The Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest

By Lisa Dale

It was one of those absolutely perfect Rocky Mountain days. You know, the kind that reminds you why you live here. The kind that makes cell phones and e-mail seem irrelevant, and the piles of laundry awaiting you at home just vanish from your consciousness. My breath made clouds in the chill air while my face gratefully soaked in the sun. The drive up Poudre Canyon from my home in Fort Collins had been painless, and we were waylaid only by a couple dozen mountain goats eagerly licking the pavement as they satisfied their craving for salt.

We arrived at the trailhead near the top of the pass, waxed up our touring skis, and set out for the day. The sun sparkled and sent shafts of white light through the ice-glazed pine needles. Our skis were barely audible, and the only sound was the enthusiastic panting of my Labrador retriever having the time of his life. During the three-mile trek along the Long Draw Road, we only encountered one other group of skiers and two memorable speeding snowmobile riders who came screaming around the corner and literally had to slam on their brakes at the last minute to avoid hitting us. By the time we reached the turn-off for Trap Park, we were thirsty and ready for a break, so we ambled off the trail and found the perfect resting spot: a log to sit on in the sun with a running stream nearby for canine rehydration. No snowmobiles are permitted on the Trap Park trail, and we knew we had reached our reward: solitude and peace in a stunning wilderness.

Above: a "ghost road" in the North St. Vrain drainage. Damage such as this is increasingly prevalent in the Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest--a result of increased population, diminished staffing levels among land managers, and the generally inadequate land ethic of off-road vehicle users.

Sadly, this experience is increasingly rare. Development, logging, and recreation all threaten our pristine lands, and the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest remains one of the most popular destinations for people from the most densely populated region of Colorado. Vera Smith, Conservation Director for the Colorado Mountain Club, says that the ARNF is the host for most CMC-sponsored trips. Training days, wilderness trekking, and mountaineering schools all take place within its borders, and the majority of the CMC membership lives and recreates there. As she put it: “Location is everything.”

The Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest (ARNF) forms a long swath of forest land along the front range, making it a favorite playground for residents of Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Longmont, and dozens of cities, towns and hamlets. Encompassing 1.5 million acres, the ARNF supports low elevation ponderosa pine forests, high elevation alpine tundra, and everything in between.

Plentiful mule deer and elk populate those hills, attracting wildlife enthusiasts and hunters. An estimated fifty-one endangered, threatened, and sensitive species inhabit the forest, and dozens of others are suspected. Bird watchers delight in the American peregrine falcon, the bald eagle, and the whooping crane. Fishermen appreciate the greenback cutthroat trout. Botanists and plant enthusiasts discover the threatened Ute ladies’ tresses orchids. And really, where would we be without the bright boreal toad?

Erin Robertson of the Center for Native Ecosystems underlines the critical ecological role played by the forest, noting, “The Colorado Natural Heritage Program has recognized the important habitat that the ARNF provides for wildlife and plants by designating over one hundred Potential Conservation Areas on the Forest, including over sixty areas that the Natural Heritage Program considers to be of high or very high biodiversity significance.”

And yet the resources of the ARNF are at risk from a combination of human use, management shortcomings, and urban invasion. The forest gets hammered with recreation use: the U.S. Forest Service predicts a thirty-one percent increase in demand for developed recreation and a forty-two percent increase for dispersed use (such as backcountry camping, hiking in the wilderness, or fishing at your favorite spot in the woods) by 2005. The Forest Service is simply unprepared to manage the onslaught. Recreation budgets for the agency have dropped by sixteen percent since 1993, right alongside rising use. The 1995 Forest Plan for the ARNF is full of creative and effective recreation management objectives, but with a dwindling staff and growing demands, the agency now predicts it will be unable to meet at least half of its own management goals. In 1993, there were eighty-seven permanent and seasonal recreation staffers for the Arapaho-Roosevelt; by 2000, the number had dropped to fifteen.

Management issues and conservation

Controversy swirls around the management of the ARNF. Environmental, recreation, and community groups voice their concern on a number of wide-ranging issues, but the top three concerns have to be roadless areas, off-road vehicles (ORVs), and fire in the “urban interface” (boundary areas where private land backs to Forest Service land).

Roadless Areas

Environmentalists and lovers of pristine nature across the mountain west cheered last January when President Clinton passed the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Under the rule, new road construction would be prohibited in areas that currently do not contain roads. New oil and gas leases as well as logging for timber production would also be relegated to the parts of the forest that already contain access roads. Despite overwhelming public support for this rule (ninety-two percent of Coloradans who commented on the rule were in favor of it), the incoming Bush administration immediately suspended it.

Currently, forests are being managed under evolving “interim directives” that are designed to guide management while the Bush administration works out a more permanent plan that it says will better protect roadless areas. Environmentalists remain skeptical. Harlin Savage, the regional organizer for the American Lands Alliance, explains, “the Bush administration has made it clear that they don’t plan to offer any real protection for roadless areas. They say the opposite, but their actions belie their real intent.”

Above: Off-road vehicle damage on a steep slope
in the North St. Vrain drainage

Last summer, for example, local land managers with the Forest Service were given discretion to allow road-building projects in their roadless areas. The most recent changes to the policy weaken regulation even further and would allow the Forest Service to bulldoze a new road into a roadless area before even preparing an Environmental Impact Statement or soliciting public input.

The Arapaho-Roosevelt is especially vulnerable to these policy changes. Along with two other national forests in Colorado (the Routt and the Rio Grande), the ARNF has a revised forest plan; according to the interim directives, forests with a revised plan are exempt from all special roadless protection requirements. Forest Service personnel in the ARNF remain confident that their revised plan offers roadless protection, with or without a national rule. Nevertheless, nearly eighty percent of Colorado’s remaining roadless acreage would be open to the possibility of road destruction under the new directives.

To complicate matters further, and despite recognition by ARNF land managers that roadless areas are important, existing roads in the forest are poorly mapped and terribly maintained. “Ghost roads,” so called because they are created by users (mostly Off-Road Vehicle riders), become popular access routes without the Forest Service ever realizing they exist. A comprehensive effort to identify and map all existing routes in the forest is underway (see “Citizens for the A-R,” below), but roadless areas are at risk in the meanwhile. For example, Cherokee Park Roadless Area, 8,000 acres of low-elevation habitat including spruce-fir old growth and elk calving grounds, is threatened by a 2002 proposed fuels-reduction project in the Sheep Creek area.

Off-road vehicles and recreation management

Off–Road Vehicle (ORV) use has grown by five hundred percent in the last decade in Colorado. Even with that increase, however, the vast majority of outdoor enthusiasts in the state access their forest without the aid of motorized machines. Less than two percent of Coloradans own an ORV. Why, then, is over seventy percent of National Forest land open to motorized travel when less than twenty percent of recreationists prefer to use this mode of travel? The answer is because the motorized community is organized, remarkably well-funded, and has lobbyists in Washington. Non-motorized users outnumber the ORV-users, but they need to get organized and speak up.

The Colorado Mountain Club’s Vera Smith puts it this way, “ORVs are, in my mind, the biggest threat to wildlife, to habitat integrity, and to high quality non-motorized recreation opportunities. One of our biggest challenges is to insist that the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management take a strong hand in managing snowmobiles and dirt bikes and ATVs (All-Terrain Vehicles) before irreversible damage is done.”

Indeed, ORVs are notorious for the damage they cause. Not only does their noise disrupt the recreation experience of non-motorized users, such as hikers, but the machines’ tires causes soil erosion, which in turn leads to decreased water quality downstream. The increased silt level in the water smothers amphibian and fish eggs and alters stream channel dynamics. The loud noises that accompany vehicles result in “startle” and stress reactions in wildlife, fragment habitat, and alter migratory patterns as species seek to avoid roads.

The vehicles themselves contribute to the invasion of exotic species. For example, one vehicle driven through a knapweed site can pick up 2,000 seeds, ten percent of which are still attached to the vehicle after ten miles of driving. Seeds are spread rapidly. Likewise, the vehicles are notoriously inefficient, and expel twenty-five to thirty percent of their oil and gas into the air unburned.

Phil Cafaro, with the Poudre Canyon Group of the Sierra Club in Fort Collins, is dismayed by what he sees out there. “It’s hard to do a day hike in any part of the [Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest] without seeing ORV damage, and that includes designated wilderness areas.” The Forest Service is chronically underfunded and understaffed, and recreation management suffers.

The urban interface and fire

The northeastern sections of the ARNF resemble a checkerboard, with a pattern of squares of Forest Service land alternating with privately held property. The area around Boulder is also deeply fragmented, as private land encroaches farther and farther up previously undeveloped canyons. As any land manager will tell you, these are exceedingly challenging conditions for fire management.

Until recently, fire was not generally recognized as a beneficial process for the forest, and fire suppression was the norm throughout the mountain west. But now scientists tout the key ecological role of fire, including enhancing regeneration in the forest, creating habitat, and preserving healthy watershed functioning. The questions are tough ones. How can fire be allowed to run its natural course when human lives and property are at risk? How can we maintain healthy forests if we douse every fire in our effort to protect private homes?

Science continues to provide new insights into fire behavior and patterns. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of fires actually happen in areas that are accessible by human beings. These are not our roadless and remote forests; they are areas in the interface. Research done by the Forest Service makes just this point. As a rule, logging makes forests more susceptible to both fire and disease. Forests that have been logged are drier, have less shade, and usually have accumulated piles of debris since the “slash” isn’t commercially valuable. Roadless and unlogged areas remain largely unaltered for generations, have the greatest ecological integrity, and are the most resilient to fire. Naturally. Even when these areas do burn, they present a much smaller risk.

As we saw in the summer of 2000, a bad fire year can cause significant damage to private property, and nobody wants to see that happen again. To that end, the Forest Service has been given a great deal of money to deal specifically with the fire issue. A new national fire plan was drafted, and money is being pushed into fire research, fire fighting equipment, and education. Fire money should be funneled to the interface, argue most environmental groups, to support programs that encourage private landowners to take steps to minimize their vulnerability to fire. The ARNF Forest Service agrees. John Bustos, Public Affairs Officer for the forest, says his agency is “looking for a collaborative effort. We want to work with communities, with people who live in the interface.” However, according to the Forest Service, nationwide only twenty-five percent of their 2001 fire projects were in the interface.

The result? Cafaro sees a discouraging trend: “Work proceeding under the new National Fire Plan seems likely to lead to replacing natural fire in the high lodgepole pine forests with clear-cutting, suppression of almost all fires and the intensive management of these forests in perpetuity.” The larger danger is thematic, he says, and leaves us with forests that are “progressively tamed” as our wild lands are replaced by “overly managed ones.”

Citizen Participation

Countless environmental and recreation groups exist along the Front Range, and their members recreate in the ARNF regularly. These groups care about the fate of the forest and most are actively involved in its conservation. But they aren’t talking to each other!

The Citizens for the Arapaho-Roosevelt (CFAR) is a newly-formed group designed to provide a clearinghouse for forest information, activism, and communication. Volunteer programs are available to provide stewardship for critical forest needs, including roadless area inventory and trail maintenance. CFAR is actively seeking interested members, so get in touch!

Vera Smith says the CMC has a long - standing commitment to stewardship and responsible recreation. “In the case of the Arapaho-Roosevelt, CMC has a unique opportunity to really stand up and make a mark. We will continue our commendable tradition of stewarding wild lands throughout this state.”

The Sierra Club and dozens of other local groups have already responded enthusiastically to this effort. As Harlin Savage put it, “This is the way the democratic political process works! The grassroots are critical. If folks who really care about these areas and live near them don’t speak up, the corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C. will be calling the shots.” And that’s not what any of us want to see. Step up. Get involved. Contribute to the protection of your forest.