the Bitterroot, just
concerned citizens who don’t want to see
their rural communities turned into even
larger bedroom towns for Missoula.
Highway 93 South
— The Bitterroots
The Highway 93 Citizens Coalition
for Responsible Planning formed in the
early 90’s when MDOT first proposed
widening the road. This coalition
promoted a “Super Two” road plan similar
to that now approved on the Flathead
reservation: they proposed a mile-by-mile
design, with frequent passing lanes and
opportunities to enhance wildlife migra-
tion (Highway 93 fact sheet). They
offered comments within the public process, and appealed
MDOT’s final decision to construct a five lane undivided
highway. When they lost, they joined with Friends of the
Bitterroot, a conservation organization, and sued to force
consideration of the Super Two. However, without the
negotiating power of the Tribes they lost.
To date, eight of the 34 miles to be rebuilt have already
been widened to five lanes with no wildlife crossing structures
and no other significant wildlife or habitat mitigation. New
housing developments are already under construction in
anticipation of the road expansion.
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
The indiscriminate widening of HWY 93 south will
forever change the character of the Bitterroot Valley. The
discriminate widening of HWY 93 north will forever change
the Mission Valley. While most wildlife were long ago driven
out of the valleys and into the mountains to avoid people,
these valleys still provide important habitat for many species.
And this is where conservation and sprawl activism again
connect.
Up in the Mission valley, the Tribal government now must
follow through to ensure that developments on adjacent land
are at least as sympathetic to the land, wildlife and cultural
heritage of the area as the redesigned road. They have the
power to do so.
In the Bitterroot Valley, communities have eschewed
zoning for years, and with the widening of HWY 93 are now
faced with new developments that many community mem-
bers don’t want. They must quickly enact regulations to
control and manage growth.
Clearly, sprawl affects not just the private lands where it
occurs, but the adjacent private and public lands that provide
important habitat for wildlife. Unfortunately however, it
seems that until we run out of space, we are not willing to
conserve it. Sprawl is just one obvious symptom of that
problem. Roads provide access for increased and rampant
development, and people have to come together to fight both
roads and development. While these battles may be difficult,
they can be won. Sprawl can be combated through federal
laws (e.g. endangered species act), economic incentives (e.g.
conservation easements), and through fighting roads. But
without coordinating anti sprawl and conservation efforts,
much of the hard work of both groups will be for naught and
efforts to conserve public land habitat will fall far short of our
goals to protect wildlife and wild places.
The Mission Mountains loom over the Mission
Valley, providing habitat for old-growth
forests, grizzlies, and wolves. This side of the
Missions is a Tribal Wilderness Area with a
designated buffer zone along its perimeter
that controls development. In places, it is only
a few miles away from Highway 93. Photo by
Jim Coefield.
7
 Wildlands CPR Policy Primer
The Policy Primer is a new column in the Road-RIPorter,
designed to highlight the ins & outs of a specific road or ORV policy. “Unfortunately, as is often the case,
If you have a policy you’d like us to investigate, let us know!
the devil is in the details.”

The “Existing Routes Exception”

An update on a new Forest Service
paradigm for ORV management
By Jacob Smith
The Forest Service is slowly conceding that cross-country
motorized travel is inappropriate. While this is a significant
step toward appropriate management of off-road vehicles on
Forest Service lands, the agency’s implementation of this new
management approach is deeply flawed. This primer outlines
our off-road vehicle management goals, describes this new
Forest Service approach and its flaws, and discusses some
implications for public lands activists.
Appropriate Off-Road
Vehicle Management
In December of 1999, more than 100 organizations joined
a formal petition requesting that the Forest Service adopt a
suite of management rules aimed at ensuring responsible and
prudent management of off-road vehicles. The petition,
authored by Wildlands CPR and The Wilderness Society,
requested five specific management changes:
* The Forest Service must demonstrate that a proposed
motorized route will not cause adverse impacts before
designating the route.
* The designation of motorized vehicle routes, construction of
new routes, upgrading of existing routes, and other projects
related to off-road vehicle recreation must be fully analyzed
under the National Environmental Policy Act.
* Off-road vehicle use shall be prohibited in roadless and
other sensitive areas.
* Off-road vehicle use is only permitted on routes designated
and posted as open for this purpose. Cross country travel
shall be prohibited.
* Off-road vehicle use shall be prohibited unless adequate
monitoring and enforcement of the use and impacts are
fully funded and implemented.
the Forest Service just announced the closure to dirt bikes of a
long-contested route technically off-limits to vehicles but
never managed as such.
These gains reflect our commitment to eliminating cross
country motorized vehicle travel on public lands. Recent
Forest Service decisions suggest that the agency is slowly
conceding that cross-country motorized travel is inappropri-
ate. For instance, recent travel management decisions on the
Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming and the Gunnison
National Forest in Colorado included, as central provisions, a
prohibition on cross-country travel. The January 2001
decision by the Forest Service to ban cross country travel on
nine National Forests in Montana and the Dakotas, known as
the Tri-States OHV Management Plan, is an even more
dramatic example.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, the devil is in the
details. Most of these decisions involve three components.
First, they formally prohibit cross country travel. This is good.
Second, they commit to a process for inventorying all of the
existing non-system routes (those routes that have been
created through use or for long-forgotten purposes and have
never been planned for, analyzed, or formally adopted into the
travel system). As these routes are inventoried, the Forest
Service will then make a site-specific management decision
for each. This is a mixed bag, as I explain below. Third, as an
ostensibly interim management measure, they allow contin-
ued motorized use of those routes that existed as of a specific
date (usually near the date of the decision). In other words,
while the Forest Service is clearly moving toward a ban on
cross-country travel, in each of these instances motorized
vehicle use will be permitted on previously existing or
established routes until the agency gets around to analyzing
all of those routes for their appropriateness and legality. The
result, typically, is a so-called “ban” on cross-country travel
that is largely a ban in name only. This is bad.

We argued, given the numerous laws and regulations that

pertain to off-road vehicle management, and the large body of
scientific evidence about the environmental impacts of off-
road vehicle use, that these five requests were required in
order to manage off-road vehicle use legally and responsibly.

Banning Cross-Country Motorized Travel

In the time since we submitted our petition, the conserva-
tion community has made noteworthy gains (and suffered
some setbacks as well). For example, conservation groups in
Montana forced the Forest Service to remove an illegally
created snowmobile route, and successfully assisted the Forest
Service in defending a decision to prohibit off-road vehicles in
a Wilderness Study Area. In August, activists in California
successfully pushed the Forest Service to eliminate off-road This is a good example of a cross-country route that has been widened
vehicle access to a fragile botanical area. In western Colorado, by unregulated off-road vehicles. Photo by Benjamin A. Hart.

8 The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002

The Flaws of the
“Existing Routes Exception”
While we greatly appreciate the general direction toward
a cross-country travel ban, the flaws in this “interim” ap-
proach are severe:
* Motorized vehicle use of routes not planned and designated
in accordance with the National Forest Management Act,
Executive Orders 11644 and 11989, the National Environ-
mental Policy Act, other applicable statutes and all the
implementing regulations for these laws is illegal and,
furthermore, represents poor land stewardship.
* Permitting the continued use of user-created and other
unplanned routes rewards decades of destructive and often
illegal motorized vehicle travel.
* The political challenges associated with closing any given
area or cross-country route to motorized travel will only
increase over time. The more established the use, the more
difficult it will be to eliminate later regardless of environ-
mental and other impacts. This dynamic is especially
pronounced if the Forest Service informally sanctioned such
use (e.g., by officially permitting its continuation, even if on
an interim basis, through travel management planning). The
end result will almost certainly incorporate much of this
existing system.
* Without a clear and nondiscretionary endpoint to the
transition period, this type of approach will be interim in
name only. If a given National Forest unit ever completes its
inventory and evaluation process, and this is by no means
assured, it will require many years if not decades.
* Responsible off-road vehicle users, which may constitute a
large percentage of those who ride the vehicles, will
generally have a very difficult time determining if use of any
given route is legal or not.
* Enforcing an “existing routes” policy will be extremely
difficult, as motorized recreationists will usually be able to
claim, credibly, that they believed a given route was legal for
motorized use. Thus, irresponsible off-road vehicle riders
will largely be able to ignore the ostensible prohibition on
cross-country travel. This problem is exacerbated by the
critical gaps in law enforcement funding and capacity. The
result is that motorized use is likely to continue in largely
the fashion it occurred before the new policy was adopted.
The Bitter Pill
Although it may be simple for activists to determine if an
interim management policy is appropriate (it almost certainly
is NOT appropriate), there is a more difficult challenge. Forest
Service decisions to ban cross country travel with an “existing
routes” grandfather clause are frequently structured such that
challenges to the sweeping existing routes exception will
result in a reversion back to whatever abysmal travel plan
existed before the new decision.
For example, the Forest Service adopted a Travel Manage-
ment Plan with this “existing routes” provision on the
Uncompaghre National Forest in western Colorado. The
Forest Service tried to persuade the conservation coalition to
drop the appeal, arguing that our administrative appeal would
result in a temporary withdrawal of the decision (while the
appeal was decided), which meant that management reverted
to the previous “anything goes” policy. In other words, the
Forest Service argued that if we didn’t accept this compromise,
with all its warts, and appealed or litigated the decision, the
resulting environmental impacts would be worse than if we
had left it alone. We not only filed the appeal but won it as
well, which meant that the “anything goes” approach remains
in effect while the agency completes another travel plan.
Although we agreed with the Forest Service that there
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
might be a short-term increase in environmental damage if
the agency withdrew its decision because of the appeal, we
believed that the long-term implications clearly outweighed
these concerns. For all of the same reasons we object to this
approach in the first place, we believe the long term impacts
of “existing routes” policies are severe enough to warrant
aggressive political, administrative, and legal challenges to
their use, even at the risk of Forest Service reliance on older,
“anything goes” type management while these challenges are
resolved. Although it is possible that such a compromise
might make sense under unusual circumstances, in every
example we’ve evaluated we believed that the long-term
importance of appealing far outweighed the potential short-
term costs of walking away.
Implications for Activists
It is important to recognize that these new challenges
represent progress on the motorized recreation front. The
Forest Service is, by all appearances, conceding that cross-
country motorized travel is inappropriate. That said, the flaws
of the “existing routes” approach are so severe that we are
generally better off challenging this approach than living with
the so-called compromise.
There are at least several implications for conservation
activists. First, challenging these policies will require thor-
ough and credible field data documenting the existence of
illegal routes, use of those routes, and the environmental
damage caused by off-road vehicle use. While we should
aggressively challenge these sorts of travel management
planning decisions, as well as any inappropriate off-road
vehicle use of Forest Service lands, we must do so thought-
fully. In every instance, we must be certain to carefully build
our case that inappropriate off-road vehicle use has real
impacts to the environment and to other users. Simply
arguing that the Forest Service is violating the letter of the law,
without demonstrating that the impacts of such violations are
substantive, will not persuade a judge who doesn’t know or
care about off-road vehicle issues.
Second, conservation activists should aggressively clarify
to the Forest Service that they have both the authority and
duty to eliminate off-road vehicle use that is unplanned or
causing environmental damage (or both). Even where agency
decision-makers are sympathetic, they are often reluctant to
close routes or make strong travel decisions for fear of losing
subsequent administrative appeals and litigation. To date, the
agency’s authority to close such routes has been largely
affirmed by the courts; our task is to communicate this to the
Forest Service.
Finally, the fact that banning cross-country travel is
increasingly a part of the agency’s management paradigm is
extremely encouraging. We are gaining ground and need to
continue to push hard until off-road vehicles are managed
appropriately.
Along these lines, conservationists
should push hard for cross-country
travel bans, strongly support National
Forests that have such bans, and
aggressively challenge Forest Service
decisions that only give lip service to
this critical goal of prohibiting cross-
country motorized travel.
9

Odes to Roads
The Landscape
of Desire
An excerpt, by Greg Gordon
To the west of Green River, Utah juts the San Rafael Reef,
a shark tooth ridge of upended sandstone. Not an actual
marine reef, but so christened by the early pioneers because
this 2000 foot high pleat proved a significant impediment to
east-west travel. Most of the desert beyond remained
inaccessible until the construction of Interstate 70. Begun in
1970, this stretch of Interstate took 20 years to complete. The
highway slices right through the San Rafael Reef, revealing
successive layers of geologic history. Deposited horizontally,
they are now tilted on end, so that one drives through the
entire Jurassic period in a few minutes.
A dirt road off a dirt road leads to Muddy Creek, the only
reliable source of water in the southern half of the vast and
seldom visited San Rafael Desert. It looks more like an
irrigation ditch loaded with cow manure than a creek.
Composed of grey Mancos Shale, the Coal Cliffs loom
above us. A cold wind whips the cumulus clouds across the
sky like a time release film. Through the low clouds we can
see snow in the highlands of the
Fishlake Plateau. As we step out of
the van after the long ride,
everyone replaces their shorts
with pants and long underwear
and quickly throws fleece over
their T-shirts.
I pull out the maps and
show my students we are
headed clear through the San
Rafael Desert, from I-70 to the
tiny town of Hanksville. A
person could easily hike
through this county in less
than half the time, but our
purpose isn’t to pass through
an area as quickly as possible,
but rather to come to know a
place, to linger and saunter as
Thoreau would have us do. “For every
walk is a sort of crusade,” he wrote. “We should go forth on
the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of adventure, never
to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as
relics to our desolate kingdoms.”
“It’s a big chunk of country, nearly all roadless. I’ve never
been here before; should be interesting,” I say, closing the
map case.
We shoulder our heavy packs and navigate through failed
attempts at alfalfa fields. We aim toward the Interstate,
sighting our course along Muddy Creek. We trudge slowly in a
perpendicular line, unwavering as a missile, so as to intercept
the four-lane Interstate. We wonder if anyone notices a line of
backpackers threading their way through a maze of barbed
wire, old tires and car parts to the highway, passing beneath it
and heading south into a landscape as desolate as the moon.
We could have parked on the other side of I-70 and begun
our hike farther downstream, but I wanted us to walk under
10
“…our purpose isn’t to pass through
an area as quickly as possible, but
rather to come to know a place, to
linger and saunter as Thoreau would
have us do. ‘For every walk is a sort
of crusade,’ he wrote…”
the highway, having spent so much of our lives traveling over
it. This ribbon of asphalt superimposed over the landscape
defines our movement telling us which places are important
and which are not. It gets us from here to there with little
concern as to what lies between. We build our highways with
near total disregard toward the land and its inhabitants.
I also wanted to experience how animals move through
the landscape. Driving along I-70 from Grand Junction,
Colorado, to Moab, Utah, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds
of ground squirrel carcasses littering the pavement. Are we
simply oblivious of the lives of animals in our rush across the
desert? Why right here on this one stretch of highway?
The Humane Society estimates more than one million
animals are killed every day on U.S. highways. This includes
not only large and small mammals such as deer, bear, rac-
coons, hares and rodents, but also reptiles, amphibians, birds,
and an untold number of invertebrates. Over half a million
deer alone are killed every year by traffic. Roadkill is the
leading cause of mortality for most large
mammals and several endangered
species, such as desert tortoise,
Houston toad, brown pelican,
ocelot, northern long-eared bat
(whose only known breeding
location is bisected by the
Transcanada Highway), American
crocodile, and key deer (of which
80% of all known deaths are
attributed to traffic). Highways
also act as wildlife mortality sinks.
For example, snakes are attracted
to the road to sunbathe and are
flattened as a result; ravens and
jays and other scavengers come to
feed off the carcasses and are in
turn killed themselves.
From salamanders to grizzlies,
highways prove to be impermeable
barriers to some wildlife movements, preventing amphibians
from reaching their breeding grounds and bears from finding
mates. Roads can also dissect habitat. I-70, for example,
severs the San Rafael bighorn sheep population in half. As
traffic flow increases in speed and volume, the highway
becomes like a solid wall of speeding metal, resulting in
decreased gene flow between isolated populations. Further-
more, a decreased ability to re-colonize results in a drop in
overall ecological resilience. If populations remain isolated
long enough they become susceptible to disease and inbreed-
ing. Extinction results.
Many animals avoid highways altogether. Elk spurn areas
up to half a mile from a road. Small mammals find many
roads too wide to cross. A study of a four-lane highway in the
Mojave Desert discovered that rodents hardly ever crossed the
road. This is particularly portentous to the Colorado Plateau,
which is home to more than thirty species of rodents. Thus
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
highways are a double jeopardy for wildlife, for not only do
they fragment the available habitat into smaller islands, they
simultaneously kill off the remaining populations.
Muddy Creek flows unhindered beneath the Interstate. If
an animal sensed this passageway, it could safely move from
one side to the other. Riparian corridors like this serve as
valuable wildlife habitat; indeed 80% of deer kill zones are
associated with major drainages. If properly designed, the
creek could serve as a wildlife underpass, an idea now being
incorporated into highways from Florida (which has installed
underpasses for crocodiles and panthers) to Canada (which
has installed overpasses for larger mammals such as elk). The
Texas highway department is considering a plan that installs
tunnels under the highway for the endangered Houston toad.
Near Park City, Utah, fenced right-of-ways funnel deer to
painted cross walks that have reduced mortality 40%. How-
ever, these mitigation measures are expensive and the results
mixed. In Florida, deer and raccoons frequently use the
underpasses but black bears do not. In Canada, elk, deer and
coyotes use the overpasses, but grizzlies and wolves may not.
As we hike, I think about Simon Ortiz’ poem. For our
brothers: Blue Jay, Gold Finch, Flicker, Squirrel, who perished
lately in this most unnecessary war, saw them lying off the
side of a state road in southwest Colorado.
They all loved life.
And suddenly,
it just stopped for them. Abruptly,
the sudden sound of a speeding machine,
and that was it.
I don’t have to ask who killed you.
I know, and I am angry and sorry
and wonder what I shall do.
This, for now, is as much as I can do,
knowing your names, telling about you.
Squirrel. Flicker. Gold Finch. Blue Jay.
Our brothers.
This particular highway also defines some sort of bound-
ary in my own mind. Although much of the Colorado Plateau
lies north of I-70, for me the area between I-70 and the
Arizona line embodies Utah’s redrock wilderness. I-70
represents civilization and I had always looked to the south —
Canyonlands, Zion, the Escalante — as the real wilderness. By
starting north of the Interstate and walking beneath it I wanted
to defy the validity of that line. I also hoped that this would
somehow frame the students’ concept of wilderness on an
experiential level.
Does anything significant change when we pass under the
Interstate? We are hardly in the land of Oz, but nothing
civilized lies between us and the tiny town of Hanksville, 85
river miles downstream: no pavement, no houses, nothing but
a couple of dirt roads, a muddy creek to follow and over half
million acres of wilderness. At Hanksville, Muddy Creek joins
the Fremont River and creates the Dirty Devil River. After a
short re-supply, we would follow the Dirty Devil its entire
length, another 85 river miles to where it converges with the
Colorado River beneath the surface of Lake Powell.
I-70 to Lake Powell. Icons of the modernization of the
West? The Interstate serves as a transportation corridor,
emblematic of speed, efficiency, globalization, carrying lettuce
from California to the Midwest, orange juice from Florida to
San Francisco, and no doubt cocaine from L.A. to Denver. Lake
Powell was created by a massive dam across the Colorado
River, 120 miles long; the “lake” flooded what was once the
very heart of the Colorado Plateau — Glen Canyon.
But what lies between I-70 and Lake Powell? Twenty years
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
before the damming of the Colorado, Harold Ickes, FDR’s
Secretary of Interior, proposed the world’s largest preserve, a
4.5 million-acre national monument that would reach from
Lee’s Ferry in Arizona west to Kanab, Utah, north to Green
River and east to Moab. Only one dirt road crossed this region,
the most remote in the contiguous U.S. However, FDR’s
Federal Reserve Chairman, Marriner Eccles, was from Utah
and was vehemently opposed to the monument. The idea was
shelved as the bombing of Pearl Harbor shifted attention
elsewhere. Even earlier, Bob Marshall, co-founder of the
Wilderness Society, identified two million acres of roadless
land in the San Rafael alone in 1935. While I-70 now sliced it
in half, I wondered how much remained. Although Interstates
and dams have shredded and fragmented one of our last
remaining wildernesses, could we still thread together a
patchwork traveling by foot across this remote region? Is it still
possible to set off into the unknown for weeks, simply
following a creek? Would we find the soul of the Colorado
Plateau here, damaged but still intact? Would we find our
own?
We pass an abandoned mine and a road bed scarred into
the desert crust. This is a place where you damn the land and
hope to get rich quick and get the hell out, an area so desolate
Photo by Marcel Huijser.
that it has never seen a permanent settlement. Scour the earth
for uranium (or magnesium as in the case of this mine), or
coal or oil and gas, or fill it with cows, scrape every available
source off and then fill in the gaps with toxic waste. This
unlovely land has been consigned to satisfy the motorized
recreation needs of off-road vehicles. We take everything it
has to offer and leave feeling not quite satiated.
This is a grey streaked country, always too cold and windy
or searingly hot. This is a land of salt bush flats and little to no
water. What water exists is foul, laced with heavy metals, salt
and giardia (as we later discovered). These barren bentonite
hills, mysterious enough on their own, seem inhabited by
ghosts of a different kind — the specters of greed and desire.
The Wilderness Act defines wilderness as an “untram-
meled” area. Most misinterpret this as “untrampled.” Untram-
meled refers to a trammel line, which is what fishermen use to
surround a school of fish with nets. Thus untrammeled would
pertain to an area whose boundaries are flexible and porous,
not surrounded by civilization. I wondered to what degree I-70
and Lake Powell act as ecological trammel lines for the San
Rafael/Dirty Devil region. Could they also act as psychological
trammels reining in our own wildness?
— This essay is taken from the forthcoming book about the
Colorado Plateau, The Landscape of Desire by Greg Gordon.
11
 Bibliography Notes
Bibliography Notes summarizes and highlights some of the
scientific literature in our 6,000 citation bibliography on the
ecological effects of roads. We offer bibliographic searches to
help activists access important biological research relevant to
roads. We keep copies of most articles cited in Bibliography
Notes in our office library.
An Evaluation Of Wildlife
Crossing Structures
Their Use And Effectiveness
— By Maureen Hartmann
The study of road impacts upon wild-
life has ignited in the last decade, but only
in the past few years have efforts begun to
mitigate these impacts. Engineers and
biologists are now working jointly to
design operative wildlife underpasses and
overpasses that will temper the effect
roads have upon wildlife. Effective cross-
ing structures will help to reconnect areas
of viable habitat that have become isolated
due to road construction. This is an ardu-
ous task if you consider the wide-ranging
species in the world, their diverse biologi-
cal needs and habitat requirements.
Photo by Marcel Huijser.
12
Forest Service graphic.
In the last decade, wildlife crossing structures ranging
from amphibian tunnels to large carnivore open span bridges
have been built to combat roadkill and road avoidance. With
the passage of a new federal highway bill in the U.S. Congress,
the Transportation Equity Act (TEA-21), federal support is
available for wildlife crossing structures on both new and
existing roads in the United States. The European Union
passed a similar measure, COST-341. Both initiatives have
heightened the concern for sustainable transportation systems
and incorporation of mitigation structures into road plans
(Gloyne and Clevenger, 2001).
Only limited information exists on the efficacy of those
structures that are just now gaining nationwide and global
support. Biologists and engineers are on a learning curve, and
future studies are needed to determine what attributes will
make these structures most effective for the greatest number
of species. Although the need for more research is apparent,
preliminary studies from Europe, Canada, and the United
States have provided some insight concerning significant
features/issues that should be considered when building
wildlife crossing structures.
Wildlife crossing structures come in many sizes and
shapes; their features ultimately depending upon the ecologi-
cal and behavioral needs of the diverse species that inhabit an
area. Each species has different needs, therefore, when
designing these structures it is virtually impossible to accom-
modate all species in an area. A more generalized approach
should be taken to make highways permeable for as many
species as possible. “Today highway planners and land
mangers can ill afford the naïve luxury of single-species
mitigation structures. Species do not function in isolation but
are components of ecological systems that inherently fall into
the category of organized complexity. Therefore, any single-
species mitigation structure is likely to have cascading effects,
some positive and some negative, on non-target species also.
If a mitigation structure is to succeed, a multi-species ap-
proach is needed to evaluate the efficacy of such mitigation on
non-target species as well” (Clevenger and Waltho 2000).
Various attributes of crossing structures such as light,
noise, substrate, natural cover, dimensions, and placement will
determine usage by different species. Most studies indicate
that the larger the underpass/overpass, the better suited it will
be to accommodate a wide range of species (Reed 1981, De
Santo and Smith 1993, and Jackson and Curtice 1998).
Natural vegetation near the opening will give both large and
small species the security of their preferred environment
(Rodriguez et al. 1996, Hunt et al. 1992, Clevenger et al.
2001a). Vegetation can serve as a funneling system, guiding
animals to the openings, thus helping to motivate them to use
the crossing structure (Yanes et al. 1995).
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
 Proper placement of the crossing structure is likely the
most important feature in determining success (Jackson and
Curtice 1998, Rodriguez et al. 1996, Land and Lotz 1996,
Singer et al. 1985). Most studies indicate that placing the
crossing structure near traditional migration routes will
increase effectiveness. Methods to determine proper place-
ment are track count surveys, monitoring trails with infrared
cameras, GIS modeling to determine likely travel corridors,
roadkill data, and radio tracking collared animals (Scheick and
Jones). In addition, some biologists recommend that crossing
structures be placed away from human disturbance areas;
human activity has been negatively correlated with underpass/
overpass use.
Underpasses and overpasses will be more effective if they
are accompanied by fencing on both sides of a road. Fences
were primarily erected to reduce roadkill, however, without a
crossing structure, fencing further reduces a road’s permeabil-
ity. Most studies indicate that fencing should be about eight
feet tall (Groot Bruinderink and Hazelbrook 1996, Sipes and
Neff 2001). Fencing should be built around the crossing
structure to guide (funnel) animals to the passageway, thus
preventing them from circumventing the system (Jackson and
Curtice 1998).
Photo by Marcel Huijser.
Are These Structures Effective?
Crossing structures are slowly being incorporated into the
road plans of transportation agencies around the globe,
however, very little research has been done on their true
effectiveness. “This is a field of applied ecology still very
much in its infancy,” says Parks Canada researcher Tony
Clevenger (Wilkinson 2000). Clevenger also adds that virtually
nothing is known about the relative effectiveness of over-
passes and underpasses, or between the different types of
underpasses being tested (Clevenger 1998). We can infer what
features are most important based on the studies that have
been conducted so far, but no study has been able to accu-
rately estimate how many animal crossings would have
occurred if a given structure was not there.
Knowledge of the abundance and distribution of popula-
tions is essential in developing criteria to measure crossing
effectiveness (Clevenger 1999). To try and obtain expected
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
crossing rates, movement patterns, population densities, and
life history requirements, years of study are needed. “Answer-
ing some of the complex ecological questions around roads
and long-lived wildlife like bears may require research
timeframes of up to 10-15 years” (Whyte Museum 2000).
Even then, biologists will need to take into consideration that
a low crossing rate may be due to a natural fluctuation/decline
in wildlife populations. Low crossing rates may also be
attributed to the time it takes certain species to adapt to and
use a crossing structure.
Although more studies are needed to determine effective-
ness, the crossing structures and fencing erected in areas such
as Banff National Park, Glacier National Park, Florida and
Europe have dramatically decreased roadkill and have allowed
for numerous wildlife passages. In some cases the carnage on
roads has decreased as much as 97%, and wildlife ranging
from salamanders to large grizzly bears and panthers are
passing through the structures to reach vital habitat.
Conclusion
Wildlife crossing structures have had some great suc-
cesses. They have been useful in decreasing roadkill, and
have been successful in enhancing landscape connectivity.
The dearth of information on their effectiveness makes
further studies essential if biologists and engineers are
expected to make the crossings even better for a diverse array
of wildlife (Clevenger 1998). Regardless of how much data is
collected, there will never be one perfect structure to suit all
species’ needs (Clevenger and Hardy pers. comm.). Therefore,
“our first choice would always be to not build a road through
wildlife habitat” (Lavendel 2000). For already existing roads,
wildlife passages should be added thoughtfully with all
species considerations in mind.
The following list provides some salient recommenda-
tions to consider when developing or monitoring wildlife
crossing structures:
* Take a multi-species approach rather than a single-species
focus, remembering that species do not function in isolation
but are components of ecological systems;
* Know the biology of the species in the area, their distribu-
tion, abundance, and ecological and behavioral needs;
* Place the structures at known migration routes, away from
human disturbance. This can be determined by roadkill
data, infrared cameras, GIS modeling, and track-count
surveys;
* Make the passages wide to accommodate a larger number of
species;
* Try to build structures to allow for natural lighting and low
noise levels;
* Have a clear view to the other side;
* Use fencing designed to reduce wildlife intrusions;
* Conduct intensive monitoring before and after constructing
the wildlife passages via track count surveys, radio-collaring,
mark-recapture studies, etc., and;
* Share the results!
It is imperative that biologists and engineers share their
findings and ideas concerning crossing structure effectiveness.
Events such as the International Conference on Wildlife
Ecology and Transportation have become integral to this
process. Ideally, the knowledge gained from these meetings
will lead to the design of improved crossing structures that
will more effectively connect the habitats of a diversity of
wildlife.
— Maureen Hartmann is a graduate student in Environmental Studies
at the University of Montana.
— Citations on next page —
13
Literature Cited
Clevenger, A.P. 1998. Permeability of the Trans-Canada Highway
to wildlife in Banff National Park: Importance of crossing
structures and factors influencing their effectiveness. Pp.109-
119. In G.L. Evink, P.A. Garrett, D. Zeigler, and J. Berry, eds.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Wildlife
Ecology and Transportation. Feb. 10-12, 1998 Fort Myers, FL.
FL DOT FL-ER 69-98.
Clevenger, A.P. and Nigel Waltho. 2000. Factors influencing the
effectiveness of wildlife underpasses in Banff National Park,
Alberta, Canada. Conservation Biology. 14(1): 47-56.
DeSanto, R.S. and D.G. Smith. 1993. Environmental auditing: An
introduction to issues of habitat fragmentation relative to
transportation corridors with special reference to high-speed
rail (HSR). Environmental Management. 17(1): 111-114.
Gloyne, C.C. and A.P. Clevenger. 2001. Cougar (puma concolor) use
of wildlife crossing structures on the Trans Canada highway in
Banff National Park, Alberta. Wildlife Biology. 7(2): 117-124.
Groot Bruinderink, G.W.T.A. and E. Hazelbrook. 1996. Ungulate
traffic collisions in europe. Conservation Biology. 10(4):1059-
1067.
Hunt, A., H.J. Dickens, and R.J. Whelan. 1987. Movement of
mammals through tunnels under railway lines. Australian
Zoologist. 24(2) 89-93.
Jackson, S.D. and G.R. Curtice. 1998. Toward a practical strategy
for mitigating highway impacts on wildlife. Pp. 17-22 in G.L.
Evink, P.A. Garrett, D. Zeigler, and J. Berry, eds. Proceedings of
the International Conference on Wildlife Ecology and
Transportation. Feb. 10-12, 1998 Fort Myers, FL. FL DOT FL-
ER 69-98.
Land, D. and M. Lotz. 1996. Wildlife crossing designs and use by
florida panthers and other wildlife in southwest Florida. In G.L.
Evink, P.A. Garrett, D. Zeigler, and J. Berry, eds. Proceedings of
the International Conf. on Wildlife Ecology and Transportation.
June, 1996. Tallahassee, FL. FL DOT FL-ER 58-96.
Lavendel, Brian. 2000. Putting the breaks on roadkill. Animals.
133(6):20-23.
Mansergh, I.M., and Scotts, D.J. 1989. Habitat continuity and
social organization of the mountain pygmy-possum restored
by tunnel. Journal of Wildlife Management. 53(3):701-707.
Rodriguez, A., G. Crema, and M. Delibes. 1996. Use of non-
wildlife passages across a high speed railway by terrestrial
vertebrates. Journal of Applied Ecology. 33:1527-1540.
Reed, Dale. 1981. Mule deer behavior at a highway underpass
exit. Journal of Wildlife Management. 45(2):542-543.
Savage, Candace. 2000. A highway runs through it. Canadian
Geographic. 120(5): 35-42.
Scheick, B.K. and M.D. Jones. Locating wildlife underpasses prior
to expansion of highway 64 in North Carolina. North Carolina
Wildlife Resources Commission, Plymouth and Bridgeton,
North Carolina. www.myflorida.com/emo/sched/locate.pdf.
Servheen, C. 2001. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Grizzly Bear
Recovery Coordinator. Personal Communication Nov, 2001.
Singer, F.J., W.L. Langlitz, and E.C. Samuelson. 1985. Design and
construction of highway underpasses used by mountain goats.
Transportation Research Record. 1016:6-10.
Sipes, J.L. and J. Neff. 2001. Fencing, wildlife crossings, and
roads: separating animals and vehicles. Landscape
Architecture. 91(6):24-27.
Whyte Museum. 2000. Mitigation: Reducing the Impacts of
Roads and Railways on Bears. http://www.whyte.org/bears/
mitigate.html.
Wilkinson, Todd. Making the road safe — for elk, bears, and
wolves. The Christian Science Monitor. 12/09/00. http://
www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/12/19/text/p3sl.html.
Yanes, M., J.M. Velasco, and F. Suarez. 1995. Permeability of
roads and railways to vertebrates: The importance of culverts.
Biological Conservation. 71:217-222.
14
New Resources
Wildlands CPR interns produced a series of excellent
reports last fall. They ranged from the effectiveness of
highway mitigation practices (see page 12-14) to the ecologi-
cal effects of oil and gas drilling and seismic exploration. The
Road-RIPorter will feature many of them in the future. These
reports will be posted on our website, and you also can
contact our office to receive copies of them. Many thanks to
the graduate students who completed these reports for us!
Ecological Effects of Seismic Testing
By Erich W. Zimmermann
This report includes an incredibly clear and concise
explanation of the seismic exploration, from a description of
the seismic receiving and source lines to the enormous
vibrasise trucks used. It also provides a detailed explanation
of the profound amount of ground disturbance caused by
seismic exploration.
Coal Bed Methane: One Way Road to
Environmental Degradation
A study of road-related impacts during development
By Brian Crawford
Brian looked at existing coal bed methane developments
to analyze the number of miles of linear disturbance that are
created through a typical project. Brian also included a short
comparison to conventional gas extraction.
The Impact of Roads on Neotropical
Migratory Songbirds
By Roiann Matt
Roian's paper summarizes the current research on the
impacts that roads have on neotropical migratory songbirds in
North America. She presents a detailed discussion of the main
impacts: nest predation; parasitism; and habitat decline.
Finally, Roian recommends several ways to minimize these
impacts if road obliteration isn't an option.
Impacts of Helicopter Recreation
By Emily Yeomans
Emily's report is an assessment of the impacts of helicop-
ter recreation on wildlife. It provides a survey of the scientific
literature on helicopter impacts and recommendations
regarding their management.
Field Guide to Road Closures
By Amy Barry
The new "Field Guide to Road Closures" surveys the
techniques used to close routes, from the installation of road
closure signs to complete road obliteration, assessing the
strengths and weakness of each.
Wildlife Crossing Structures
Evaluating their Use and Effectiveness
— By Maureen Hartmann
Maureen's report provides a detailed and compelling look
at the benefits and limitations of highway mitigation struc-
tures for wildlife connectivity. She has summarized the
available research, presented several case studies and included
information about the research questions that remain to be
answered.
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002

Regional Reports & Updates
Forest Service Interim Directives on
Roadless Area Management
by Mike Anderson
The Wilderness Society analyzed the Forest Service’s
latest interim directives on roadless area management. This
latest directive affects the National Forest System Road
Management Strategy (Transportation Policy). The directive
takes all language within the Transportation Policy that
protects roadless areas (this part of the Transportation Policy
is enjoined due to lawsuits) and removes it.
The interim directives — issued as an amendment to the
Forest Service Manual — went into effect on December 14,
2001 and will continue for 18 months. A 60 day public
comment period ends on February 19th.
Summary
The new Forest Service directives significantly reduce
administrative protection for national forest roadless areas.
Specifically, the directives:
1. eliminate the requirement that there must be a “compelling
need” for road construction in roadless areas;
2. eliminate the requirement to prepare an environmental
impact statement prior to building roads in roadless areas;
3. eliminate any special protection for uninventoried roadless
areas greater than 1,000 acres that are adjacent to invento-
ried roadless areas or wilderness areas, and;
4. create a new loophole for logging old-growth forests in
roadless areas.
The directives essentially allow logging and road building
in roadless areas, subject to the approval of the Forest Service
Chief or Regional Foresters. However, that approval require-
ment only lasts until local forest managers complete an
amorphous “roads analysis” and update their forest plans.
Logging projects in national forests that revised their plans
prior to July 2001, such as the Tongass National Forest, are
exempt from Chief-level review. The directives continue the
policy of ultimately turning over all roadless area manage-
ment decisions to the local forest planning process, which has
favored logging and other development in roadless areas.
Analysis
The new directives consolidate interim management
direction for inventoried roadless areas (IRAs) into one section
(the forest planning section) of the Forest Service Manual, and
they entirely delete the roadless area section of the Transpor-
tation Policy. These changes have several negative effects on
roadless area protection.
First, the Transportation Policy stated that any road
construction or reconstruction in IRAs may only be authorized
if the Regional Foresters determine a “compelling need” for a
road (FSM 7712.16b(1)(a)). The new directives eliminate that
requirement. Consequently, the standard for road building in
roadless areas will be reduced to the same as that in any other
area — i.e. the Forest Service must determine only that the
road would serve a “documented need” (FSM 7712.12b).
Second, the Transportation Policy required the Regional
Foresters to prepare and approve an environmental impact
statement (EIS) prior to approving road building in IRAs (FSM
7712.16b(1)(c)). The new interim directives give the Forest
Service discretion to determine whether or not an EIS is
required (FSM 1925.04b(3)). Another section of the Forest
Service directive requires an EIS only if an action would
“substantially alter the undeveloped character of an invento-
ried roadless area” (Forest Service Handbook 1909.15,
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
chap.20.6(3)). Consequently, Forest Service managers could
now elect to build roads in a roadless area without preparing
an EIS if they determine that the roadless area would not be
substantially altered.
Third, by rescinding the roadless area section of the
Transportation Policy, the new interim directives remove any
form of protection for uninventoried roadless areas. As noted
above, the special procedural requirements of the Transporta-
tion Policy applied equally to IRAs and to uninventoried
roadless areas located adjacent to IRAs and wilderness areas.
These “contiguous unroaded areas” often provide important
wildlife corridors or other ecological values. Since the new
interim directives only require Chief-level review of road-
building projects in IRAs, the Forest Service apparently has
decided that the contiguous unroaded areas warrant no
special protection of any kind.
Fourth, the new directives apparently create a loophole
for logging old-growth forests in roadless areas. The Roadless
Rule generally prohibited commercial logging in IRAs, but
included exceptions for logging that “is incidental to the
implementation of a management activity not otherwise
prohibited by this subpart” (36 CFR 294.13(b)(2)). The interim
directives greatly broaden this exception by allowing logging
“incidental to the implementation of a management activity
and not otherwise prohibited under the land and resource
management plan” (FSM 1925.04a(2)(b). This latter exception
is far broader than the one in the Roadless Rule, since local
management plans often allow unlimited logging in IRAs.
In addition, the new interim directives would leave in
place Chief Bosworth’s policy of allowing all roadless area
decisions ultimately to be made through local forest planning.
The new interim directives require approval from the Chief for
road building and logging activities in IRAs, with some
exceptions. However, the Chief’s approval is no longer
required once a national forest completes a forest-scale roads
analysis (for road-building activities) and a forest plan revision
(for logging activities).
— Mike Anderson is a senior resource analyst for The
Wilderness Society.
Send Comments by February 19, 2002
USFS CAT
Attention: Road Policy
P.O. Box 221150
Salt Lake City, UT, 84122
via email to: roads_id@fs.fed.us
or via fax: 801-517-1021, to USFS CAT, Attn: Road Policy
Talking Points:
* Please demand that the USFS cease any attempts to
undermine protections on our National Forest roadless
areas as provided by the Roadless Area Conservation
Rule and the Transportation Policy adopted last January.
* Urge the Forest Service and Administration to not
renege on their promise to uphold protections for
roadless areas.
* Our National Forests currently contain over 383,000
miles of classified roads and the maintenance backlog
now exceeds $8 billion dollars. The Forest Service
should eliminate roads not build new ones.
* These directives continue the Forest Service policy of
turning over all roadless area management decisions to
the local forest planning process, which has favored
logging and other development of roadless areas. This
marks a return to the same failed management policy
that created the need for the Roadless Area Conserva-
tion Rule in the first place.
15
The Forest Service and
Categorical Exclusions
A Primer and Update on Current Litigation
— By Jim Bensman
A Categorical Exclusion (CE) can be a citizen’s nightmare.
The Forest Service loves to use CEs to avoid public participa-
tion and make it easier for them to violate the law. This article
will help you understand CEs and how to deal with them.
What is a CE?
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) provides
three ways for agencies to document their decisions. An
Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is a full-fledged
analysis, and of the three ways, it requires the most analysis
and public participation. The second way is called an Environ-
mental Assessment (EA). An EA is basically a mini EIS.
The third way is a CE. CEs can be used for “actions which
do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on
the human environment and which have been found to have
no such effect in procedures adopted by a Federal agency in
implementation of these regulations and for which, therefore,
neither an environmental assessment nor an environmental
impact statement is required.” 40 CFR § 1508.4. When a CE is
used, the least amount of analysis and
public participation is provided. CEs are
supposed to be only used for projects that
have no potential for significant impacts
(i.e., cutting the grass at a Ranger Station).
When the Forest Service uses an EA
or EIS, they have to consider the impacts
of the project. The Forest Service’s NEPA
regulations include a list of categories of
actions that “do not individually or
cumulatively have a significant effect” on
the environment. See 1909.15 FSH § 30.
One example of a categorically exclud-
able category of actions is:
Repair and maintenance of administrative sites. Examples
include but are not limited to: a. Mowing lawns at a District
office. b. Replacing a roof or storage shed. c. Painting a
building. 1909.15 FSH § 31.1b (b)(3).
When the Forest Service established these categories, they
made a determination that every project in that category does
not have the potential for significant effects unless there are
“extraordinary circumstances.” Therefore, unless there are
extraordinary circumstances present, the Forest Service does
not have to analyze the effects of any project in the category.
To properly use a CE, the Forest Service must determine the
project is in the category and there are no extraordinary
circumstances present. If these conditions are met, the action
can be CE’d from any more thorough NEPA process.
How do you challenge the use of a CE?
The first way to challenge the use of a CE is to argue it is
not in the category. The Forest Service will often try to use a
CE for projects that do not fall within the categories set forth
in their regulations. It is important to remember that the
examples listed in the regulations are not the only items in the
category. Make sure you properly identify the category (i.e.,
“repair and maintenance of administrative sites”). Then you
16
can argue that the action was not in the category.
You can argue the project does not fit the plain language
of the category. You can also use the drafting history (i.e.,
Federal Register Notices) of the CE regulations. They have
information about the intent of the Forest Service. The
citation for the first notice is 56 FR 19718; (April 29, 1991).
The final notice is at 57 FR 43180 (September 18, 1992 ).
The second way to challenge the use of a CE is to argue
that an extraordinary circumstance is present. The Forest
Service NEPA Regulations at 1909.15 FSH § 30.3(2) state:
“2. Extraordinary circumstances include, but are not
limited to, the presence of the following: a. Steep slopes or
highly erosive soils. b. Threatened and endangered species or
their critical habitat. c. Flood plains, wetlands, or municipal
watersheds. d. Congressionally designated areas, such as
wilderness, wilderness study areas, or National Recreation
Areas. e. Inventoried roadless areas. f. Research Natural Areas.
g. Native American religious or cultural sites, archaeological
sites, or historic properties or areas.”
If any of these extraordinary circumstances are present,
the Forest Service cannot legally use a CE. They must prepare
either an EA or EIS.
Following the law gets in the Forest Service’s way so they
have come up with an illegal way to get around this require-
ment. Instead of preparing an EA or EIS when extraordinary
circumstances are present, the Forest
Service will often prepare an internal
analysis and then claim there will be no
significant effects to the extraordinary
circumstance and then use a CE. This is
illegal and we have proven it in court.
The best case is the Court of Appeals
ruling in our lawsuit over a project on the
Shawnee National Forest: Rhodes v.
Johnson, 153 F.3d 785 (C.A.7(Ill.)1998).
Another relevant case is Bensman v. United
States Forest Service, 984 F.Supp. 1242,
1250 (W.D.Mo. (1997). There are two more
cases that have also ruled that this practice
is illegal: Washington Trails Association v. United States Forest
Service, 935 F. Supp. 1117 (W.D. Wash. 1996); and High Sierra
Hikers Ass’n v. Powell, 150 F.Supp.2d 1023, 1044 (N.D. Cal.
2001).
The Forest Service recently issued a proposal to change
their regulations to get around all these court rulings. 66 FR
48412. We contend that this proposal is illegal and that we
will challenge the agency if they adopt it. We even have
memos from their own attorneys telling them that what they
are proposing is illegal.
What about comments and appeals?
When the Forest Service proposed to eliminate appeals of
their projects, Congress responded by passing the Appeals
Reform Act. 16 USC § 1600NOTE. The law required the Forest
Service to provide a comment and appeals process for
“projects and activities implementing” Forest Plans. Despite
this Congressional action, the Forest Service did not provide a
comment and appeals process for projects approved with CEs
Heartwood and other groups filed a Petition for
Rulemaking arguing that the Appeal Reform Act requires the
Forest Service to provide a 30 day comment period and
appeals for projects approved with a CE. The Forest Service
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
denied our petition. Heartwood then
sued the Forest Service. We settled the
lawsuit and the Forest Service agreed to
immediately start providing comments
and appeals for many projects including
many ORV projects. They also agreed to
start rulemaking to make additional
projects subject to appeal.
After we settled our lawsuit with
the Forest Service, the Blue Ribbon
Coalition sought to intervene and to
vacate the settlement. The judge issued
an absurd ruling that completely
ignored all the guidance from the 7th
Circuit. He let them intervene and
vacated the settlement. We appealed to
the 7th Circuit, just had oral arguments
on the case and hope to prevail.
While the regulations do not
currently require a 30 day comment
period, they still must conduct scoping
for projects that are categorically
excluded. 1909.15 FSH § 30.3(3).
Scoping is an initial step in the NEPA
process allowing interested citizens to
identify issues that the Forest Service
should address. It is also the time when
you should argue that the proposal is
not in the category and/or that extraor-
dinary circumstances are present.
Since projects approved with a CE
are not subject to appeal, the Forest
Service can implement the project as
soon as the decision is made. Your only
recourse is to file a lawsuit. But you
have to act quickly. To prevent you from
suing, the Forest Service will often issue
a CE for an ORV race, rally or similar
project on the day that project is to be
implemented. You may not find out
about the decision until after the project
is already carried out. To avoid this, you
must be vigilant about conveying your
interest in such projects to the relevant
Forest Service staff, you must be vigilant
in monitoring NEPA project schedules
(issued by every Ranger District) and
advertisements for the activities you are
concerned about.
While it can be difficult to stop a
categorically excluded project, if the
use of the CE is inappropriate you
should try, and you should document
the impacts of the project so that you
are in a stronger position to require a
full environmental analysis and public
participation process if the proposal
reappears in the following year.
If you need a copy of the Federal
Register Notices, Forest Service NEPA
Regulations, or the cases I mention go
to http://webpages.charter.net/
jbensman1/. Our comments on the
recent FS proposal are also there.
— Jim Bensman is Forest Watch
coordinator for Heartwood. Reach him
at jbensman1@charter.net.
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
Activist Spotlight
The Activist Spotlight shares the stories of some of the incredible activists we work
with, both as a tribute to them and to highlight successful strategies and lessons
learned. Please email your nomination for the Activist Spotlight to
jenbarry@wildlandscpr.org.
Activist Spotlight honors
the outstanding work of Florida
Biodiversity Project volunteer
Brian Scherf. Brian has been
defending Florida’s imperiled
wildlands since 1968, when the
construction of State Road 84
sliced through the heart of
Florida’s Everglades. That’s over
30 years of dedication!
In 1993 Brian united with
other activists to form the
Florida Biodiversity Project
(FBP). FBP, a member of the
Natural Trails and Waters
Coalition, works proactively to
preserve and restore Florida’s
native ecosystems. FBP utilizes
a variety of tactics to compel
agencies to follow environmen-
tal laws, pushing them to
include the best scientific data Photo courtesy of the Florida Biodiversity Project.
in their decision making.
In 1995 Brian helped FBP file suit against the National Park Service (NPS) for
ORV damage in Big Cypress National Preserve, home to an exceptional number of
endangered species (including the Florida panther) and rich in biodiversity. The
subsequent settlement agreement forced the NPS to prepare an ORV Management
Plan/Supplemental EIS. The Plan disclosed a disturbing fact: the Preserve has over
23,000 miles of mainly user-created ORV trails — nearly enough to encircle the
earth! Last January, FBP, Wildlands CPR, and a number of other groups formed a
coalition of defendant intervenors to defend the ORV Management Plan against a
lawsuit filed by pro-ORV organizations. In the words of Jacob Smith, ORV Policy
Coordinator for Wildlands CPR, “Brian has worked tirelessly to protect Big Cypress.
Without his deep commitment to saving this priceless ecosystem, it would have
been destroyed by irresponsible off-road vehicle use long ago.”
Brian is working to have U.S. Hwy 41 and I-75 elevated where they cross the
Everglades to allow for safe wildlife passage under the roads, and he’s fighting the
expansion of U.S. Hwy 1 in the Florida Keys. Brian keeps road and ORV issues
germane by attending local meetings, monitoring field impacts, and traveling to
Washington D.C. to press his congressional delegation for action.
Brian’s hard work pays off. Attorney Amy Atwood with Meyer and Glitzenstein,
says: “Brian is incredibly passionate and dedicated when it comes to his work on
environmental issues. He accomplishes most of his work during his own time, works
tirelessly to produce famously long and detailed comment letters to agencies,
attends public meetings, and is tenacious about following through on his FOIA
requests. Brian is so persistent that he is no match for those who seek to continue to
degrade Florida’s amazing biodiversity and natural resources.”
In addition to a hefty schedule of volunteer work, Brian also holds a full-time
job as a travel counselor with the American Automobile Association, working one-
on-one with AAA members to help them plan their travel routes. Many AAA mem-
bers travel to National Parks or across natural areas by car, and to Brian, this
presents a perfect opportunity to educate them about the ecological condition of
these areas. Brian notes that on US or regional maps it is easy to contrast the dense
spider web network of roads with the relatively tiny area of preserves. Most AAA
members are unaware of road impacts and Brian is not shy when it comes to
engaging people in conversation about these issues. Often, he will even suggest ways
they can take action themselves.
Thanks Brian for your hard work making Florida’s natural world a better place.
Contact Brian at b.scherf@worldnet.att.net
17
 Around the Office…
Thanks
Wildlands CPR would like to thank the following
foundations for their generous grants: Patagonia — Dillon
Outlet; and thePage Foundation
And thanks to all the others who responded so
generously to our “Give Thanks” appeal, including:
* Hi Fidelity Investment Charitable Gift Fund
* Bank of America Charitable Fund (anonymously)
Newsletter Distributors
We would like to thank the following Wildlands CPR
members for distributing The Road-RIPorter in their
hometowns: Andrew Laird, Stockbride, Michigan; Larry
Glass, Eureka, California; Scott Silver, Bend, Oregon; Howie
Wolke, Conner, Montana; Catherine Landis, Syracuse, New
York; Howard Wilshire, Sebastopol, California; John Noyes,
Kalispell, Montana; and Mary Hindelang, PhD. Chassell, MI.
Thank you all! If you are interested in doing the same,
email Jen Barry at jenbarry@wildlandscpr.org or call our
office at 406-543-9551. We’d send you about 15 copies—
more or less is fine—for distribution, and offer you a
complimentary membership for your efforts.
Welcome
Wildlands CPR welcomes two new activists to our
staff: Nicky Phear and Lisa Philipps. Lisa comes to us from
Colorado, where she was working on off-road vehicle
issues. She is taking over as the Grassroots Coordinator for
the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. Lisa has done
extensive field monitoring and worked for Colorado Wild
before joining us at Wildlands CPR & Natural Trails. Her
breadth of experience is refreshing and we’re sure she’ll
keep you well-informed, while keeping us on our toes.
Much to our chagrin, Jacob Smith has decided to move
in a new activist direction. Starting in January, he began
splitting his position with Nicky, and he will be working on
protecting native grasslands through the Center for Native
Ecosystems during the other half of his time. Fortunately,
he’s made the transition as painless as possible by giving
us a year to adjust to life after Jacob.
During that year, Jacob will continue working out of
the Colorado office, and Nicky will be working on off-road
vehicle issues in our main office in Montana. Nicky brings
a diverse background of outdoor education leadership and
activism. Most recently she completed a stint as the acting
Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. We
couldn’t be happier to have two such terrific people join
our staff, and we’re sure you’ll find them as resourceful
and helpful as their predecessors and co-workers. Wel-
come aboard Nicky and Lisa!
New Office
After nearly five years of our beloved — if a bit
decrepid — grain elevator, and nearly seven years sharing
space with Missoula’s Ecology Center, Wildlands CPR is
moving to a new office space in downtown Missoula.
We’ve tried to maintain some continuity by finding
another funky space, but it certainly has a different feel to
it than our current digs. We’ll miss the EcoCenter, but
we’ve really outgrown our space there.
Moving does have significant added costs, so if you’d
like to make an extra donation, we’d sure appreciate it!
18
Resources
Printed Materials
Road-Ripper's Handbook ($20.00, $30 non-members) — A com-
prehensive activist manual that includes the five Guides listed
below, plus The Ecological Effects of Roads, Gathering In-
formation with the Freedom of Information Act, and more!
Road-Ripper's Guide to the National Forests ($5, $8 non-mem-
bers) — By Keith Hammer. How-to procedures for getting
roads closed and revegetated, descriptions of environmental
laws, road density standards & Forest Service road policies.
Road-Ripper's Guide to the National Parks ($5, $8 non-mem-
bers) — By David Bahr & Aron Yarmo. Provides background
on the National Park System and its use of roads, and out-
lines how activists can get involved in NPS planning.
Road-Ripper's Guide to the BLM ($5, $8 non-members) — By
Dan Stotter. Provides an overview of road-related land and
resource laws, and detailed discussions for participating in
BLM decision-making processes.
Road-Ripper's Guide to Off-Road Vehicles ($5, $8 non-mem-
bers) — By Dan Wright. A comprehensive guide to reducing
the use and abuse of ORVs on public lands. Includes an ex-
tensive bibliography.
Road-Ripper’s Guide to Wildland Road Removal ($5, $8 non-
members) — By Scott Bagley. Provides technical informa-
tion on road construction and removal, where and why roads
fail, and how you can effectively assess road removal projects.
Trails of Destruction ($10) — By Friends of the Earth and Wild-
lands CPR, written by Erich Pica and Jacob Smith. This re-
port explains the ecological impacts of ORVs, federal fund-
ing for motorized recreation on public lands, and the ORV
industry’s role in pushing the ORV agenda.
Online Resources
Visit our Web Site at http://www.WildlandsCPR.org
You’ll find educational materials, back issues of The Road-
RIPorter (including all our bibliography, legal and field
notes), and current action alerts.
Also at the site, we’ve got a link to an ORV Information Site
with an interactive map-based database on each National
Forest’s ORV Policy.
Now available on our site:
Ecological Impacts of Roads: A Bibliographic Database
(Updated Jan. 2001) — Contains approx. 6,000 citations —
including scientific literature on erosion, fragmentation,
sedimentation, pollution, effects on wildlife, aquatic and
hydrological effects, and other information on the impacts
of roads.
Environmental Impacts of Motorized Recreation:
A Bibliography
This is a 5000 citation bibliography of scientific studies,
government reports, and related documents on the
environmental impacts of motorized recreation. The
documents cited here include scientific studies on a wide
variety of adverse impacts, including: soil erosion and soil
compaction, sedimentation, pollution, wildlife disturbance,
habitat fragmentation and degradation, and others.
Subscribe to our online list-serves. Check the boxes on the
member form and receive Skid Marks and/or our Activist
Alerts over email.
The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002
 Membership and Refer a friend to
Wildlands CPR!
Order Information Send us the names and addresses of friends
you think may be interested in receiving
membership information from Wildlands CPR.

Join the Rip-a-Road-a-Month Club!

To help ensure steady support for Wildlands CPR, Yes! I’d like to join Wildland CPR’s
please consider our new Rip-a-Road-a-Month Club! new Rip-a-Road-a-Month Club!
NEW!

It’s simple: Please withdraw my monthly donation

Instead of a yearly membership fee, a monthly
donation can be automatically withdrawn from your
checking account. Everyone spends five dollars a
month on something frivolous. Why not spend $5 a
month or more to protect wild places?
via automatic checking account debit.
Day of month for debit __________________
Amount to withdraw ____________________

Consider this: Signature _____________________________

$5 (a movie ticket) You won’t
$10 (lunch out) even miss it! Please include a voided check!
$15 (round of lattes) All information will be kept confidential.

Wildlands CPR Membership/Order Form

I have enclosed my tax-deductible Wildlands CPR Send me these Wildlands CPR Publications:
membership contribution of: Qty: Title/Price Each: Total:
$1,000 $250 $50 family $15 living lightly
/
$500 $100 $30 standard other
/
Rip-a-Road-a-Month Membership (fill out above form)
/
Type of Membership:
Total of all items:
Individual Organization (put name below)
Prices include shipping: for Priority Mail add $3.50 per item;
Organization for Canadian orders, add $6.50 per item.
Name International Membership — $30 Minimum. All prices in U.S. Dollars
Ask about reduced rates for items ordered in bulk.
Name
Check here if you are interested in helping
to distribute The Road-RIPorter in your area
Address
Check here to receive our ORV and road email
newsletter, “Skid Marks,” every few weeks.
City, State,
Check here for our Email Activist List.
Zip Please remember to include your email address!
Phone Check here for our RIP-Web non-paper option. Get
the RIPorter online before it gets printed!
Please include your email address!
Email
Pay by Credit Card: ❏ Visa ❏ MasterCard
Please send this form and your check payable to: Cardholder name: __________________________________
Wildlands CPR • PO Box 7516 • Missoula, Montana 59807 Card # ___________________________ Exp. date: _______

The Road-RIPorter January/February 2002 19

Visions…

Photo by Cate Campbell.

Non-profit Organization
US POSTAGE
PAID
MISSOULA, MT 59801
PERMIT NO. 569

Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads

P.O. Box 7516
Missoula, MT 59807

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.”

—Rumi

The Road-RIPorter is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled, process chlorine-free bleached paper.