(Note: There are three excerpts from this biweekly ezine. Note the tone toward all that dare to maintain human use, multiple use or safer roads.)

September 14, 2003

From: marnie@wildlandscpr.org  (Marnie Criley)

Sender: skidmarks@vortex.wildrockies.org

Skid Marks, Wildlands CPR's (usually) biweekly e-mail newsletter, reports on activist efforts to challenge roads and motorized recreation nationwide. Skid Marks shares instructive and precedent-setting successes and failures in the campaign to halt motorized abuse of wildland ecosystems.

Utah leaders remove road closure signs

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has initiated a criminal investigation of two elected Kane County leaders who removed 31 road markers from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. All of the signs indicated prohibitions on off-road vehicles. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Kane County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw and Sheriff Lamont Smith took the signs to monument headquarters in Kanab on Aug. 13, along with a letter defending their actions and ordering the Bureau of Land Management to remove additional signs on the county's purported roads.

"These roads have been used for years and years and years," said Smith, an off-road vehicle enthusiast. "The roads we took signs off of are roads that definitely have the history to be county rights of way." Both the Utah Attorney General's office and the Governor's office, who are trying to resolve the sticky issue of road ownership on federal lands, condemned Kane County's actions.

The sign removal is one of several actions taken by Kane County officials and residents since the monument was created in September 1996. In October 1996, Kane County bladed roads inside several wilderness study areas within the monument's boundaries. The U.S. Attorney's Office filed a civil complaint against the county, but the case, in which a district judge narrowly defined what constitutes an RS 2477 right of way, is still pending.

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Jarbidge Road rebuilt - again

The South Canyon road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, made famous in 2000 by the Jarbidge shovel brigade, is slowly being reopened. Unauthorized repairs and improvements to the narrow 1.5-mile dirt and gravel road that winds along the Jarbidge River to a primitive campground in the national forest have triggered a federal investigation and caused more bad blood between land managers and residents of the nearby town of Jarbidge.

"It is clearly unauthorized, illegal activity," said Bob Vaught, supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. Despite concerns about potential harm to the threatened bull trout, it has been partially reconstructed, most likely during the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Vaught said a damage assessment is being conducted to determine if the actions amount to criminal behavior.

Katie Fite with the Committee for the High Desert in Boise, Idaho, and the Utah-based Great Old Broads for Wilderness, said she came upon the road the weekend after July 4. Rocks were moved and young cottonwood trees were run over, Fite said. The latest reclamation extends the rocky road to its original destination near a wilderness boundary. "Now that Jarbidge has become such a flash point -- a Mecca for motor heads of a certain mindset -- if a road was rebuilt it would be impossible to keep ATVs out of the first part of the wilderness there," she said.

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Highway 95 project to alter streams, wetlands

The Idaho Transportation Department has applied for a permit to allow construction in wetlands and streams as part of a project to widen and realign U.S. Highway 95 from Moscow to Lewiston. In the notice of application, the highway department estimates discharging 2,725 cubic yards of earth fill into wetlands and streams as highway segments are realigned and widened. The Idaho Transportation Department plans to compensate for filling in about 5 1/2 acres of wetland -- the total in two phases of the construction project -- by creating 10.1 acres of restored wetlands in the Cow Creek floodplain upstream of Highway 95 near Genessee.

The Highway 95 project has drawn opposition from a Moscow-area coalition that contends that rerouting the roadway over Paradise Ridge, just out of Moscow, would destroy the last vestige of historic Palouse bunchgrass prairie. The coalition has filed suit to challenge the project.

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"Skid Marks" comes to you compliments of Wildlands CPR. We're a non-profit conservation organization working to protect and restore wildland ecosystems by promoting road removal, preventing new wildland road construction, and limiting motorized recreation. If you're not already a member, consider joining Wildlands CPR's growing grassroots network. You'll find membership information and a wealth of road and off-road vehicle resources at our website, www.wildlandscpr.org.

Please keep in touch with us about your roads and motorized recreation work. Questions about Skid Marks should be directed to Marnie Criley at marnie@wildlandscpr.org.  Please send e-mail action alerts to WildlandsCPR@wildlandscpr.org.

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