Forest travel plan out soon

The long-awaited announcement of which roads on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest will be closed to ATVs and other motor vehicles except snowmobiles is getting close.

The final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the forest’s controversial Travel Management Plan is scheduled to be released around mid-October, said Judy Wing, the Wallowa-Whitman’s public affairs officer.

“We’re working hard to make that deadline,” Wing said on Tuesday.

That deadline isn’t the only one, though.

Roads won’t immediately be off-limits to vehicles on the day the EIS is published in the Federal Register.

The closures won’t take effect until next spring or summer, when the Wallowa-Whitman begins distributing the map that shows the status of roads across the 2.4-million-acre forest.

Weather will influence the situation, too.

Most forest roads are blocked by snow during winter and early spring, making administrative closures superfluous.

The decision facing Monica Schwalbach, the Wallowa-Whitman supervisor who started work early this year, is what to do with about 4,400 miles of rarely maintained roads on the forest.

Schwalbach also will decide which areas, if any, will remain open to off-road travel by motor vehicles (snowmobiles, again, will not be affected by the travel management plan).

Now, with the exception of wilderness areas and parts of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, cross-country travel by motor vehicle is legal on the Wallowa-Whitman.

Work on the Travel Management Plan started in the spring of 2007 under the direction of Schwalbach’s predecessor, Steve Ellis.

The real impetus, though, came in 2005 when then-Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, citing “unmanaged recreation” as one of the four main threats to national forests, ordered the supervisors of each national forest to decide where motorized vehicles would be allowed.

In 2009 the Wallowa-Whitman released a draft EIS. That 599-page document examined six strategies, called alternatives, for Ellis to consider, ranging from closing no roads to banning motor vehicles on almost 4,500 miles of roads.

Ellis said at the time that he wouldn’t choose any of those alternatives in its entirety, but that he would probably combine aspects of two or more.

Wing said Schwalbach expects to make a similar decision, perhaps picking one of the alternative as a basic model, but making many changes to it.

Wallowa-Whitman officials said from the start that a decision on the Travel Management Plan would take at least a few years.

A couple of factors delayed the decision beyond the original plan.

First, severe flooding on the forest during June 2010 damaged several roads, and fixing those took precedent over completing the final EIS for the travel plan.

Second, Ellis announced last fall that he was taking a job as Idaho state director for the BLM.

That left his replacement, Schwalbach, at something of a disadvantage, having to read through thousands of pages of documents.

“It was such a big undertaking, and Monica wanted to make sure the decision was hers,” Wing said.

Whatever Schwalbach decides, it’s almost certain to disappoint at least one group of Wallowa-Whitman users.

On one side, a contingent of ATV riders, angry about road closures on the Wallowa-Whitman during the 1980s and 1990s, has urged forest officials not to close any more.

In 2007, after Ellis announced that work was starting on the travel plan, about 6,000 people signed a petition calling for no more road closures.

On the other side, a coalition of environmental groups have lobbied the Wallowa-Whitman to ban motor vehicles from almost half the roads on the forest.

Those groups cite such effects as dirt washing from roads into fish-bearing streams, and motor vehicles affecting migration patterns by elk and other animals.

A committee appointed by the Baker County Board of Commissioners took what could be described as a middle-of-the-road approach.

The committee recommends the Wallowa-Whitman, in deciding which roads to close, focus on routes which have essentially been abandoned, some of them having mature trees growing along them.

Regardless of how many roads Schwalbach decides to close to motor vehicles, Wallowa-Whitman officials acknowledge that aggressively enforcing the decision will be difficult considering the scale of the forest.

It’s not clear how many roads will be blocked with gates or other effective obstacles.

Many of the roads “closed” during the past two decades, for instance, were blocked by means of “tank traps” — basically, holes dug by heavy equipment at the start of the road.

But ATV riders can easily go around, or in some cases straight through, many of these moats.

Circumventing such impediments is legal now, but won’t be after the travel plan takes effect.