Roads to restoration
Cooperative effort targets road removal in the San Juans

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A local car leaves the asphalt and ventures onto a San Juan National Forest road early this week. There are thousands of miles of such roads in the region, creating a maintenance backlog for the San Juan Public Lands Center and a challenging situation for area wildlife. However, a new collaborative effort hopes to erase many miles of redudant and damaging roadway./Photo by David Halterman

by Will Sands

The San Juan Mountains are filled with enough dirt roads to stretch from Durango to Honolulu and back again. More than 6,400 miles of road lace San Juan public lands, and more than half of those miles are either user-created or no longer maintained. A collaborative effort is now hoping to enhance the area’s wildlife habitat and water quality by erasing some of that unnecessary mileage.

The Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, San Juan Citizens Alliance, Great Old Broad for Wilderness, and the San Juan Public Lands Center are coming together around a central cause – fewer road miles on the San Juan National Forest and local Bureau of Land Management lands. The effort is long overdue, according to Ronni Egan, executive director of Great Old Broads.

“Building roads is probably the most highly impactful thing we can do to a landscape,” she said. “The fewer roads we have on public land, the better off it will be.”

Dubbed the Community Watershed Restoration Initiative, the project has twin goals, said Monique DiGiorgio, SREP communications and development director.

“Roads on public lands carry economic and ecological costs,” she said. “From an economic standpoint, the Forest Service and BLM don’t have the budgets to get out and maintain all these miles and miles of roads, and the agencies currently have a huge backlog. From an ecological perspective, roads disturb and fragment wildlife habitat. Roads also have an adverse impact on the watershed, and dust and erosion lead to the sedimentation of streams and poor water quality.”

Removal of unnecessary and illegal roads will also expand the number of wild places available in the San Juan National Forest, Egan said. Many of the San Juan Mountains’ most pristine places are bisected by dated or user-created roads.

“This project really suits Great Old Broads’ mission of protecting roadless, wild lands,” she said. “By removing roads, with any luck these places will become wild again. Having large roadless areas is crucial in terms of wildlife connectivity.”

The San Juan Public Lands Center has already laid out a long-term vision for the Community Watershed Restoration Initiative. The Forest Service and BLM are proposing to decommission 6 linear miles of unneeded roads annually. By obliterating these few miles of roadway, huge improvements to habitat are expected. The agencies plan to provide a minimum of 500 acres of habitat improvement per year through the project’s 15-year duration. If all goes according to plan, 100 miles of rogue road will disappear and nearly 8,000 acres of habitat will be created. In addition, the Forest Service should realize up to $100,000 in saved maintenance costs per year once the work is complete.

Spurred by seed funding from the National Forest Foundation and The Wilderness Society Recreation Planning Program, work has begun to identify which byways should be obliterated first. More than a dozen watersheds, including Vallecito Creek, Elbert Creek, Cascade Creek and sections of the Dolores River drainage, have already been spotlighted for road removal. User-created roads will be on the top of the list. However, the collaborative effort is also hoping for the greatest effect and eyeing roads that will open vast and high-quality habitat once obliterated.

“We’re going to prioritize user-created roads, partly because of the ease of removing them,” DiGiorgio said. “We also really want to pinpoint areas where we can get the best leverage to improve habitat and enhance the watershed.”

Targeting, securing funds and erasing 100 miles of dirt road over a 15-year span will be a “huge, huge project,” according to DiGiorgio. With that in mind, the cooperative effort will be looking to the community for a lot of the heavy lifting. The Restoration Initiative will be on hand during next Wednesday’s Wild and Scenic Film Festival at Fort Lewis College seeking volunteers to go out on the ground and inventory roads for removal and provide baseline data for the project’s coming phases.

“The biggest step is going to be getting the community involved,” DiGiorgio said. “We’re going to need people out on the ground for the life of the project, and that work will begin this spring.”

And even if they’re not on the ground, members of the public can shape watershed restoration in the San Juans in other ways. Road removal and watershed restoration are both pieces of the San Juan Revised Forest Plan, and now is the time to speak up on the full spectrum of issues contained therein.

“People who are concerned with keeping some areas preserved for quiet, muscle-powered recreation need to come forward and make their opinions known,” Egan said. “The motorized community is very well-organized and powerful, and if we don’t make our voices heard, we’re going to be stuck with whatever comes our way.”

The San Juan Revised Forest Plan can be found at: http://ocs.fortlewis.edu/forestPlan. •