Earlier this year, I spoke at two public town halls held in Sacramento and South Lake Tahoe about the proposal by the Secretary of Agriculture to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule. The town halls were hosted by the Sierra Club and the Sierra Nevada Alliance, of which I am a board member, since the U.S. Forest Service did not host any public town halls on this proposal. This is in stark contrast to the 600 meetings held when the Roadless Rule was established, receiving 1.6 million comments, 95% of which were in favor.
I did not speak as a representative of the Sierra Nevada Alliance. Rather, I provided a perspective based on my 28-year career as a USFS hydrologist in the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.
My colleagues and I inventoried every mile of road in the LTBMU to identify road segments that should be reconstructed or eliminated to mitigate adverse impacts to water quality and stream channels. Working with our engineering, recreation, and vegetation management departments, the LTBMU eliminated 100 miles of legacy roads (left over from historic logging and unauthorized OHV use) and retrofitted almost every mile of the 250 miles of classified roads currently maintained on the forest to reduce erosion.
Why did we do this work? Because if not properly managed, roads can be the most significant cause of erosion and transport of sediments into streams and rivers from Forest Service land.
A well-designed road has minimal adverse impacts if maintained on average every two years. Conversely, poorly designed and unmaintained roads, especially in steep terrain near stream channels, can significantly impact water quality and stream channel health due to excessive sediment erosion and stormwater runoff.
While the LTBMU has largely kept up with road maintenance needs, the USFS currently has a backlog of billions of dollars in road maintenance. Meaning, maintaining roads is currently not happening at the frequency it should.
Which brings me to the 2001 Roadless Rule. For many reasons, the Roadless Rule is an important environmental policy providing a national framework for protecting large areas of Forest Service lands, particularly as recent funding cuts and staffing losses have created unprecedented chaos and uncertainty in the agency.
During my career, the Forest Service faced the reality of too many legacy roads, limited capacity to keep up on road maintenance, and both legacy roads and inadequately maintained designated roads contributing to significant water quality problems. The agency also recognized that large portions of the forest, far from communities and developed recreation and relatively road-free, should be kept that way.
And so, the Roadless Rule was born. And like with every good policy, care was taken to identify exceptions to improve wildlife habitat or reduce the risk of wildfire.
In the Tahoe Basin, a Roadless Rule exception that allows management to improve forest health and reduce the danger of large, destructive wildfires is currently being utilized for the Lake Tahoe West Restoration Project, planned to begin in October. This project proposes intensive fuels reduction and forest health treatments across roughly 60,000 acres along the West Shore, including a little over 3,000 acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs), for mechanical thinning, hand thinning, and prescribed fires. No new permanent roads will be built in the roadless area for this project.
I believe under the current administration, the proposed action to rescind the Roadless Rule would further open the door to its clearly stated goal of opening more land to commercial logging and motorized recreational use while at the same time, through reorganization and funding cuts, providing fewer resources to manage that land.
However, many forest managers, including myself, also believe there is an argument for updating the current roadless area boundaries and modifying rule exceptions to increase management access where there is a feasible opportunity to reduce catastrophic wildfire risk.
Public comment on rescinding the Roadless Rule opened Aug. 20. I recommend sending your message on this through three important nonprofits: Outdoor Alliance, Trout Unlimited, and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. The messaging from these nonprofits is on point, and your comments are automatically sent to congressional representatives and the Department of Agriculture. As with all public comments, personalize your message to identify what public lands in roadless areas are important to you and why.
Your voice matters, so I hope you will be a part of millions of people voicing support for protecting our roadless areas in 2026.
~ Sue Norman lives in Tahoe and currently serves on the Sierra Nevada Alliance Board. She recently published her memoir, RISK, A Life Saved by the River, and is working to help others amplify the power of the written word to protect public lands. Learn more at susannormanauthor.com.
