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Colorado’s Roadless Rule Debate: How Did We Get Here?

By Bobby Magill, 5-05-11

Flickr photo by AlphaTangoBravo/Adam Baker.

Roadless areas are not quite wilderness, but they’re not quite freely open to development either.

They’re somewhere in between, particularly in Colorado, where the fate of roadway-free, undeveloped national forest land has been rancorously contested for a decade and could soon end up with a management scheme entirely unique to the state.

On April 14, the U.S. Forest Service and the state of Colorado unveiled a final draft of a federal rule that will govern how more than 4 million acres of roadless land in Colorado’s national forests are managed. The Forest Service is asking for public feedback on the draft rule through July 14, with the feds’ final blessing expected sometime late this year or in early 2012.

If the Forest Service finalizes the rule, it would mean roadless areas in Colorado will probably get different treatment than similar roadless areas elsewhere in the country. The Colorado rule involves two different levels of roadless area protection, one keeping the land more wild than the other, while allowing some logging of trees killed by mountain pine beetles and some rights-of-way for oil, natural gas, coal and ski area development.

Initially, roadless areas were designed to be wilderness on a diet: They were meant to be primitive, but not necessarily pristine, without significant signs of previous development and, with some exceptions, no new roads were allowed. No new roads meant no new development, which meant that roadless areas could look and feel very wild, but you could still ride bikes, some motorized vehicles and other equipment barred from wilderness areas where all vehicles with motors and gears are contraband.

When you think of wilderness areas in Colorado’s national forests, think of the Maroon Bells, the Indian Peaks forming Denver’s rugged northwestern western skyline or the serrated spine of the Never Summer Range on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park — areas of almost iconic and dramatic beauty given the government’s greatest protections from development and off-road vehicles.

Roadless areas aren’t quite as iconic. They include parts of western Colorado’s Battlement Mesa and the rugged Grizzly Creek gorge in White River National Forest and narrow strips of forest on the edge of the Medicine Bow Mountains in Roosevelt National Forest — tracts of national forest land bordering wilderness areas or land that, for whatever reason, has been overlooked for wilderness designation.

How Colorado’s roadless areas got to where they are today is a complex tale involving nine federal lawsuits, dueling judges in California and Wyoming and, among many other things, three different roadless rules.

Each of the three roadless rules is a product of wildly shifting political winds:

• The Clinton Rule — This is the original Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which took effect in the final days of Bill Clinton’s presidency in 2001. It protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest land across the country from road graders, loggers and oil company drilling rigs. Environmentalists idealize the Clinton Rule as the apex of roadless area conservation, and many hope it’ll eventually be the law of the land everywhere.

• The Bush Rule — After George W. Bush took office less than two weeks after the Clinton Rule was made public, nine federal lawsuits were filed against the Clinton rule, and in 2003, a federal court in Wyoming tossed the rule out as illegal, a case now being reviewed by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Instead of having one roadless policy apply to all the states equally, in 2005 the Bush administration created its own roadless rule, the Bush Rule, also called the “State Petitions” rule. That rule gave each state license to decide the fate of its roadless areas so long as the Forest Service approved.

• The Colorado Rule — Given the chance to influence how the state’s roadless areas would be governed, Colorado lawmakers pounced, and in 2005, state lawmakers approved a bill creating a 13-member bipartisan task force that would help create a roadless rule unique to Colorado. Idaho was the only other state to take advantage of a state-specific roadless rulemaking process.

  At stake were 4.4 million acres of wild lands in Colorado — whittled down to just under 4.2 million acres through a long revision process — some of which have been targeted by the coal, oil and gas and skiing industries for development.

  The Colorado task force met with thousands of people during public meetings in 2005 and 2006 and created a list of recommendations for how the state’s roadless areas should be managed. Over the next two years, Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration created a draft of a state roadless rule, but after it was published in 2008, public outcry about how much road building and tree cutting it would allow prompted the state to add in more restrictions.

  The final draft issued in April allows less development and logging in Colorado’s roadless areas. The rule carves out about 540,000 acres of roadless land for the Forest Service’s highest level of roadless area protection, providing stricter standards for development there. On Colorado’s remaining 3.6 million acres of roadless land, the Forest Service could allow some restricted road building, tree cutting, pipeline construction and energy development.

The Forest Service can decide to scrap the Colorado Roadless Rule altogether and reinstate the Clinton Rule in Colorado, or it can amend the Colorado Roadless Rule, bestowing an additional 2 million acres with the agency’s highest level of roadless area protection.

Then there’s the Forest Service’s final option: Toss out the Colorado Roadless Rule altogether and scrap all the state’s roadless areas, returning them to their original unprotected status.

Whatever the decision, the final word on roadless areas in Colorado and across the country will likely be heard only after the courts have made their final judgments on the matter, something that, given the long and conflicting history of roadless areas in the West, could still be many years away.

Bobby Magill can be found online at www.bobbymagill.com.

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