Snowy Range Scenic Byway Needs Your Letters! Help Protect Fragile Alpine Areas from Motorized Destruction

Snowy Range Scenic Byway Needs Your Letters! Help Protect Fragile Alpine Areas from Motorized Destruction

The Forest Service is proposing to site a snowmobile and ATV staging area
(parking lot) along the Snowy Range Scenic Byway.

Possibilities identified by the Forest Service include the Green Rock trailhead inside the Snowy Range Roadless Area, which is the only trailhead along the Snowy Range Scenic Byway currently reserved for cross-country skiers. The other alternative would site this major parking facility (staging area) above the Snowy Range Ski Area.

Neither alternative is acceptable - the Snowy Range Scenic Byway, with its fragile alpine habitats and a lack of an established motorized trail network is not the appropriate place to increase snowmobiling, dirt biking, and ATV traffic. If the Forest Service must promote an increase in motorized recreation in the Medicine Bow Mountains, it should do so at the southern end of the range, far from the fragile alpine areas at the top of the Snowy Range.

A parking lot development for ATVs and snowmobiles should be sited on Highway 230 along the Colorado Border, where a motorized trail network already exists.

The plan also includes building a new Centennial information center and upgrading traffic pullouts, which would be harmless or even beneficial, but the ATV/snowmobile parking lot must go.

Please tell the Forest Service:

Building a major ATV parking lot would inevitably lead to illegal motorized use in neighboring Roadless Areas and fragile alpine habitats.
Heavy snowmobile use in the alpine areas damages fragile alpine plants and compact the snow, causing unnatural delays in snowmelt and destroying "subnivean" habitats (small mammal habitats under the snow ) which are crucial to the winter survival of some types of wildlife.
Please provide adequate peaceful and quiet recreational opportunities. Don't make the current noise and commotion problem worse by flooding the Snowy Range Scenic Byway with more noisy snowmobiles and ATVs.
If it must build an ATV/snowmobile parking area, build it along Highway 230 along the Colorado border to reduce the impacts of ATVs and snowmobiles on fragile lands.

Comments must be postmarked by July 17th

Send written comments to:
Paul Willard, ID Team Leader
Brush Creek/Hayden Ranger District
Hwy 130, PO Box 249
Saratoga, WY 82331
FAX: 307-326-5250.

Email comments to:

comments-rocky-mountain-medicine-bow-routt-brush-creek-hayden@fs.fed.us

Thanks for speaking out on behalf of the Medicine Bow's most fragile lands!

For more information contact Duane Short at (307) 742-7978