June 28th, 2007

The Columbian Editorial- In our view: Closing Roads

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Timothy Egan, who has written passionately and vividly about the Northwest for The New York Times and in books such as “The Good Rain,” wrote in a newspaper column this week of the creation of the U.S. Forest Service by President Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.

“A century later,” wrote Egan, who was a Columbian reporting intern three decades ago, “I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest … and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.

“If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line ¬ the place is yours,” he writes. “Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.”

Egan is correct in blaming the Bush administration, for which maintenance of national forest campgrounds and roads, as well as national parks, has not been a high priority. But it would be unfair to leave it at that or to suggest all of the road closures are bad news. In fact, many of the miles of roads taken out of service will never be missed by those seeking trailheads, campgrounds, berry fields or scenic drives.

At the moment, the Forest Service is planning the closure of 25 miles of roads in the Mount St. Helens Ranger District, as reported Monday by The Columbian’s Erik Robinson. As unpleasant as that task might be for an agency created to make national forests accessible for multiple uses, it is worth keeping in mind that there have been multiple factors and players in all of this. The whole story on Forest Service roads also includes the Northwest Forest Plan of the 1990s, created to save the spotted owl, and activists who oppose using national forests as a source of lumber.

When timber truly was king, with streams of log trucks out of the Gifford Pinchot to mills in the Columbia River Gorge, Toutle, Longview, Randle, and elsewhere, there was lots of road money from the buyers of standing timber. But that money has dried up, and not been replaced from the regular federal budget. As a result, roads have fallen into disrepair and been closed all over the Northwest.

Ron Freeman, of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest headquarters in Vancouver said Wednesday that there are 4,048 miles of roads in the Gifford Pinchot Forest. But 1,706 of those miles are closed or gated, in some cases to protect critical wildlife habitat but mostly for budgetary reasons.

Those roads could some day be reopened, depending on need and money. Another 350 miles of roads in the forest will never reopen. In the meantime, only 12 miles of new roads have been built in the forest since 1994.

“The whole grand plan was to build all these roads and have all the maintenance paid largely by logging,” Freeman said. “But nobody came up with an answer on how the system would work without timber money.”

Not appropriating money to maintain existing facilities such as the Cultus Creek Campground at the north end of the Indian Heaven Wilderness in Skamania County (its water system has been out of order for at least three summers) is poor policy and a disservice to campers and hikers. But closing some carefully selected, remote roads, which many would argue were overbuilt in the first place, is reasonable and sensible under the circumstances.