The Trump administration has filed a proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, a regulation that restricts road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting on roughly 45 million acres of National Forest System land across the country, including approximately 6.4 million acres in Montana.

Seven long years ago the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, with the support of local residents, took the Forest Service to federal court to halt the Hanna Flats logging, road-building, and burning project on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest in northern Idaho. Through a long and winding legal saga the good news — for grizzly bears, old-growth forests, and the local populace which strongly opposed the deforestation — is that a federal appeals court just ruled for the Alliance.