If the Forest Service has no money for staffing, no money for fighting fires, and no money for maintaining our national treasures, then how in the hell can they afford to have totally destroyed
over 25,000 miles of roads in our park lands???

Flyin' Ryan

 

Environmental organizations have been running 3/4 page ads in the Washington Post, criticizing Clinton's "Roadless" initiative: the advertisers claim, he hasn't gone far enough!

These "greens" take Clinton to task, because the Forest Service included some old logging road as "existing" roads; the "tree huggers" falsely claim this procedure is a "loophole" enabling logging (horrors!) in the future.

Logging roads, regardless of their age, are just as "existing" roads as the Pacific Coast Highway or US 1; the difference, logging roads are used only when necessary for evacuating logs--logging roads may remain idle for generations, while trees, Americas renewable resource, renew themselves.

Anyway, the eco-activists lobby readers in their ads to contact their Congressmen to prevent the "destruction" of National Forests; they might similarly lobby readers to contact the Secretary of Agriculture to stop the "destruction" of wheat fields, corn fields, bean fields, etc., etc.

Tree Farmer

 

The story I read was an AP story, printed in the local newspaper. And when they say "roadless" they mean Roadless. They are ripping out existing bridges--they are removing culverts, where a creek goes under the road--and they actually have "native" seed that they blow onto the soil to allow the underbrush to grow back in. Within 18 months, the USFS claims that you'd never know that a road was ever there.

And, if you, as a private citizen and tax-payer, can no longer get to that favorite fly fishing hole of yours, well, tough stuff. The USFS has just taken that away from you. You did not get to vote on it. Your complaints fall on deaf ears.

In the meantime the USFS has no money.

Flyin' Ryan

 

FlyinRyan:
I'm with ya on this one. Where the hell do they get all the money to do this work, when they claim they don't have any to start with? How much damage are they doing tearing out all these bridges and culverts, to put the water ways back to al-natural? We already don't have that many places to ride out here in Washington, and yet up in the mountains, out in the middle of nowhere, they're removing what we do have. Live and let live. The roads that are already there, have been for how long now? Basically, the environment has already adapted to these conditions, so what the hell good is removing the roads going to do? They're going to do more damage removing them, spend more money they don't have, and take at least the next 18 months to re-new conditions. And all for what? To please the environazi's?

So what and where do you ride? I spend quite a bit of time outside of the Naches area, above Rimrock. I do a lot of elk hunting up there, and there are miles of endless roads you can run in nearly any direction. There are also tons of old Jeep trails the forest service has put in, and some of them are really nasty (tons of fun), and require lots of winching in certain places. Our property is outside of Omak, so I'm also up there quite a bit.

State primaries are September 19th. If you haven't already looked at it, you may want to. I've already sent letters to the rep's, and senators about this issue. The more we hound them, maybe we can accomplish something.

Good luck!

Mike