Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Mitchell. Yes, thank you. My name is Ron Mitchell and I reside at 8673 Fairview, Boise, Idaho. I'll be submitting detailed written testimony, but I would like to make some general com ments. I favor classifying as wilderness approximately 3 million acres of Idaho's remaining 6.5 million acres of roadless forest lands. I also support wilderness classification of lands designated by the Idaho Conservation League as endangered Idaho wilderness core. And I'm adamantly opposed to hard release language in any wil derness bill because future changes in Idaho's demographics, econo my and wildlife populations behoove us at a future date to classify roadless as wilderness. My advocacy of wilderness is based on the overwhelming evi dence that wilderness status will render the highest and best uses of such land for both the quality of life and economic standpoints. Road these areas and log and mine them, and as both the U.S. Forest Service and the Idaho Fish and Game Department acknowl edge, the quality of fishing, hunting, and watershed and scenery will certainly decline. Logging scenic de facto wilderness and therby locking them up in a network of clearcuts and logging roads precludes or diminishes other uses as wilderness backpacking, horsepacking, camping, fish ing, hunting, photography, and nature study. The outdoor recreation review commission once projected a ten fold increase in wilderness recreational use from 1960 to the year 2000 and a recent forest survey confirmed that wilderness recrea tion is increasing several times faster than road accessible camp ground use. Crowding has become a major problem in portions of 466 the Sawtooth, Hells Canyon and River of No Return Wilderness Areas, and consequently in order to maintain quality wilderness recreation, for which Idaho is nationally famous, and to bolster the State's recreation and tourism economy, which is now second only to agriculture, additional wilderness lands are needed. Furthermore, the economic impact on Idahoans of logging and roading of potential wilderness lands is, cumulatively, negative. The cost of building logging roads in these marginally commercial timberlands often exceeds the monetary receipts to the Forest Service for timber sold. In fact