
Only an estimated 3 million acres of our wild forests remain. These unroaded, ecologically critical areas in Washington state are rapidly being lost to logging, road building and other development. They include some of the state's most treasured places like the Dark Divide in the South Cascades, the Twin Sisters and Hoodoo in northeastern Washington and Devil's Gulch on the eastern slope of the Cascades. In the last 100 years, roadless areas in our state have been disappearing at an average of 200,000 acres per year.
Unlike National Parks or designated Wilderness Areas, unprotected roadless areas are open to logging and road building. America's National Forests, which are managed by the U.S. Forest Service, is fragmented by 433,000 miles of roads -- most of them for logging. Even though we have enough logging roads to circle the globe 16 times, the Forest Service proposes to build more every year.
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