Major Forest Service Policies Could be Changing. Here’s What’s at Stake.

This story is produced by Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal in collaboration with Grist as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative.

You would not want to be a cutthroat trout in the Middle Fork of the Judith River before 2023. Along a 6-mile stretch of this water in central Montana, there were more than 80 entrances to the river and 27 shallow spots where everything crossed, from cars to off-highway vehicles like side-by-sides.

Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, says by 2020 sediment runoff from vehicles moving through the river had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish. 

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over widened and shallow creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.” 

Traffic, he says, was the problem. When vehicles cross rivers, they cause erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn.  

So Edgington met with a coalition of groups to address the issue. It was a diverse collaboration including the OHV community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, along with environmental groups like Trout Unlimited and Wild Montana, and government agencies like Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the U.S. Forest Service. 

From 2020 to 2023, the groups rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of OHV/Jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The OHVs crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules, Edgington says. The use was legal, but was detrimental to the health of the river and threatened species like native cutthroat trout.  

“I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there’s just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.” 

Recreation on a given Forest Service trail is guided by the agency’s Travel Management Rule. The policy requires travel management planning for each individual forest that outlines when a trail is open for non-motorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding or hiking, and when it’s open for OHV use including side-by-sides and dirtbikes. The Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service have similar travel management rules. 

The Forest Service’s approach to motorized vehicle recreation can be summed up in four words: “closed unless designated open.” Unless a trail specifically allows OHVs, it is only available for non-motorized access. 

But that all could change under a proposal issued by the Trump administration in late August to revise the Travel Management Rule. It would reverse the current approach and instead be “open unless designated closed.” 

“A full repeal would create more problems than it intends to solve,” Edgington said. “Whether that’s OHVs in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

A change of that magnitude, he says, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith. The work done to repair the river was directed by the Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest’s travel management plan, which falls under the Forest Service’s Travel Management Rule. 

Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington says those work together to create three layers of protections that made Trout Unlimited and other collaborators’ investments worthwhile. 

“Had travel management not called out the removal of that road from the riparian area, it would not have been worth our time and effort to invest in that landscape,” he said. 

It’s a long process to change a federal rule. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the Travel Management Rule, the first step in the process, through September 23.  

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread changes that could happen across the country’s national forests, which make up 19.4 million acres in Montana alone.  

Last month, just before the travel management revision, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the agency was moving forward with rescinding the Roadless Rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections. 

The short public comment periods have received backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding an additional 15 days to the comment period, pushing the deadline to October 6. 

In a statement about the decision the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.” Hillary Eisen says rules like roadless and travel management help to uphold the purpose of public lands. 

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” said Eisen, the federal policy director for public lands advocacy organization Wild Montana. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie into that in one way or another.” 

The roadless rule, she says, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but that more people actually interact with travel management every time they go into a forest.  

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

According to Eisen, everyone who uses the forest, from recreationists to ranchers with grazing lessees to those in timber industry, rely on the clarity provided from a travel management plan. And she isn’t sure how the Trump administration plans to overhaul rule.

“The notice of intent that was published is difficult to follow,” Eisen said. “It’s vague and somewhat poorly written.” But she fears without guidelines in place, motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape. 

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean, if you can get your side by side on there, have at it.” 

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands. 

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods and this is public lands and people with disabilities, elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there,” said White, who was also a Montana District 64 representative from 2013-2021. “With the Roadless Rule in 2001, we saw a real acceleration of obliterating roads and trails.”

White says the policies will allow for better access and clarity for users from ATVs to e-bikes. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

Citizens for Balanced Use also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas and that’s simply not the case,” White said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana says these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about ‘how can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

For Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.”

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the Roadless and Travel Management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”