The Soul Of The Roadless

When we talk about roads, especially in our forests and on public lands, one thing is clear: we have a lot of them. Probably more than we need in the United States.

In the U.S., we have over 4 million miles of roads, with about 1.3 million of those unpaved, often in rural areas. On National Forest lands alone, there are over 380,000 miles of roads crisscrossing stands of timber, meadows, mountain passes, and streams in riparian areas.

Don’t get me wrong—I love roads. I love a good road trip. I love finding highways like U.S. 50 across Nevada, where you can roll down the windows and scream to the sky as you speed through the sage, mountains rising on the horizon. I love Interstate 70, which cuts through the heart of Colorado’s Front Range at Loveland Pass and the Eisenhower Tunnel. I even love that it’s often blocked in vertiginous Glenwood Canyon due to rockfall. I love the way it bisects the San Rafael Swell, revealing millions of years of geology.

I love forest roads too—like the Gravelly Range Road in Montana, which climbs into high meadows where only sheep, ranchers, and cowboys venture. I love small tracks and fire roads that seem to go nowhere but end at the perfect campsite. Rock Creek here in Colorado is a fun place to take my 4Runner—a challenge that leads you to the high alpine, where you can hear migrating birds and see the clouds up close.

But even more than roads, I love roadless areas.

Truly, there are so few left in the United States—few in the world. We’ve paved and routed nearly every place we can go. We are obsessed with access. The only places we can’t have roads in the U.S. are in designated Wilderness Areas, protected by Congress thanks to the Wilderness Act, written by Howard Zahniser and passed into law in 1964. Visionary legislation, it preserves places of spectacular beauty and wildness for their own sake.

The key phrase in the law is a lovely and important one: that these places should remain “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” I still find it hard to believe that we had such visionaries working in Congress after World War II—people like Senator Lee Metcalf, activists like Bob Marshall, and a government willing to preserve the quickly disappearing American landscape and the sanctity of wild places for their own sake.

Luckily, there are over 800 federally designated Wilderness Areas in the U.S., covering more than 111 million acres (out of 2.26 billion acres of land in the U.S.). Fifty-seven million acres of this are in Alaska. Here in the Lower 48, the furthest you can get from a road is a spot in Yellowstone National Park called Fairholme, where you're 30 miles in and grizzly bears roam the night.

But there is still land that is roadless yet not protected by the Wilderness Act. These places are no less spectacular or worthy of preservation. In 2001, then-President Clinton acted to preserve 58.5 million acres of roadless areas in the National Forest System through what’s known as the Roadless Rule. This measure, which took years to implement and survived fierce protests from states like Idaho and Wyoming, effectively halted most new road construction.

I’ve been to many of these places. They are no less lovely or important for lacking formal designation. The vast sagebrush steppe of the Owyhee Canyonlands. The serene meadows and quiet forests of the Gravelly Range. These places are often even wilder than designated Wilderness or National Parks—because they’re not called out on maps. They exist quietly, for the sake of wildlife, for the last stands of forest that once covered this continent, and for the solitude they offer.

The great conservationist Aldo Leopold, a champion of wilderness after witnessing the rapid disappearance of natural systems, once wrote:

“To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes. Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

The truth is, we have far more roads than we can maintain on public lands. Many of them go nowhere, serve no real purpose, and simply disturb wildlife and ecosystems. And with federal agency budgets slashed, we no longer have the resources to take care of the roads we already have. So what’s the point in building new ones?

It seems to me to be an act of bitterness and dominion. Proponents of road building say it's necessary for economic development or wildfire prevention—but these arguments are easily disproven. No, it’s a stranger urge than that. It’s a fear of wild places, of things that are not controlled, not paved.

I honestly admit, I don’t understand it. Every part of me wants to push back against it. Every part of me wants there to be more than 30 miles I can walk away from all this noise and confusion and fumes and bills and screens. We need that so badly right now. Because what wilderness and roadless areas represent is a more advanced society—one that understands its place on a shrinking planet. A society that seeks not dominion, but harmony. That works within natural systems to keep them sustainable, fruitful, and beautiful.

That is a more evolved, more mature way of thinking and being in the world.

Howard Zahniser’s son, Edward, once said in speaking about the iconic legislation his father helped create (and sadly died before seeing passed):

“In its broadest sweep, the Wilderness Act is a statement of social ethics. It is about restraint and humility—about restraint and humility for what we do not know about the land organism . . . about which Aldo Leopold wrote. As acid rain, acidic deposition, has forced us to understand soil relationships better, we find in soils the same spiraling downward of complexity that the Hubble space telescope finds spiraling outward as the complexity of the universe—or multiverse.”

Last week, the outdoor community rallied people of all demographics and politics to stop the sell-off of public lands. But the assault on public lands, the push for dominion and concrete, a modern Mordor everywhere, continues. The agencies that manage public lands have had their budgets slashed so badly they can barely operate. And the Trump

Administration rescinded the Roadless Rule, opening up those 58.5 million acres to cynical, pointless road building.

Why?

Roadless areas are essential to the soul.

And I’d argue for hours with anyone who says differently.

Doug Schnitzspahn's Opened Container is a weekly column that highlights Doug's unique point of view on the intersection of outdoor culture, policy, business, politics, and conservation. To hear more, listen to Doug's podcast Open Container by clicking here. Let's get some.