Mt. Hood National Forest has issued their decision to deommission 170 miles of unnecessary roads in the Collawash Watershed, in the Clackamas River Ranger District. Forest roads are expensive to maintain and can cause significant harm to fish and wildlife habitat. This project will decommission 39 percent of the roads in the watershed. The original proposed action would have decommissioned 255 miles, or 58 percent, of the roads in this watershed in recognition of the severe impacts these roads are having on aquatic habitat. While this project still will improve fish and wildlife habitat as well as drinking water quality, we are disappointed that the Forest Service has significantly scaled back the project in response to comments from the few individuals who use them on occassion instead of considering the greater public good. In addition, many roads would not be decommissioned for another five or ten years, after plantations in the area are logged. This watershed has been hammered with logging and road building for decades. Decommissioning roads will actually increase access for recreationists in the forest. How? Right now many roads in Mt. Hood are in pretty bad shape, and sometimes even blow out during major storms. This can make it really hard to reach major recreation destinations. Recent blow outs have made accessing places like Ramona Falls and the Bull of the Woods Wilderness almost impossible for months at a time. By decommissioning unneeded roads, the Forest Service will be able to focus its time and limited road maintenance funding on maintaining the main roads we use to access our favorite places in the Forest.The Forest Service has many options for how it will decommission roads. It can obliterate roads, literally taking them off the landscape and recontouring the landscape so that in a couple years it would be difficult to know a road had been there. It can also passively decommission roads, obliterating the first eighth of a mile and removing major features like culverts. And then of course the Forest Service can do something in between. Passively decommissioning roads is much cheaper than obliterating them, but they are also much easier to reopen for future logging projects and they are still scars on the landscape. We are concerned that the Forest Service might elect to passively decommission roads in sensitive areas when the right prescription might actually be to obliterate the road so they can store the it for future use. While we have concerns about how this project is implemented, we are pleased to see the Mt. Hood prioritizing road decommissioning and getting serious about road removal.

• Deconstruction in process
  Decommissioning old Forest Service roads in the Mt. Hood National Forest benefits plants, wildlife, humans
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• Road decommissioning in the Collawash River Watershed
  What does decommissioning roads entail and how does it help improve habitat and watershed health?
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• Report Gives Thumbs-Up to Pacific NW Legacy Roads Program
  Federal statistics show up to 24 jobs are created for every $1 million spent on these projects.
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