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From the Friday, Feb 8th, 2006 of the Aspen Daily News
David Frey
Local environmentalists are gearing up to try to protect thousands of acres in the White River National Forest they feel could be threatened if they are not kept free of roads.
This battle has environmentalists not just fighting the political fight but doing something political efforts don't often include. Taking a hike. Or go snowshoeing. Or a bike ride.
"Now there's going to be more action, and more fun, frankly," said Dave Reed, development director for the Wilderness Workshop, the group that, along with the Colorado Mountain Club, is organizing a citizens' effort to protect acreage on the White River National Forest that have been designated as roadless.
After the Bush administration removed protections for roadless areas imposed by the Clinton administration, it fell to individual states to make a case for what areas should be protected from road-building. Colorado formed a task force to study the issue and make recommendations to Gov. Bill Owens for what areas to protect.
In June, the task force will meet in Glenwood Springs to consider what areas on the White River National Forest should be kept roadless. Environmentalists hope to come armed with examples from the ground about how they believe roads could impact the landscape and wildlife.
They are meeting with interested residents tonight at 7 p.m. at WestStar Bank in Glenwood Springs to work out their strategy.
"What we're hoping to do is actually have people visit a roadless area and sort of adopt it," said Jim Campbell, of Glenwood Springs, who has been active in the campaign. "They become familiar with that roadless area and are able to speak with some knowledge about a particular area and the value of keeping it in a roadless condition."
Environmentalists say some 640,000 acres on the White River National Forest could be affected by the loss of the roadless protections. They are especially concerned about areas like Thompson Creek, west of Carbondale, an area that could see an expansion of roads for the natural gas industry, and Red Table Mountain, near Basalt, a target for military helicopter training.
Some 4.4 million acres are at stake statewide.
"I think there are a lot of misconceptions among our community about what roadless means," said Claire Bastable, with the Colorado Mountain Club. "Roadless means just this: keep it the way that it is. It doesn't mean no motorized use. It doesn't mean no access."
While environmentalists believe some roadless areas have qualities that could make them eligible for stricter wilderness designation, many are already laced with routes that allow for dirt bikes and ATVs.
Keeping them roadless wouldn't bar vehicles from places where they are allowed, Bastable said.
But environmentalists also worry that allowing roads could harm habitat and forever bar wilderness-quality areas from receiving tighter federal protections.
"It opens the flood gates to energy development, logging, road building, mining, anything that might be done with that land," Reed said.
Some hunters have sought to drop roadless protections in an effort to make more land open to hunters on motorized vehicles.
But environmentalists hope to join with hunters and anglers interested in maintaining roadless protections. They say hunters will actually suffer by seeing habitat damaged. Some species are afraid to cross roads. Rivers could be dirtied by runoff from roads.
"If we have more roads coming in, there's a pretty good chance we're going to have more islands of habitat that are separated from other habitat," said Campbell, a former instructor of a semester-long wilderness program at Colorado Mountain College. "This is not going to be a good thing for either hunting or wildlife viewing."
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