Announced August 18, 2026 · Comment window closes September 21
The Forest Service has filed a proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule in its entirety — the regulation that has kept road-building and commercial timber harvest out of the wildest unprotected country in the National Forest System for 25 years. This explorer maps every one of the 11,370 inventoried roadless areas, tallies the acreage state by state, and lays out what the science says it means for elk, mule deer, native trout, salmon, and the people who hunt and fish them.
The Duck Chugger · Data: USFS Enterprise Data (S_USA.RoadlessArea_2001) · Compiled Aug 18, 2026
Inventoried roadless acres losing national protection — about 23% of the National Forest System.
Window opens Aug 20 and closes Sept 21, 2026, via Regulations.gov. No public hearings scheduled.
Of 625,737 comments on the 2025 notice of intent, per a Center for Western Priorities sample.
Fire density within 50 m of forest roads vs. roadless areas, 1992–2024 (Aplet et al., Fire Ecology 2026).
The clock is running. Public comment on the proposed rescission and draft EIS opens Aug 20 and closes Sept 21, 2026, on Regulations.gov — the final opportunity for input before a record of decision expected late this year. The direct comment link will be added here once it goes live. (Note: the 2025 scoping docket FS-2025-0001 is closed — comments there no longer count.)
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the Forest Service, under Chief Tom Schultz, has filed a proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule in its entirety, along with a draft environmental impact statement. USDA frames the rule as "a one-size-fits-all restriction that has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to wildfire risk reduction," and says rescission "removes national designation of roadless areas but does not mandate timber cutting or road construction" — returning decisions to local forest managers through individual forest plans.
The proposal covers 44.7 million acres across 37 states and Puerto Rico — every inventoried roadless area in the country except those in Idaho and Colorado, which keep their own state-specific roadless rules (9.3M and 4.4M acres respectively). It cites four executive orders on deregulation, timber expansion, energy, and Alaska resources, and it finishes the job the administration started in 2025: the Tongass National Forest's 9.2 million roadless acres lose protection not by a targeted exemption this time, but because the national rule itself goes away.
The draft EIS considers three alternatives: keep the rule (no action), adjust it incrementally, or rescind it entirely — the proposed action. A 30-day comment window opens August 20 and closes at midnight September 21. In parallel, Senator Mike Lee's amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act (S.140) would nullify the rule legislatively and prohibit any similar rule in the future; it cleared committee 11–9 in June and awaits the full Senate.
When the same question was asked in 2025, 625,737 people answered — and 99.2% said keep the rule. The original 2001 rulemaking drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever on a federal rule at the time, more than 90% supportive.
Finalized January 12, 2001 (66 FR 3244) after 600+ public meetings, the rule prohibits three things in inventoried roadless areas (IRAs) — generally undeveloped tracts of 5,000+ acres identified in the Forest Service's wilderness inventories: road construction, road reconstruction, and commercial timber harvest. That's it. It is not wilderness and was never a lockout:
The original rule covered 58.5 million acres in 39 states. Two states left the national rule the right way — through years of collaborative, stakeholder-driven state rulemaking: Idaho (2008, five management themes across 9.3M acres, praised by hunters and industry alike) and Colorado (2012, 4.2M acres including 1.2M "upper tier" acres protected more strictly than the national rule). Both are retained by this rescission — and both are the model groups like TRCP say should have been the path here, instead of repeal.
The Tongass has been the bellwether all along: exempted by settlement in 2003, restored by the courts in 2011, exempted again in 2020 (over 96% opposition in comments), restored in 2023, and now swept up in the national rescission. It is 30% of the world's remaining temperate rainforest, and — as Part 3 shows — America's single greatest salmon factory.
This is the official Forest Service inventory (S_USA.RoadlessArea_2001), simplified for the browser but complete: every polygon is a real inventoried roadless area with its name, forest, and acreage. Orange areas lose national protection under the rescission; blue-gray areas in Idaho and Colorado are exempt under their state rules. Scroll-zoom or pinch to dive in, drag to pan, hover for details, and click any area — or any state — to pull up its story. The presets jump to country worth knowing.
58.4M mapped acres · 44.7M affected (orange) · 13.7M exempt under Idaho & Colorado state rules (blue-gray). Puerto Rico's 24k acres (El Yunque NF) are in the tables but off this projection.
Source: USFS Geospatial Data Discovery, S_USA.RoadlessArea_2001 (11,391 features; 21 slivers dropped in simplification). Acreages are the FS-attributed values, rounded.
More than 96% of all roadless acreage sits in twelve Western states — but 37 states and Puerto Rico have skin in the game, from 14.8 million acres in Alaska down to a few thousand in Kentucky and Mississippi. Utah is the standout ratio: roughly half of its entire national forest base is inventoried roadless. Click any bar to zoom the map to that state and see its game species and key stats.
Orange = affected by the rescission · blue-gray = exempt under state rules. Click a bar to explore the state on the map.
Source: computed from S_USA.RoadlessArea_2001 attributes; matches the 2001 FEIS Appendix A table within rounding.
The rescission lands hardest on a familiar roster of backcountry forests. The Tongass alone carries 9.2 million roadless acres — more than the next two forests combined. The Humboldt-Toiyabe's 3.4 million acres span the Great Basin's elk and mule deer country; the Flathead, Lolo, Beaverhead-Deerlodge, and Bitterroot anchor the Northern Rockies elk security that Part 3 is about. Click a row to zoom the map to that forest's roadless country.
All forest units over 500,000 roadless acres. Idaho/Colorado forests marked exempt.
Source: computed from S_USA.RoadlessArea_2001. Forests spanning state lines are split by state per the FS attribute table.
No question in big-game management is better studied than what roads do to elk. The Montana Cooperative Elk-Logging Study (1970–85) put numbers on it that have held for fifty years: elk habitat effectiveness falls roughly 25% at one mile of open road per square mile of habitat, and 50% at two miles per square mile. Lyon (1979) measured 60–80% less elk use within a tenth of a mile of open roads; Perry & Overly found displacement up to half a mile, as much as 95% near main roads. The study's blunt summary: roads, and the people and traffic that come with them, influence elk security more than most other factors combined.
Out of that research came the standard agencies still use — the Hillis paradigm: for bulls to survive hunting season, a herd unit needs at least 30% of its area in security blocks of 250+ acres lying more than half a mile from any open road. Inventoried roadless areas are, almost by definition, the security blocks. In Montana, 93% of roadless areas hold elk summer range; in Idaho it's 98%, and Idaho's highest bull harvests come out of them. Nevada's crucial elk summer range is 2.6× more concentrated inside roadless areas than outside. In Colorado, 14 of the 15 most-hunted game management units contain at least 66,000 roadless acres apiece, and two roadless areas are the primary calving grounds of the White River herd — the largest elk herd on Earth.
Wyoming's numbers make the hunting case in one line: where country is more than 90% roadless, hunters kill a bull for every 2.4 square miles. Where it's less than 10% roadless, it takes 25 square miles per bull — a tenfold difference in what the land produces.
Left: elk habitat effectiveness vs. open-road density (Lyon 1983 / Montana Elk-Logging Study). Right: bull elk harvest density in Wyoming, roadless vs. roaded country (TU, Roadless: America's Sporting Lands, 2026).
Lyon (1983) habitat-effectiveness curve digitized at 0.5 mi/mi² intervals; Hillis et al. (1991) security threshold marked. Wyoming harvest densities per TU 2026.
In Utah — where the rescission touches 4 million acres, roughly half the state's national forest land — over 99% of roadless acreage is designated crucial or substantial mule deer habitat, and 87% for elk. Utah's deer herd sits at 73% of its long-term population objective, with habitat loss the named driver. Wyoming holds 63% of its crucial mountain goat range in roadless areas. The same unfragmented blocks are the security habitat for bighorn sheep, moose, and black bears — and in the Tongass, some of the densest brown bear country on Earth. Roads cut both ways: they displace herds onto private ground (one Idaho depredation case topped $1 million and drained the state's fund), and they are the primary vector for cheatgrass and knapweed invasion into winter range.
About 70% of all roadless areas support native trout and salmon, and Forest Service watershed assessments find roadless watersheds nearly twice as likely to be properly functioning as roaded ones. The mechanism is unglamorous and relentless: road sediment smothers spawning gravel, culverts sever populations, and roaded drainages run flashier and lower. That's why the strongholds of nearly every imperiled Western native trout sit inside the orange polygons on this map — and why Trout Unlimited's president calls roadless areas "the sources of the coldest, cleanest water."
Then there is the Tongass. Its 9.2 million roadless acres produce a quarter to a third of Alaska's entire commercial salmon catch — on the order of 50 million fish a year, a quarter of the whole West Coast harvest, more wild salmon than every other national forest combined. Over 70% of the forest's Chinook, coho, pink, and chum habitat lies in roadless areas, across 15,764 miles of anadromous streams. Fishing and tourism are roughly $2 billion a year and a quarter of Southeast Alaska's employment; timber is 0.6% — and Tongass logging has cost taxpayers about $1.5 billion in subsidies since 1982.
Share of habitat, spawning grounds, or conservation populations in roadless / unroaded areas, by species.
Sources: TU Roadless: America's Sporting Lands (2026); ICBEMP; Center for Biological Diversity native trout GIS analysis; USFS Tongass fact sheets.
USDA's case for rescission is fire: over 40% of roadless acres carry high or very-high wildfire hazard potential, and only 5% of those have seen fuels treatment since 2014. Roads, the argument goes, are how crews and equipment get to the work.
The best available science points the other way on ignitions. A January 2026 study in Fire Ecology (Aplet et al.) analyzed every recorded wildfire on contiguous-U.S. national forests from 1992–2024 and found ignition density within 50 meters of a road is four times higher than in roadless areas or wilderness — a pattern that held in all eight Forest Service regions, with no exceptions. Nearly nine in ten wildfires are human-caused, and 78% of human-caused national forest fires start within half a mile of a road. Fires near roads do stay smaller on average — access matters for initial attack — but for the largest 2% of fires, the catastrophic ones that drive the acreage statistics, ignition location made no meaningful difference in final size.
And the rule already permits fuels work: roadless areas have hosted 34% of all fuel-treatment activity on 21% of the tree cover, and the 2001 FEIS found ~98% of roadless-area fires were caught small. Four former Forest Service chiefs — Dombeck, Bosworth, Tidwell, and Christiansen, appointees of both parties — wrote formally in September 2025 that total rescission "will result in many more problems than it fixes."
Fires per 1,000 hectares on contiguous-U.S. national forest land, by distance to and presence of roads.
Source: Aplet, Evans et al., Fire Ecology (2026), DOI 10.1186/s42408-026-00450-2. Pattern consistent across all 8 USFS regions.
The former chiefs' sharpest question was fiscal: "Why invest in new roads when the Forest Service cannot maintain its existing infrastructure investments?" The agency already operates roughly 370,000 miles of road — eight times the Interstate Highway System — most of it 70+ years old, with about 20 cents of every needed maintenance dollar funded. The deferred maintenance backlog stands at $10.8 billion, over half of it road-related. A third of Tongass stream crossings already fail fish-passage standards. By one estimate the Roadless Rule saved $5 billion in avoided road-building over its first two decades.
Against that: roadless-area timber represents less than 0.2% of national timber demand, and all national forest oil and gas is under a quarter percent of U.S. energy supply. Meanwhile the outdoor recreation economy these lands anchor ran $1.3 trillion in output and 5.2 million jobs in 2024 — hunting and shooting alone contributing $16.5 billion in value added and growing 16.5% year over year, the fastest of any conventional activity.
Left: road miles — the Forest Service system vs. the Interstate Highway System. Right: what roadless country protects vs. what rescission chases, in annual dollars.
Sources: USFS road system data; TU 2026 (Southeast AK fishing+tourism ≈ $2B/yr vs. timber ≈ 0.6% of regional employment); BEA Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account 2024.
Roadless Rule finalized: 58.5M acres, 39 states, after 1.6M comments (>90% supportive) — then eight years of litigation ending with the Tenth Circuit upholding it in 2011.
Idaho and Colorado adopt state-specific roadless rules through collaborative processes; both are retained by the current proposal.
Tongass exempted (over 96% comment opposition), then restored. EO 14153 later directs USDA to re-exempt it.
Secretary Rollins announces intent to rescind at the Western Governors' Association.
Scoping closes: 625,737 comments; independent analysis finds 99.2% opposed.
Sen. Mike Lee's Roadless Rule Nullification amendment to S.140 advances from committee 11–9 on party lines; Rep. Hageman's H.R. 7695 pends in the House.
Proposed rescission + draft EIS filed. Federal Register publication Aug 19–20.
Public comment window on Regulations.gov (the 2025 scoping docket is closed; the direct link will be added here when the window opens). No agency public hearings; volunteer "people's hearings" being organized instead.
Final EIS and record of decision expected. Litigation considered near-certain.
A useful comment is specific: name the roadless areas you hunt or fish (the map above will give you their official names and acreage), describe what road-building would do to that country, and speak to the alternatives — the draft EIS is legally required to weigh the option of adjusting the rule rather than erasing it, and the Idaho/Colorado state-rule path is the on-the-record example that collaboration works.
One map polygon = one paragraph. Find your country above, then tell the agency what it's worth — on Regulations.gov, Aug 20 through Sept 21. Direct link coming here when the window opens.