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The Roadless Rule protects thousands of popular trails. The USDA wants to repeal it.

By AllTrails

Aug 19, 2026

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If you’ve hiked Franconia Ridge in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Art Loeb Trail in North Carolina’s Pisgah, Baker Lake in Washington’s North Cascades, or long sections of the PCT and the CDT, you spent a good chunk of that day inside what’s called an “inventoried roadless area” or IRA. You probably didn’t realize you were in a designated “roadless area” at all. Millions of people across the country recreate in these places, and AllTrails members logged nearly 2.8 million hours on trails in IRAs last year.

Since 2001, these places have been protected by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits most new road construction and commercial logging on a specific set of National Forest land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently in the process of rescinding it. The rule covers about 58.5 million acres of National Forest land overall, roughly 30% of the entire National Forest System. The rescission affects roughly 45 million acres (Colorado and Idaho have their own state-specific versions that aren’t part of this action).

The formal proposal to remove the rule dropped on Monday, and with it a public comment window that runs through September 21. That window is one place where a few minutes of your time actually counts, both in comments and in calls to your representatives.

Submit a public comment to the USDA

Roadless is not Wilderness

The land encompassed by the Roadless Rule was selected from two decades of Forest Service work that identified blocks of land still undeveloped, generally 5,000 or more contiguous acres without permanent roads, or smaller parcels adjacent to existing Wilderness.

The rule came out of a multi-year process that included more than 600 public meetings and 1.6 million public comments, the most any federal rulemaking had ever received at the time. It has survived four administrations and a long history of litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court declining to review it in 2012.

That “prohibition” of new construction and logging isn’t absolute. There are explicit exceptions for road work tied to public health and safety, environmental cleanup, legal access to inholdings, and fire response. Logging is restricted but not banned outright; there are allowances for small-diameter cutting to reduce fire risk and for ecosystem restoration. Existing roads and trails stay in place, and hunting, fishing, biking, and motorized use on designated routes all continue. The rule primarily restricts new, large-scale development. It doesn’t prevent all uses of the land.

Roadless areas aren’t capital-W Wilderness. Wilderness is one of the strictest federal land protections there is, requires an act of Congress to designate, and prohibits all motorized and mechanized travel including mountain bikes. Roadless areas are a bit looser; they allow biking, snowmobiling on existing trails, hunting, fishing, motorized recreation on designated routes, and active fire management.

Roadless areas don’t overlap with National Parks either. The roadless designation only applies to National Forests, which are managed by the USDA for multiple uses, including timber, grazing, mining, recreation, and watershed protection.

Roughly 37 million of 193 million acres managed by the Forest Service are designated Wilderness (about 20%). Another 58 million or so is covered by the Roadless Rule (about 30%). The remaining 50% are open to recreation, logging, mining, grazing, and drilling under standard multiple-use management.

By Outdoor Alliance‘s count, IRAs hold 8,743 climbing routes, 782 miles of whitewater, more than 26,000 miles of trail, and close to 20,000 miles of mountain biking.

What rescission removes

Rescinding the rule does not mandate logging anywhere. It does not mean that trails will be replaced with roads, or even that any roads will be built. It doesn’t eliminate any Wilderness designations, override the Endangered Species Act, or bypass the National Environmental Policy Act. Although it’s a compelling headline, 45 million acres of land are not suddenly going to be clearcut overnight.

What it does do is remove a 25-year-old baseline of protections. That’s why we’re opposed, and why anyone who cares about public lands should be concerned. Right now a road or logging proposal has to clear a high bar. Without the rule, that bar drops.

In most affected acres, nothing dramatic will happen overnight. The economics don’t work for logging and the agency doesn’t have the capacity (or the funds) to be building roads. But a slow degredation due to a lack of resources doesn’t mean safe. In specific places, or where the pressure and infrastructure for logging is already present (Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and its 9.2 million roadless acres are a good example), there will be real proposals and real fights, much sooner.

The arguments for recission don’t hold up

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the rescission in June 2025 at a Western Governors’ Association meeting in New Mexico, framing it as necessary for active forest management and wildfire prevention. The agency formally published its notice of intent to repeal in August 2025, starting a formal process. Industry groups including the American Forest Resource Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association have publicly supported the move. Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski has wanted the Tongass exempted for years.

The administration’s main public argument is wildfire. The argument is that the Roadless Rule is actively preventing forest management like thinning, prescribed burns, and fuel reduction.

But the rule already allows that kind of work. It has explicit exceptions for fuel treatment, prescribed burns, and emergency firefighting. According to Trout Unlimited, nearly 2 million acres of inventoried roadless area have already been treated under the existing rule, and none of the 148 recommendations from the bipartisan Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission mention the Roadless Rule at all. A January 2026 study in Fire Ecology found that fire ignitions are about four times more common within 50 meters of roads than in roadless areas. About 84% of wildfires are human-caused…and humans get to forests via roads.

The logging argument doesn’t hold up much better. Federal timber sales in these areas have already been operating below cost for decades. Mike Dombeck, who was Forest Service chief when the rule was originally written, pointed out that roadless areas represent only about 8% of the productive timber base. Most IRAs are roadless because they’re steep, remote, and low-value (from a logging perspective, anyway; all public lands are valuable). There’s no real economic case here, given these are places that mostly weren’t going to be logged anyway.

So what’s this really about?

The rescission also “returns authority to local forest managers who know the land best.” That sounds reasonable until you think about what it actually means from a management perspective. The roadless protections that currently live in one national rule would instead live in individual forest plans, each changeable, each on its own separate review and revision cycle, and subject to whoever is currently running the agency. Great for private industry to influence local decisions, bad for broad conservation and wilderness policy.

Over the past year, the administration has moved to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil leasing, reverse a 2023 mining ban around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, accelerate construction of Alaska’s Ambler Road through previously protected terrain, mandate increased timber production across both Forest Service and BLM lands, and cut workforce capacity at the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management. The reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, only a month later, has already resulted in mining claims being made in the area.

These are different decisions affecting different places, but they share a direction. Less land held back from development, and fewer people inside the agencies to slow it down.

A few thoughts

The Roadless Rule isn’t being rescinded because it’s failing, no matter how many times Secretary Rollins calls it “the failed roadless rule.” Public support, court cases, ecological outcomes: by any measure, it’s been one of the more successful federal land protections of the last 50 years. When USDA opened a scoping comment window last fall, more than 600,000 comments came in. The Center for Western Priorities sampled them and found 99.2% opposed rescission. It’s being rescinded because it’s in the way of private interests.

The immediate result is not “your favorite trail is about to be clearcut”; that mostly isn’t true, and the dramatic version of the story gives the people pushing for rescission an easy way to dismiss opposition as hysterical. But the real version is just as sobering. A 25-year protection that was working just fine is being removed as part of a pattern that extends well beyond this one situation. Meanwhile, the agency responsible for managing the impacts of this decision is being hollowed out at the same time.

Whether the immediate effect on the trail you hiked last weekend is large or small, the framework for roadless areas, wilderness, and protections is being deliberately dismantled.

Five minutes, one comment

The fight has already moved to Congress. Rep. Harriet Hageman introduced a bill that would nullify the rule, and an amendment introduced by Senator Mike Lee goes further and would bar similar protections forever. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would do the opposite and make the rule permanent. 

The comment period is now open and runs through September 21. It’s the single most useful place for you to spend five minutes this week. Last year, public lands advocates collapsed Lee’s public land sell-off with a flood of calls and emails. That pressure worked then. It can work now.

Submit a public comment to the USDA

A few popular trails in Roadless Areas:

See more trails in Roadless areas