More than a “land without roads”
Wyoming’s roadless areas are the state’s hidden gems
by Molly Absolon
 Along the eastern flanks of the Wind River Mountains, Canyon Creek slices down through layers of limestone, dolomite and sandstone on its way out of the mountains and into the Wind River Valley. The drainage created by the creek as it cuts down to the plains is similar to nearby Sinks Canyon with its towering cliffs and sloping meadows, but Sinks Canyon is often crowded with visitors who make the easy drive up from Lander to hike, climb or just escape the heat of town for the afternoon. In Canyon Creek, you almost never see anyone.
I first hiked up Canyon Creek nearly ten years ago. My friends and I dropped into the valley near where the creek flows into the Little Popo Agie River and hiked upstream. After a few too many tangles with brush and boulders, we abandoned any attempt at keeping our feet dry. Walking in the stream provided the easiest travel path in this land with no trails, thick vegetation and lots of small cliff bands to navigate. We scrambled around waterfalls cascading over moss-covered rock bands and crawled through tangled underbrush before the canyon floor opened up into a wide meadow sprinkled with late season asters. It was a beautiful, wild place.
Canyon Creek, in the Shoshone National Forest, is just one of 115 inventoried roadless areas in Wyoming. “Roadless” is a technical term for national forest lands greater than 5,000 acres that have no maintained roads and are essentially “natural.” In Wyoming, there are more than 3.2 million acres of designated roadless areas ranging in size from small chunks like the 7,000-acre Canyon Creek parcel to the state’s largest, the 315,647-acre Grayback Roadless Area in the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
These special places are now up for grabs. President Clinton’s roadless rule from 2001, which issued a moratorium on future road building in these wild lands, was overturned in 2005. The Bush administration is now calling for state governors to petition the secretary of agriculture with specific requests for roadless area protection within their state boundaries. Governor Freudenthal has decided the best way to determine the management of roadless areas is through the forest plan revision process, currently underway on both the Shoshone and Bridger-Teton national forests.
Giving Roadless Areas a Face
 When you look at a map of Wyoming’s roadless areas, the pattern of distribution is easy to determine. Many of these lands are along the edges of mountain ranges; they are the treed lowlands and open parks that were not designated as wilderness when the icy peaks above were set aside. Often they are within easy reach of communities and many Wyoming citizens use them for recreation.
“I like to head for the open spaces where I can get away from people,” says Jim Pratt of Powell. Pratt, who is retired, is a member of the Backcountry Horsemen of America and a frequent user of both Wyoming’s wilderness and its roadless areas. “I like to get up early and watch the sun come up, build a fire, sleep outside, all the things you go out there for.
“I’m very much in favor of roadless,” he continues. “I’ve lived in Oregon where there are roads everywhere. The last thing I want to do is ride down roads. It’s terrible. When that happens here, I’ll get rid of my horses.”
Across the state, roadless areas provide Wyoming citizens with these kinds of back-to-nature getaways far from the crowds of Yellowstone or Grand Teton national parks. When you bump into someone up around Canyon Creek, chances are they are from Fremont County. The same is true for most of the other roadless lands in the state.
Many of the names of the specific roadless tracts are meaningless to all but nearby residents: Munger Mountain, LaBonte Canyon, Sand Creek, Little Bighorn Canyon, Libby Flats. But ask a local and you’re likely to hear stories about favorite hunting spots, secret fishing holes, and great wildlife watching. Unless you ask Jim Pratt. He’ll just give you a knowing smile. Jim’s not about to give away the whereabouts of any of his special rides.
Anita Bartosh, who lives in Marbleton on the eastern edge of the Wyoming Range where the state’s largest roadless area complex is located, said in a recent Wilderness Society report that everyone in her hometown heads into the roadless areas to recreate on the weekends.
“You name it, we do it up in the Wyoming Range,” she said. “We fish, hunt, snowmobile. It’s one of the reasons we live here.”
It may be the lack of a catchy name that has helped protect these lands from the overuse so common in more popular wilderness areas or national parks. Roadless areas are relatively undiscovered. For this reason, they provide exceptional opportunities for primitive recreation—hiking, horseback riding, cross-country skiing, climbing—as well as first-class wildlife habitat.
Supporters and Detractors: Who Has the Power?
The original 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule generated more than 1.5 million comments—more comments than any other federal rule has ever received. Ninety-five percent of these comments were in favor of continued protection for the nation’s remaining roadless areas.
A poll by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership found that 84 percent of hunters and 68 percent of anglers supported keeping roadless areas roadless. More remarkably, a poll of registered voters nationwide found that 76 percent favored roadless protection. This support crossed political parties: 62 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of Democrats, and 78 percent of Independents polled spoke up in support of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. But these voices fell on deaf ears.
The Bush administration’s reversal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule negated the three-year effort of countless administrators and citizens, wasted the millions of dollars that went into hosting public meetings and congressional hearings as well as to process written comments, and sent all of us back to the drawing board. Once again, we are being asked to voice our opinion on the future of roadless areas, but this time in a state-by-state, one-forest-at-a-time fashion.
What Other States Are Doing
Governors across the nation are opting for a variety of different responses to the Bush administration’s call for their input on the issue of roadless areas. Freudenthal, as mentioned above, will likely not submit a petition, but will continue to work with the forests to find a “balanced approach” to roadless area management. In Colorado, Gov. Bill Owen has initiated an involved public effort to solicit citizen input. Colorado has created a 13-member task force to hear public comments and make recommendations to the governor. This effort is being funded by a $110,000 grant from the Forest Service (High Country News, Dec. 26, 2005).
Elsewhere, governors are gathering public input through less formal channels. Idaho Gov. Kirk Kempthrone and Mont. Gov. Brian Schweitzer have asked their county commissioners to submit recommendations, and according to a High Country News article from Dec. 2005, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is considering a similar approach. In the summer of 2005, California, New Mexico and Oregon filed a lawsuit to reinstate the Clinton roadless rule. Oregon’s governor Ted Kulongoski originally petitioned the Department of Agriculture requesting the right to leave the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in place in Oregon, but this request was rejected by Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey.
Washington’s governor Chris Gregoire also asked the Department of Agriculture for an expedited process that would have allowed her state to adopt the roadless protections contained in the original rule. Like Kulongoski, Gregoire was told no and this February, Washington joined California, New Mexico and Oregon in their lawsuit against the federal government.
In Wyoming, the fate of the roadless lands in the Bighorn and Medicine Bow national forests appears to have already been determined given Gov. Freudenthal’s current position that the future of roadless areas should be decided by the forest plans. The Med-Bow’s forest plan was finalized in January 2004. In this document, 95 percent of the inventoried roadless areas in the forest have some level of protection. The Bighorn National Forest Plan, finalized in 2005, protects only 15 percent of the forest’s inventoried roadless areas from commercial logging, road building and motorized recreation.
For the Bridger-Teton and the Shoshone national forests, the planning process, which is scheduled to take three years, has just begun. Currently these forests are holding public meetings, working with a government cooperators group, and accepting public comments to define “desired conditions” for the respective forests. Once the desired conditions are determined, the next stage will involve mapping and management details.
Roadless Rule: A Balanced Solution
The Wyoming Outdoor Council favors reinstituting the original Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which would provide a national policy of protection for roadless areas. Roadless areas are not only popular recreational destinations, they are also rich in wildlife and fisheries.
We know the Roadless Area Conservation Rule provides a vision for these lands that has widespread public support. We are working with local sportsmen and women, backcountry horsemen, conservation groups, and both the Bridger-Teton and the Shoshone national forests to ensure roadless areas in these forests are protected. We’ll also be hosting forums and leading field trips to roadless areas around the state over the next year. And we have joined a national campaign to petition for the rule’s reenactment.
As Al Sammons told the Shoshone National Forest government cooperators on behalf of the Wind River Chapter of the Backcountry Horsemen of America in January 2006, “The Shoshone is a big, wild, rough, untrammeled, masterpiece of nature. These characteristics are why horsemen love this forest. The Shoshone should be managed to maintain this tradition.”
Wyoming is lucky to have several of these big, wild, rough, untrammeled masterpieces of nature left across the state. But they need our help to stay that way.
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