National Forests Land Management Plan Amendments
A number of us attended the Angeles National Forest’s 5/30/2012 open house on proposed modifications to their Forest Plan. This is of high interest to our community, since it may involve increasing the amount of designated Wilderness in several Southern California National Forests, and removing mountain biking access from those areas. Rather than repeating what is already on-line, I am including links to key documents. Wilderness designation is highly restrictive and cannot be changed without an Act of Congress (which is also required to establish them) whereas other usages are subject to modification by the land manager, subject to NEPA and other laws. I think our basic position should be that Wilderness designation is not necessary to protect road less areas from road building, mining or other inappropriate uses and should not be used to restrict existing public access. I think sometimes a Wilderness designation can result in no access at all. Power tools are prohibited, there are fewer volunteers to maintain any trails and the USFS has few assets to do so, so trails can become used less and less and abandoned.
A background news story (google can find others):
Most supporting documents and maps are at:
http://www.fs.fed.us/nepa/fs-usda-pop.php?project=35130
In order to understand the Land Use Zones on the maps, on the above page, scroll down to Supporting Documents and click on the document:
Land Management Plan Part 2 Angeles National Forest Strategy.
Very near the front are tables that show allowed usages, based on the Land Use Zones. The zones, in order of decreasing land use intensity are:
- Developed Area Interface (DAI)
- Back Country (BC)
- Back Country Motorized Use Restricted (BCMUR)
- Back Country Non-Motorized (BCNM)
- Critical Biological (CB)
- Recommended Wilderness (RW)
- Existing Wilderness (EW)
- Experimental Forest (EF)
The On-line comment link (comments are most useful when specific to a given area, and especially if you have been there). Comment by June 11th:
https://cara.ecosystem-management.org/Public/CommentInput?Project=35130
A CORBA story:
http://corbamtb.com/news/2012/05/31/recommended-wilderness-proposals-in-our-national-forests/
For ongoing coverage the SCV Trail Users Facebook page is helpful: