USFS Reorganization Hold (PDF)

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The federal judge is requiring the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to notify all employees of the order within two days, and also post it to the Forest Service’s reorganization website. Within seven business days, the Trump administration must file a declaration verifying that they have complied with the order that outlines the steps they’re taking. Tom Schultz on the Reorganization

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The Teton mountains reflect on Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park in Moran

After months of uncertainty, researchers with the U.S. Forest Service are learning whether they will have to relocate under the agency’s sweeping restructure.

The U.S. Forest Service announced the plan to restructure in March, when it said it was evaluating more than 50 research and development facilities for potential closure. Today, it announced it will shutter nearly two dozen facilities.

In the Pacific Northwest, at least three locations were being evaluated for closure, of those three, one will be closed: The Pacific Northwest regional headquarters in Portland.

The federal approval allowing a gold and antimony mine in eastern Valley County was upheld last month in United States District Court.

An Aug. 18 ruling by Judge Amanda K. Brailsford affirms the Payette National Forest’s January 2025 approval of Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite mine near Yellow Pine.

The lawsuit raised eight claims arguing that the Payette N.F. and other federal agencies violated environmental law in approving the mine. Brailsford, however, ruled in favor of the federal agencies on nearly all of the claims.

“The court concludes that the defendants’ approval of the project did not violate the applicable environmental laws – with one exception,” she wrote in her decision.

The exception relates to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s analysis of the mine’s impact on bull trout and wolverines, both of which are classified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

Brailsford found that the agency’s “incidental take statements” for the two species did not adequately specify monitoring requirements and measures to limit the mine’s impacts.

An incidental take statement is issued when a federal agency determines that an approved action may inadvertently harm protected wildlife. FWS’s statements were deficient because they relied on cross-referencing other documents rather than including required protections in the statements, Brailsford said.

“That defendants can identify statements in the record that might support or flesh out the incidental take statement’s reasonable and prudent measures and terms and conditions does not satisfy FWS’s mandatory duty,” she said.

Brailsford ordered FWS to issue amended incidental take statements for wolverines and bull trout, but did not vacate the agency’s decision or any of the other federal approvals for the mine.

Conservation groups appeal, cite ‘unacceptable risks’

Conservation groups that filed the lawsuit appealed Brailsford’s ruling on Aug. 25, continuing their bid to overturn the federal approval and halt Perpetua’s construction of the mine.

“We believe this appeal is essential to prevent long-term damage to this cherished part of Idaho,” said Sydney Luvaas, mining and policy manager for Idaho Rivers United. “The stakes for local water quality, wildlife, and surrounding public lands are simply too high to ignore.”

Save the South Fork Salmon, the Idaho Conservation League, Earthworks, and the Center for Biological Diversity are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Bryan Hurlbutt, an environmental attorney representing the groups, said they are pleased the court ordered additional protections for wolverines and bull trout, but still hope construction will be stopped on appeal.

“Allowing initial mine construction to proceed presents unacceptable risks to the South Fork Salmon River watershed, our public national forest lands, and the fish and wildlife that live there,” Hurlbutt said.

In May, Brailsford denied a motion by the environmental groups to stop Perpetua from starting construction until the lawsuit is resolved, as Valley Lookout reported.

Perpetua President Jon Cherry framed the ruling as a win for the company and described the changes ordered by Brailsford as a “narrow, discrete issue.”

“Overall, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ requests to restrict Perpetua’s construction and operation of the Stibnite Gold Project,” Cherry said. “The court’s remand was limited and does not require reconsideration of the agency’s decision.”

Other legal battles

Two other lawsuits challenging permitting for the Stibnite mine remain active.

A lawsuit filed by the Nez Perce Tribe last August is also pending before Brailsford. That lawsuit also challenges the federal approvals for the mine and seeks to halt its implementation.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit challenging an air quality permit issued to Perpetua by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality could be headed to the Idaho Supreme Court.

In July, Fourth Judicial District Judge Jason Scott ruled in favor of DEQ, prompting an Aug. 18 appeal filed by the Idaho Conservation League and Save the South Fork Salmon.

However, that appeal was temporarily suspended on Aug. 31 due to lack of payment for court transcripts, according to online court records.

Perpetua is currently in the first year of a three-year, $2.6 billion construction phase to build the Stibnite mine. Work this year is focused primarily on power line upgrades, improved road access, and workforce housing at the mine site.

“We continue to see tangible progress at Stibnite,” Cherry said.

Once construction is complete, Perpetua expects mining operations to last for 12 to 15 years, under the mining plan currently approved by regulators.

The mining timeline could be extended if exploration currently underway yields promising results, as Valley Lookout reported.

The Stibnite mine is expected to produce 4.2 million ounces of gold and 115 million pounds of antimony, according to Perpetua. The metals would be extracted from three open-pit mines totaling about 473 acres within the 1,740-acre project zone, which is about 40 air miles east of McCall and three miles from the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness.

Opponents of the mine fear it could pollute the East Fork South Fork Salmon River, which flows through the project site, and cause other environmental damage.

Water quality in the East Fork and other streams at the proposed mine site does not currently meet federal drinking water standards due to high concentrations of arsenic and antimony from pollutants left by previous mining companies.

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In an effort to bring more voices to bear on public lands issues, onX unveiled the Public Land Comment Hub today. This interactive map shows current proposals, color-coded by land management agency — U.S. Forest Service (green), National Park Service (pink), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (blue), and Bureau of Land Management (yellow). Users can click any shaded area to learn more about the issue, see how many days remain in the comment period, and immediately connect to the agency website to add their comment. The page also has resources on how to craft a good comment and a helpful acronym glossary to decode some of the bureaucracy.

In May of this year, the Salmon-Challis National Forest (SCNF) authorized limited use of gas-powered chainsaws to clear 542 miles of specifically designated trails in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. Use is limited to the next three years, starting this summer, from January 1 to August 1 of each year, and is limited to users approved by the Forest Service. This work was authorized through a document called the Minimum Requirements Analysis, which you can read about here. Right now, this work is mainly being done by permitted outfitters operating on the Forest.

As a boots-on-the-ground, volunteer-based organization, ITA’s primary focus is on getting trail maintenance done on the ground. When we learned of the chainsaw authorization, our first thought was of our twelve planned projects on the Salmon-Challis National Forest in 2026, and which trails approved for chainsaw use overlapped with our schedule.

This means we need to coordinate closely with outfitters to ensure we know where they are operating saws. Our number one priority is well-organized projects with meaningful, safe, and fun work for volunteers, work that contributes to making trails more accessible for the public. It’s more important than ever to communicate with both SCNF personnel and outfitters as we tackle the projects planned in that area this year. ITA will continue to use non-motorized/non-mechanized tools to accomplish this work in designated wilderness areas.

ITA is focusing on being proactive and communicating up front with the Forest Service and outfitters. Where a trail is planned for clearing by chainsaw, as was the recent case with the Marsh Creek Trail, ITA will assess the site to determine if it is still suitable for a good volunteer project. In the case of our recent Marsh Creek project, the answer was “yes”. The Forest Service trail program lead met our crew on the trail for a weekend of removing large boulders and root wads, brushing and improving tread, all work vital to keeping this trail navigable. We will follow this process for future projects and determine if the work remaining is meaningful and suited to volunteers or if the project is best moved somewhere else.

In the short term, as trail season winds down and after hunting season is over and outfitters are out of the backcountry, we plan to participate in Forest Service and partner meetings to review the first year of this program and identify successes, ask questions, raise concerns and discuss challenges and opportunities to improve coordination between partners and the FS and implementation of the MRA itself with its present requirements and allowances.

Over the longer term- the next three years- ITA will advocate for a long-term solution that recommits to the use of traditional tools as the way to keep trails open in the wilderness.

We will urge Congress to pass adequate funding for both Forest Service staff and partners. The Forest Service needs to restore the right positions in the right places to coordinate and support work by partners like ITA, conservation corps, and outfitters working in their respective areas.

Paid, full-season trail crews are needed. The public land trail system is a national treasure, with tremendous recreational value in today’s times. Recreational value translates to economic value for communities as well. We need trail crews to do all the work – cutting, brushing, tread work, bridges. ITA has proved people value trails; our volunteers worked 16,614 hours on trails in 2025. We are able and willing to learn the wilderness skills to maintain trails. But at the core, we need full-time, skilled Forest Service crews with years of experience to fully utilize volunteers and fully support less experienced paid crews. Over the long term, we need crews on horses and mules or with backpacks, carrying axes and crosscut saws – not chainsaws.

This decision has sparked intense debate. We feel use of mechanized equipment should be the exception to standard wilderness tools and should only be used in emergency situations. Yet, while we look ahead to a future where trails can be maintained using traditional tools, we also must focus on a present where there are hundreds of miles of trails in desperate need of work, from log out to tread repair. We must focus on our role as an on-the-ground organization, dedicated to working with other partners and the Forest Service to get vital work done this season. We care deeply about wilderness and about the traditional tools and skills that have been part of maintaining backcountry trails for decades, and we value our relationships with partners because this will always be a team effort. We will continue to speak for wilderness values while maintaining relationships with our partners, for the good of trails.

Sincerely,  Melanie Vining, ITA Executive Director

Federal land agencies want to know how many people are hiking, camping and sightseeing on public lands — and are testing dozens of pilot projects to get better data.

Traditional methods for tracking recreation numbers include trailhead surveys or vehicle counters. But those techniques don’t capture all visitors, especially in less popular areas.

Last year, Congress passed the EXPLORE Act, a package of measures to boost outdoor recreation access as record numbers participate in outdoor activities. It also directed agencies to study new visitation monitoring methods.

Federal agencies including the Interior Department followed up in late June by announcing dozens of pilot projects to evaluate some of the latest techniques. Some are new projects, while others are studies that have already been completed.

Many of the newer methods fall under the category of “digital mobility data,” said Spencer Wood, who directs the Outdoor Recreation and Data Lab at the University of Washington.

Several of Wood’s studies were included in the list of federal pilot projects, such as ones that analyze aggregated call phone data and public social media.

“They post a photograph that says they are having a great time mountain biking – that’s useful information,” he said. “We can observe that by looking at the content of images that people share publicly on social media platforms, or we can understand people’s activities by looking at the way they write a trip report.”

Another option that Wood has studied involves tracking how many people participate in virtual citizen science projects on public lands. Federal agencies say these innovative approaches are promising but need more studying.

Wood said analyzing all the projects could help inform federal land management decisions.

“That might involve questions about what type of infrastructure do they build, where do they improve roads, or where might they improve parking, or where might they work on trail development?”

The federal government is accepting public comments on the pilot projects through July 29.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

This came from Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Friday night, the President signed an executive order that could fundamentally change public lands as we know them.

Decades of underlying policy allowing agencies to govern motorized vehicle use on federal land? Gone. Agencies have been directed to rescind or rewrite policy that has regulated ORV use on public lands for the past 50 years.

We, the BHA community, already know the implications: Unchecked motorized travel on public lands can harm access for everyone in the long run. It changes wildlife behavior, fragments habitat & trades the quiet for the noise.

Access matters & we fight for it every day. But access & motorization are NOT the same thing.
Not every acre of public land should be managed for maximum motorized access. The ability to reach public lands should not come at the expense of the wild qualities that make those places worth visiting in the first place.

We’re dissecting every detail of this order and continuing to advocate for the backcountry in the halls of Congress. More to come.
~~

The draft is to not allow any restrictions on motorized access to national forests, you can’t tell a motorcyclist they can’t ride there or stop ATV or UTV access to anywhere.  They want to “open and improve” airstrips in the backcountry, the Big Creek 4 are right there on top of the list.  They want to rewrite the wilderness act to allow chainsaws across the board, which opens the door for mechanized travel and motorized travel in Wilderness.  That chainsaws in Wilderness push was just the foot in the door for eliminating what we know as big W Wilderness.  Trump is piling this on faster than we can fight it.  I am still involved in fighting the chainsaw thing and a lawsuit is being drafted, those folks that are OK with using chainsaws have just opened the door for the full on removal (or updating as IOGA calls it) of the Wilderness Act. Jeff Halligan

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been bombarded with questions about SBFC’s position on the recent signing of the Minimum Requirements Analysis for chainsaw use on certain trails in the Frank Church- River of No Return Wilderness.

SBFC is a wilderness stewardship organization with “Frank Church” in our name, so people naturally want to know our stance and what “side” we are on. The us-vs.-them narrative on this subject, and so many others in our country, can be incredibly strong.

SBFC has never been about us vs. them. We are a non-advocacy, boots-on-the-ground stewardship organization. We recruit hundreds of volunteers and hire dozens of seasonal staff and interns each year to get an incredible amount of work done in the Selway-Bitterroot, Frank Church, and surrounding wildlands. One of our strengths is that we won’t play into the us-versus-them narrative. It’s not what we do.

But, for those wondering, what is SBFC’s position on this “in the news” topic? Here it is:  SBFC is a wilderness stewardship outfit. We do a ton of work on trails. We estimate that SBFC crews will maintain 600-1000 miles of trail under our current plans this season. It’s a tremendous amount of work.

SBFC crews will use traditional tools while working in the wilderness this season, just as we have for the last twenty years. Our crews are experienced and skilled with crosscuts and axes, and they’ll remove 5,000-10,000+ logs from the trail corridor this season with those tools, skills, and passion.

SBFC wilderness trail crews do more than just remove logs. We forecast that our crews will likely spend 30-40% of their time cutting logs this season. Tread repair and drainage work has become an increasingly large part of what our crews do. This work is not optional; it truly sustains the resource. Brushing (no one’s favorite job) is equally important for the long-term sustainability of the trail. You can be sure we’ll be doing a whole lot of this work, in addition to cutting out thousands of logs.

All of this is to say, SBFC is laser-focused on wilderness stewardship. For us, wilderness stewardship means we’ll be using traditional non-motorized / non-mechanized tools when working in the wilderness, whether removing logs from the 8 ft wide trail corridor, removing brush, kicking rocks off the tread, or repairing the tread itself, which is a highly technical, skilled task where there are no shortcuts to doing good work.

No matter the tool or task, it takes an incredible amount of human time, effort, and skill to accomplish wilderness and trail stewardship goals across this landscape. It takes more humans than we have had out there in recent years (or decades). So, we will focus on bringing more humans into the fold and out on the ground. In 2026, we have our largest ever cohort of seasonal staff and interns (34!), and not by a small margin. We’ll engage with the most adult and youth volunteers in our history, and again, not by a small margin. We can see the energy, the excitement, and the momentum. It is real. Those are the things that we need, and those are the things that stand the test of time as we look ahead, not just for the next few years, but for decades to come.

SBFC exists because people love wilderness, and people care about these places a whole lot. We can say with confidence that many people will continue to love and care about these places far into the future.

Our mission is to open pathways for all to discover and steward wilderness. Stewarding wilderness is hard. It’s especially hard in the largest wilderness in the lower 48. What a privilege it is to play our role in this endeavor and to do it well. You can find us out there this season, from Missoula to Boise, and all points between, working to keep the wildest place accessible.

As always, feel free to reach out with thoughts, questions, or comments!

Wilderness Forever & For Everyone,

For more than a decade, Perpetua Resources—the junior gold mining company behind the controversial Stibnite Gold Project—has peddled a shifting set of narratives to “sell” their project to Idahoans, investors, and the U.S. Government. As Perpetua moves toward a final investment decision on the project, it’s worth examining how well those narratives have really held up.

The original narrative Perpetua put forth was that their massive new mine was counterintuitively necessary to clean up historic mining issues at the site. However, the U.S. Forest Service concluded in their Final Record of Decision that taking no action at all to address the existing contamination at the site would be less harmful to the environment than proceeding with the Stibnite Gold Project, even assuming that the company’s mining and proposed cleanup work goes perfectly according to plan (which never happens). Perpetua also inaccurately claimed that restoration was only possible through the proposed mine; the Nez Perce Tribe in particular has invested millions of dollars to restore the surrounding watershed and clean up contamination from earlier mining operations at Stibnite.

Perpetua’s second narrative was that the antimony mined at Stibnite would help advance a broader transition to clean energy by supplying a key ingredient for a new type of liquid-metal battery. However, the company designing those batteries (Ambri) filed for bankruptcy in 2024, and you’d be hard pressed to hear Perpetua make any mention of clean energy since President Trump’s reelection.

More recently, Perpetua has leaned heavily on a third—and more politically potent—narrative: that the Stibnite Mine is essential to U.S. national security because it would provide antimony for military uses. At first glance, this claim is compelling. Antimony is used in a range of military applications, and reducing reliance on foreign supply chains for our national defense is a worthwhile goal. But a closer look reveals this argument for what it is: a convenient facade.

In a recent appearance on the mining investor podcast Mining Stock Daily, Perpetua CEO Jon Cherry said the quiet part out loud: “Antimony is the enabler because of the government’s support. The economics are driven all by the gold. Our mine plan is based on gold.” The message could not be more clear: Stibnite is not about antimony, it’s about the gold (and it always was).

Even on its own terms, the antimony narrative is full of holes. Perpetua has acknowledged that a mere 10% of Stibnite’s mined antimony ore will actually be routed to the military. And as it turns out, Stibnite’s antimony might not actually be high enough grade to meet the military’s standards. Recent reporting by Bloomberg highlighted that industry experts and some military officials don’t see Stibnite as the best domestic source of antimony, in part because of the high cost associated with refining their lower grade ore. Multiple projects being pursued elsewhere in the West contain notably higher grade antimony than Stibnite.

Perpetua’s evolving narratives to justify this mine have proved to be misleading at best and downright false at worst. Strip away the mining company rhetoric and what remains is an irresponsible, taxpayer-subsidized open-pit gold mine designed primarily to maximize returns for wealthy shareholders. Perpetua will essentially be using $80 million of government subsidies intended to support antimony production to take $18 billion worth of gold out of the ground. And unlike oil and gas companies that must pay a royalty back to the public for the resources they extract from public lands, Perpetua would pay no such royalties to exploit our public lands thanks to the antiquated Mining Law of 1872.

We need some mines in some places for some reasons. But a massive open-pit gold mine in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River—one of Idaho’s most ecologically important watersheds—simply to line investor pockets and stockpile gold bars in faraway vaults? No thanks.

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