In June 2015, the Shoshone National Forest began reviewing potential changes to its current system of roads, trails and areas open to motor vehicles. Nearly eight years later, the Travel Management planning process is still underway.

At the moment, the effort has been hampered by some vacancies in the forest’s offices.“My understanding is that we are continuing to work on it,” Acting Shoshone Supervisor Kathy Minor told Park County commissioners last month, just a day after she assumed the temporary leadership role. “We’ve got a lot of holes in the organization … and we’re trying to fill positions, but it is one of the priorities for the forest. So we’ll be working on it as we can.”

Park County Commissioner Lloyd Thiel had raised the subject of Travel Management at the March 21 meeting. 

“I don’t really care — it [the trail system] can stay the way it is, but I mean that’s kind of been out in limbo now for seven years,” Thiel said.

He asked if the Forest Service would move forward or start over, given the large amount of time that’s passed since the process began.

Minor indicated that Travel Management will likely be a priority for whomever becomes the Shoshone’s permanent supervisor, “and in the meantime I’ll keep moving forward with it,” she said. Minor is on loan from the Custer Gallatin National Forest just across the Montana state line, where she serves as a deputy forest supervisor.

The Shoshone has been without a permanent supervisor since early 2022, when then-Supervisor Lisa Timchak left for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, also in southwest Montana.

The Shoshone published a preliminary environmental assessment of the travel management project in July 2020 and received roughly 6,500 comments (though only about 450 were unique). A revised assessment was published in October 2021 and more comments were accepted, but there’s been little movement since then. The preferred alternative laid out in the 2021 assessment would reduce the amount of roads open to public wheeled vehicle use by 20% — from the 878.4 miles currently available to 706.6 miles under the proposal. Meanwhile, the amount of snowmobile trails would stay constant at 288.9 miles, according to a forest summary of the proposal.

For more information about the Shoshone’s Travel Management planning, visit go.usa.gov/xMfQu.

Other projects

Over the coming months, Shoshone officials hope to lighten fuel loads across some 2,000 acres in the forest’s Clarks Fork, Wapiti and Greybull ranger districts. The intent is to do much of that work through controlled burns, but that will depend “on what kind of a weather window we get this spring,” said North Zone District Ranger Casey McQuiston, as burning is hard to conduct in the summer and fall.

Meanwhile, following significant flooding last year, Shoshone and Montana Conservation Corps crews plan to work on cleaning up around 300 miles of wilderness trails as part of general maintenance.

Crews will be also moving into the High Lakes area of the Beartooth Mountains for a project involving forest health management and fuels mitigation — removing some vegetation, potentially conducting some prescribed burns and harvesting timber, he said.

However, McQuiston said timber harvests “may become a little more of a challenge” going forward. That’s because one of the Shoshone’s “big purchasers,” R-Y Timber, closed its Livingston, Montana, sawmill in the wake of a February fire.

He’s hoping Sun Mountain Timber of Deer Lodge, Montana, will help fill the gap left by R-Y’s departure.