Protect Roadless Areas: Submit Comments and Contact Congress!

Last week the Trump Administration formally announced its intention to roll back longstanding protections for Inventoried Roadless Areas in National Forests.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will accept public comments on its plan to eliminate Roadless Area protections through Sept. 19, 2025. It’s important that they hear from you.

Read the Oregon Trails Coalition's comments here.

You may never have heard about Roadless Areas. They are not widely known of or understood as they are not visibly marked by signs. But if you regularly enjoy public lands, there’s a good chance you’ve marveled at the beauty of a Roadless Area. These are places outside of designated wilderness that are largely uncompromised by roads but highly used by recreationists and prized for protecting wildlife habitat and clean water.  

The administration’s proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule would end prohibitions on road building across nearly 45 million acres of undeveloped backcountry forestland managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The Roadless Rule was enacted in 2001 after years of study by the Forest Service to inventory the last remaining large landscapes in the National Forest System unimpacted by road construction. But before the rule was enacted, the plan was subjected to intense public scrutiny, with more than 600 public hearings nationwide and 1.6 million Americans giving testimony. Conversely, the Trump administration has pledged to quickly push aside this careful deliberation—narrowing the traditional three-month public comment period to three weeks—to increase logging, mining and oil and gas drilling on public lands. 

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said the rule has frustrated agency’s ability to actively manage the forests and fight wildfires, but recent research from The Wilderness Society shows that from 1992-2024, wildfires were four times as likely to start in areas with roads than in roadless forest tracts. Another earlier study from Pacific Biodiversity Institute showed that more than 90 percent of wildfires occurred within half a mile of a road.

And it’s not as if these lands were completely locked up and unavailable for stewardship or resource management. Timber thinning and habitat improvement projects are certainly allowed in Roadless Areas for the benefit of fuels reduction, forest health, and meadow restoration, for example. It just means that the work is largely done by hand crews rather than with heavy machinery. The Roadless Rule even allows road construction to address catastrophic events like floods and fires or to connect communities. 

Roadless Areas provide healthy habitat for many endangered or threatened species and offer abundant outdoor recreation opportunities, including hunting, fishing, camping, climbing, mountain biking, and horseback riding. Millions of people access these public lands, which include 556 river miles for paddling, 9,298 miles of hiking trails, 7,947 miles of mountain biking trails, 17,936 miles of non-motorized trails and 691 miles of backcountry ski trails.

The Forest Service already has a 380,000-mile road system and can’t afford to properly maintain it. There is $8.4 billion worth of backlogged repairs needed across National Forest roads, according to the agency.

Please take the time to let the administration know how important Roadless Areas are to you! Your personal stories will make a huge difference.

You can submit your comments here.

Congress is also getting involved. Fifty House members and 17 Senators, all Democrats and one Independent, have signed onto legislation—the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025. The bill would make the Roadless Rule the law of the land, preventing its rollback without another act of Congress. 

Please reach out to your elected representatives in Congress and tell them to join as a co-sponsor. This should not be a partisan issue.

Gratitude to our partners at Pacific Crest Trail Association for much of the content of this advocacy alert. Check out their interactive map to see the Inventoried Roadless Areas along the PCT.