Navigating Forest Service Roads
Planning ahead for the ride
Riding a motorcycle out onto a Forest Service road can sometimes
be a gamble. Anyone who spends more than about 30 hours a year
exploring forest service roads knows the heartbreak that comes with
riding down a road that eventually becomes impassable. Washouts,
downed trees and other obstacles have a way of forcing one into
doing a re-route on the fly. Good maps and a GPS are handy tools to
have when this occurs.
But today there’s a system in place you can check before you
drive off into the great unknown. For several years now the Forest
Service has been developing a road conditions section that is
functional across all district websites throughout the US. With a
few clicks of your mouse you can get some idea of what unpaved road
conditions are out there.
To begin, you must know how to get to the USFS district website
for the area you plan to ride. That’s not always an easy task, but the
best way to begin is to identify where you want to ride via a good
road atlas like those produced by Benchmark Maps. For this
exercise let’s plan on exploring the roads around the North Fork of
the Snoqualmie River in Washington. The elevation on this area is
low enough for year-'round riding, but the area, like so many in the
Northwest this last wet season, has been plagued with heavy rains and
high winds. Our atlas tells us that this area is on the outer edge
of the Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest.
So we make our way to the USFS website, which by the way is not
at www.usfs.com. Instead you’ll find it parked on the web at http://www.fs.fed.us/.
Probably not your second choice for a possible website address which
is an indicator of things to come when navigating the Forest Service
web.
Here you can ask it to take you to your state and then locate the
area you’re looking for, in our case that would be the Mt.
Baker/Snoqualmie national forest. But wait a second, I asked for
Washington and it took me to a list of states? Why? Poor website
design. If you scroll down the page you’ll find a listing of all
your state's national forest districts under the listings for all 50
states. Geesh!
Wait a second… We can circumvent all this silliness by doing a
simple Google search for the keywords - Road Conditions Mt.
Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. It’ll get you directly to the page
you want.
Now we’re there. The plan is to ride on FR57 and explore
its two alternates of FR5730 and FR5740. On this page, you’ll find a
road-by-road assessment of what’s going on with each road. You’ll
have to drill through the districts to find the area you’re looking
for. In this case we had to go nearly to the bottom, past the Mt.
Baker, Darrington and Skykomish districts to finally get to the
Snoqualmie district report. Today’s report says there’s partial snow
along FR57 and there are no listings for FR5730 or FR5740. We can
assume this to mean that these roads have been put to rest or are
impassable and there’s no future plans to maintain them. If you
assume it’s any rosier than that, you’re probably asking for trouble
attempting to ride them.
Each status line carries a date with it. I’m told by one district
ranger that the reports are updated about every four weeks from
October to May and then weekly from June through September. That may
be true for his district, but all districts will vary. There’s no
doubt about that, as we'll soon see.
The reports on the FS web site only cover federal lands, not
necessarily the approach or surrounding roads which could be county,
state or even privately managed. It's critical to know who owns
and/or manages the roads people ride on to get the best information.
People tend to assume that all roads in the woods are "forest
service" roads, but that's not usually the case. For example, most
of what is known as the North Fork Snoqualmie River road is actually
managed by King County and Hancock Timber.
Let’s change our plans. Instead we’ll contemplate a ride to
Wynoochee Lake in the Olympic National Forest from say – Hood Canal.
We change our Google search and ask for: Olympic Forest Road
Conditions. Bingo, the page we want is the first listing. However
this time we get a rather sparse page with some cryptic 7 digit road
numbers and not a date to be found anywhere. Fortunately the phone
number for the district office is on the left side of the page. Take
that to mean it’s in your best interest to call the district office
ahead of time and confirm the accuracy of the report as it pertains
to where you want to ride.
How about a ride in Oregon? If it’s winter, perhaps a trip out on
the coast where there are many gravel roads. In fact,
it’s possible to ride the entire Oregon coastal region using Forest
Service and public land roads. So if we begin our ride at the
California-Oregon border, we’re actually in the public lands region
of the Kamiopsis Wilderness. Our Google search of Kamiopsis
Wilderness Road Conditions takes us to the Public Lands info center
that provides us with nothing more than a link to ODOT’s TripCheck
website which provides road conditions for paved roads, but not
gravel.
Bummer? Perhaps. However we do note that this region is actually
managed by the USFS Chetco Ranger District. We redial our Google
search for Chetco Road Conditions and we land at a familiar looking
page on the USFS site, this time for the Rogue-Siskiyou National
Forest. And yes, there is some dated information specific to the
region that would be useful in trip planning.
And when summer comes, how about a trip into Idaho? I’ve heard
the legends of riding over Lolo Pass on a dirt road, rather than
along the pavement of US12. A good look at the map and I see Forest
Road 500 which runs along many peaks and ridges just to the north of
US12 through the Clearwater National Forest. So I Google: Clearwater
Forest Road Conditions.
Also known as the Lolo Motorway, FR500 retraces the Lewis and
Clark pass a little more closely. The USFS site offers little in the
way of road by road conditions in the area, but has quite a bit of
info about the road itself.
All these resources are far from perfect and perhaps over time
they may get better, but don’t count on any standard of excellence
to arise and be followed in the near future. The important thing to
note is that before you traipse off into the wilderness on two wheels, take the time to look ahead, use what information is available
and wind up with a better ride experience for having done so.
PT/Spring 07 - Assistance with this article was provided by
Mitch Comstock.
Use our
Road Conditions link in the top left menu bar to access all the
Forest Service links in the Northwest. |
