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Rocky Mountain Front's Future on the Block in New Travel Plan
Plan Should Rein In Destructive ORV Use. But Will It?
Montana’s spectacular Rocky Mountain Front is the eastern edge of an ecosystem that includes Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex.
Its grandeur hasn’t kept it off limits to unchecked and unmanaged off-road vehicle (ORV) use that damages so many of our public lands. The Forest Service is considering a travel plan that could shield the Front from the growing motorized threat, but only if the agency selects the sensible alternative in the process. We need your help to ensure that it does. The comment deadline is August 16, 2005.
| Sample Letter for Campaign |
Subject: Rocky Mountain Front Travel Plan
Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,
Please ensure that the final Front travel plan protects the quiet and peaceful forests that wildlife need and that most human visitors seek.
Only Alternative 3 will accomplish that and I urge you to select it. Other alternatives are seriously flawed. For example:
- Badger-Two Medicine. Alternative 4 allows continued motorized use on sensitive trails and ignores a Blackfeet Nation request for a ban on motorized use to protect its cultural traditions. Trails in the North Fork of Badger Creek, Hall Creek and Little Badger Creek should be closed to motorized use. But Alternative 4 wrongly leaves them open.
- Dupuyer Creek area. Three alternatives would allow motorized use in this area despite its wilderness qualities. The area provides a haven for big game that would otherwise move to private land.
- Renshaw Lake. Several alternatives would retain a motorized trail to this lake. Not only will this invite trespass and create significant enforcement problems, but it could jeopardize future wilderness designation.
Finally, several alternatives ignore the historic accord between the Montana Wilderness Association and some snowmobile groups to put the southern half of the Front off limits to snowmobiles. In return, conservationists agreed to support continued snowmobile access to select winter play areas in roaded parts of the Helena National Forest. Please honor this agreement.
Your decision to make trails closed unless open is an important step and I applaud it.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
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Campaign Launched:
July 29, 2005
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More about the Front and the ORV Threat
The Rocky Mountain Front is in the Lewis and Clark National Forest that includes parts of seven mountain ranges in north central Montana. The travel plan now in the works covers only the forest’s Rocky Mountain Division of which the Front is a part.
This landscape sustains incomparable natural values. It’s a place where the Rockies rise up against the plains in a 150-mile chain of limestone reefs. There is stunning scenery, largely unroaded terrain and key habitat that supports abundant wildlife. The Front is a crucial piece of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, one of the continent’s largest intact ecosystems.
A Legacy Shared, Valued
The Front’s transitional landscapes connect the mountainous summer wildlife range of the Bob Marshall Wilderness with seasonally crucial foothills and prairie to the east. The Front’s health is a conservation legacy that Montanans, regardless of politics and lifestyle, have treasured for a century.
Its habitat values are so exceptional that Montana’s wildlife authorities consider the long north-south strip to be in the top one percent of wildlife habitat in the lower 48 states. The Front holds one of the nation’s largest bighorn sheep herds and its second largest elk herd. In 1997 the Forest Service imposed a moratorium on oil and gas leasing on the Front in recognition of its natural values. The public overwhelmingly supported the decision.
You can learn more about the remarkable Rocky Mountain Front in the July issue of National Geographic. For an online preview, go to:
http://www.7nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/sights_n_sounds/index.html
The Growing ORV Menace
Across many of our public lands, off-road-vehicle use has proliferated, but the Front has remained relatively untrammeled by ORVs except for the Badger-Two Medicine area. Without a strong travel plan, though, motorized users will establish a presence in the Front’s unroaded areas.
As elsewhere on our public lands, the price for that use is high. Destructive, sometimes flatly irresponsible, ORV use has damaged soils, fragmented wildlife habitat, and spread noxious weeds. If left unchecked, ORV use could threaten future wilderness designations in a landscape worthy of that protection.
Neither the people nor the animals that use the Front are tolerant of ORVs. The roadless and wilderness-worthy lands on the Front are critical to wildlife. Among the species that move between protected summer range in the mountains to the west and low-lying areas of winter range in the Front are elk, bighorn sheep, deer, wolves, grizzly bears, lynx and wolverines. These creatures feed, breed and raise their young there and most are intolerant of noise and motorized intrusion.
Quiet, Traditional Recreation
Foot and horseback travel remain the dominant recreational uses on the Front, though ORV enthusiasts have made alarming inroads into one special area, the Badger-Two Medicine.
Surveys show that 80 percent of Front visitors come to view wildlife, 40 percent to hunt, 75 percent to enjoy the scenery. A scant 8 percent use ORVs, but that use threatens many of the others.
The issue squarely before the Forest Service is whether the travel plan will reflect this balance of uses or cater to the relative handful of people who demand to take their machines anywhere they’ll go. And as these machines grow ever more powerful, that is almost everywhere.
Protecting the Front: A Matter of Values
The travel plan will cover 391,000 acres of non-wilderness public land along the Front. The plan will guide recreational use for the next 20 years, specifying routes for hikers and horseback riders, snowmobiles and off-road vehicles. It can affirm Montana’s, and the nation’s, conservation investment in this precious landscape or it can scrap it for the sake of a vocal, motorized minority that already has ample opportunities to recreate in half a dozen other ranges in the Lewis and Clark National Forest.
At stake in the plan are how streams and fisheries will be protected, how habitat for key wildlife species will be managed and whether motorized travel will be allowed in the Badger-Two Medicine, an area adjacent to Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex that has profound cultural significance for the Blackfeet Nation.
The Right Alternative
The Forest Service is considering five alternatives. Only one, Alternative 3, reflects and will protect the values of the Front and of most Montanans. Indeed, Alternative 3 is there at all only because of overwhelming public demand for a common-sense, conservation choice.
During preliminary stages of the planning effort in 2002, many thousands of Montanans commented. And 90 percent of them asked the Forest Service to develop a conservation-based plan that emphasizes traditional foot and horse travel. Alternative 3 was the agency’s response to that demand.
While the final travel plan can allow some off-road vehicle activity, it must protect the land, wildlife, private property and quiet recreational opportunities for all Americans. Only Alternative 3 will.
Please Take Action Today!
Your voice matters! Last October, with your help we stopped ill-considered plans to issue gas drilling permits in the Front’s Blackleaf area. Now we need your voice again!
Please urge the Forest Service to adopt Alternative 3 in its pending travel plan for the Rocky Mountain Front. You can send that message immediately from the previous page.
If you have time to write your own letter to the agency, please do! Your own words will have the greatest impact. And if you have personal knowledge or experience of the Rocky Mountain Front or adjacent wild lands (or more generally, the impact of ORVs on your own quiet recreation) please mention it. You will find contact information below, along with a draft letter from which you can draw the most important points. Finally, please put “Travel Planning” in the subject line. Remember, the deadline for comments is Tuesday, August 16, 2005!
Contact Information
Spike Thompson, Forest Supervisor
Lewis and Clark National Forest
P.O. Box 869
Great Falls, MT 59403-0869
E-mail: comments-northern-lewisclark@fs.fed.us
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