Hey all, I’m still here.
Been a busy few months and I’ve been slacking on H&T but I’m hoping to keep it a bit more consistent. But, a break is always nice. Did a bit of traveling, ran the UTMR 60k, and been quite busy with work. More to come.
I originally worked on this topic with AllTrails, but the comment period on the Roadless Rule rescission is ongoing until Sept 21th (despite the initial social media blitz dying down a bit), and it’s as good a topic as any to kick myself back into gear on here.
Thanks for reading.
Kyle
If you’ve hiked Franconia Ridge in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Art Loeb Trail in North Carolina’s Pisgah, Baker Lake in Washington’s North Cascades, or long sections of the PCT and the CDT, you spent a good chunk of that day inside what’s called an “inventoried roadless area” or IRA. You probably didn’t realize you were in a designated “roadless area” at all.
Since 2001, these places have been protected by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits most new road construction and commercial logging on a subset of National Forest land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently in the process of rescinding it. The rescission affects about 45 million acres of land across the country (Colorado and Idaho have their own state-specific versions of the rule that are excluded from this action).
The formal proposal to remove the rule dropped in late August, and the public comment window runs through September 21.
Submit a public comment to the USDA
Roadless is not Wilderness
The land protected by the Roadless Rule was originally selected from two decades of Forest Service work that identified blocks of undeveloped land (generally 5,000 or more contiguous acres without permanent roads), and smaller parcels adjacent to existing Wilderness. It involved a multi-year process with over 600 public meetings and 1.6 million public comments (the most any federal rulemaking had ever received at the time). It also survived four administrations and a long history of litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined to review it in 2012.
The “prohibition” of new construction and logging outlined in the rule isn’t absolute. There are explicit exceptions for road work tied to public health and safety, environmental cleanup, access to inholdings, and fire response. Logging is restricted but not banned outright, and there are allowances for cutting to reduce fire risk and for ecosystem restoration. Existing roads and trails stay in place, and hunting, fishing, biking, and motorized use on existing, designated routes all continue. The rule primarily restricts new, large-scale development. What it doesn’t do (although critics sometimes describe it this way) is prevent all uses of the land.
Perhaps most important to note, IRAs aren’t capital-W Wilderness. Wilderness areas are one of the strictest federal land protections we have. They require an act of Congress to designate, and prohibit all motorized and mechanized travel including mountain bikes. Roadless areas are a bit looser; they allow things like biking, snowmobiling, hunting, fishing, and more. In many ways, they’re kinda like the “happy medium” of land designations.
Roadless areas don’t overlap with National Parks either. The designation only applies to National Forests, which are managed by the USDA for multiple uses, including timber, grazing, mining, recreation, and watershed protection. About 37 million of the 193 million acres managed by the Forest Service are designated Wilderness. Another 58 million (including the roughly 13 million in Colorado and Idaho) is covered by the Roadless Rule (about 30%). And the remaining 50% is open to recreation, logging, mining, grazing, and drilling as part of multiple-use management.
If you want to see an interactive map of IRAs, I’ve got one here.
What rescission removes
Rescinding the rule does not mandate logging anywhere. It doesn’t mean that trails will be replaced with roads, or even that any roads will be built. It doesn’t eliminate any Wilderness designations, override the Endangered Species Act, or bypass the National Environmental Policy Act. Although it’s a compelling headline, the 45 million acres of land involved are not suddenly going to be clearcut overnight.
But what it does do is remove a 25-year-old baseline of protections. That’s why I think anyone who cares about public lands should be concerned. Right now, a new road or logging proposal has to clear a pretty high bar. Without the rule in place, that bar gets lower.
In most affected areas, nothing dramatic will happen overnight. The economics simply don’t work out for logging and agencies don’t have the capacity (or the funds, honestly) to be building a ton of new roads. But a slow chipping away of norms due to a lack of resources doesn’t mean these places are safe. In places where the pressure and infrastructure for logging is already present (Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is a good example), there will be real proposals and real fights, much sooner.
The arguments for rescission don’t hold up
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the rescission in June 2025 at a Western Governors’ Association meeting in New Mexico, framing it as necessary for active forest management and wildfire prevention. Industry groups, including the American Forest Resource Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association have publicly supported the move. Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski has wanted the Tongass exempted for years.
The administration’s main (public) argument in favor of rescission is for wildfire prevention. They lean on the perspective that the Roadless Rule is actively preventing forest management like thinning, prescribed burns, and fuel reduction, and that it’s partially to blame for the destructive wildfire seasons over the last few years.
But…the rule already allows that kind of work. It already has exceptions for fuel treatment, prescribed burns, and emergency firefighting. According to Trout Unlimited, nearly 2 million acres of inventoried roadless area have been treated under the existing rule, and none of the 148 recommendations from the bipartisan Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission mention the Roadless Rule at all. A January 2026 study in Fire Ecology found that fire ignitions are about four times more common within 50 meters of roads than in roadless areas. About 84% of wildfires are human-caused…and humans get to forests via roads. It’s not a far leap to say that more roads have a very good chance of leading to more opportunities for human-caused ignitions.
The logging argument doesn’t hold up much better. Despite an administration push for more logging, federal timber sales in areas like these have already been operating at a loss for decades. Mike Dombeck, who was Forest Service chief when the rule was originally written, pointed out that roadless areas represent only about 8% of the productive timber base. Most IRAs are roadless because they’re steep, remote, and low-value (from a logging perspective, anyway; all public lands are valuable). There’s not a great economic case here, given these are places that mostly weren’t going to be logged anyway.
So what’s this really about?
One aspect of rescission is that it would “return authority to local forest managers who know the land best.” That sounds reasonable until you think about what it actually means from a management perspective. The roadless protections that currently live in one national rule would instead live in individual forest plans, each changeable, each on a separate review and revision cycle, and each subject to whoever is currently running the agency or local office. That kind of fragmentation is great for private industry to influence local decisions, and not so great for broad, consistent conservation and wilderness policy.
It’s part of a broader pattern. Over the past year, the Trump administration has moved to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil leasing, reverse a 2023 mining ban around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, accelerate construction of Alaska’s Ambler Road through previously protected terrain, mandate increased timber production across both Forest Service and BLM lands, and cut workforce capacity at the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management. The reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante has already resulted in mining claims being made in the area, only a month later after the removal of protections.
These are different decisions affecting different places and agencies, but together they share a theme. Less land held back from development, and fewer people inside the agencies to slow it down.
The rule isn't the problem
The Roadless Rule isn’t being rescinded because it’s failing, no matter how many times Secretary Rollins calls it “the failed roadless rule.” Take your pick…public support, court cases, ecological outcomes: by any measure, it’s been one of the more successful federal land protections of the last 50 years. When USDA opened a comment window last fall, more than 600,000 comments came in and the Center for Western Priorities found that 99.2% opposed rescission.
It’s being rescinded because it’s in the way of private interests.
The immediate result is not “your favorite trail is about to be clearcut”; that mostly isn’t true, and dramatic headlines give the people pushing for rescission an easy way to dismiss opposition as hysterical. But even the most conservative concerns are still sobering. A 25-year protection that was working just fine is being removed as part of a pattern of deregulation in favor of private industry, and the agencies responsible for managing the impacts are being hollowed out at the same time.
Whether the immediate effect on the trail you hiked last weekend is large or small, the framework for roadless areas, wilderness, and environmental protections is being deliberately dismantled.
Five minutes, one comment
The comment period on rescission is now open and runs through September 21. Last year, public lands advocates killed Lee’s public land sell-off with a flood of calls and emails. That pressure worked then. It can work now.