In his announcement of the Forest Service’s 18-month
road-building moratorium on Jan. 22, Chief Mike Dombeck admitted
that there are over 60,000 miles of unmapped “ghost roads’ in
national forests (HCN, 2/2/98). This was no news to members of the
Bozeman, Mont.-based Predator Project, whose Roads Scholars program
has been documenting these roads in the Northern Rockies since
1994.
“I’m just surprised that they acknowledged
the scope of the problem,” says Dave Havlick, the program’s
director. Ghost roads are usually created by off-road vehicles or
by logging operations that fail to close “temporary” roads. Since
roadless areas are important to large predators such as grizzly
bears, says Havlick, unmapped roads can lead the Forest Service to
overestimate the amount of available habitat. Unmaintained roads
also wash sediment into streams and contribute to landslides. The
agency has closed some roads with gates or other barricades, but
the Roads Scholars program found that barely half the closures are
keeping out motorized vehicles.
The Forest
Service will never be able to stop the illegal use of roads, says
agency spokesman Alan Polk, “but we can reduce the chances of those
roads being used.” He says the 18-month moratorium will give the
agency a chance “to get a good, solid inventory and an idea of how
many (roads) need to be decommissioned or upgraded.”
*Michelle
Nijhuis
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline ‘Ghost roads’ haunt forests.
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