NOT ROADLESS. LESS ROADED
Policy issues are all about perspective. And for the third time, I’ve been given the opportunity to see Friends of the Inyo’s policy concerns from the perspective of the sky.
Friends of the Inyo frequently partners with EcoFlight, a nonprofit that uses six-seat airplanes to fly over threatened conservation areas. On Tuesday, August 4, they invited me to join them for two of these flights.
On the first flight, taking off from Mammoth Airport, we circled around Laurel Mountain, flew over Convict Lake and passed through the Glass Mountains.
It was hard to believe, with all the various roads cutting through these landscapes, that they have one designation in common – that they are “Roadless Landscapes.”
“It’s not actually roadless, but less-roaded,” Friends of the Inyo’s Allison Weber said.
The Roadless Rule, adopted in 2001, established prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting across nearly 60 million acres of inventoried roadless areas, with limited exceptions, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Although these areas are designated “Roadless,” roads that existed before the rule’s adoption remain.
Today, the 2001 Roadless Rule applies to nearly 45 million acres of National Forest System lands.
Among those acres, 52,867 surround Glass Mountain. Looking down from above, the area appears truly wild. There are no buildings, just a vast expanse of sagebrush and dark streaks of obsidian.
Within this landscape live bighorn sheep, greater bi-state sage grouse, golden eagles and threatened whitebark pine.
Another 40,044 acres sit within the Laurel-McGee area, which contains the headwaters of Laurel, Convict, McGee and Hilton creeks.
Last year, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced her intent to rescind the Roadless Rule, arguing that it “goes against the mandate of the USDA Forest Service to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands.”
“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Rollins said in a 2025 statement.
The stated reason for removing the rule is to improve wildfire response and increase access for firefighters.
Friends of the Inyo disagrees with that reasoning, arguing that roads can also create wildfire risks by increasing vehicle access and human activity.
“The rule was passed in 2001. They’ve been able to fight fires the whole time,” said Jora Fogg, Conservation Lands Foundation public lands policy associate director, during the flight.
For conservation groups, roadless protections also represent one of the remaining tools available to challenge development, including extraction projects, on public lands, especially as other environmental review processes have changed.
Under the Trump administration, the Department of the Interior announced reforms to its National Environmental Policy Act procedures, describing the changes as a way to reduce regulatory barriers, accelerate project approvals and streamline environmental reviews.
The reforms, announced in February 2026 and led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, rescinded more than 80% of the Interior’s previous NEPA regulations, moving many provisions into a streamlined Departmental NEPA Handbook of Implementing Procedures.
The second flight of the day offered a different view of the same debate, a trip over the proposed mining site at Hot Creek, where Friends of the Inyo is opposing future development.
Because of changes to how federal agencies implement NEPA, Friends of the Inyo says the public may have fewer opportunities to learn about the proposal early in the approval process or provide comments before decisions are made.
The current proposal is expected to be a revised version of a previous mining proposal that was approved by the U.S. Forest Service but later overturned in court in 2021.
*For further explanation of this history, see the April 11, 2026 issue of The Sheet.
From above Hot Creek, the proximity of the proposed mining area to the waterway is immediately visible. The closest point of the proposal sits approximately 0.3 miles from Hot Creek, Weber said.
But beyond the policy debate, the landscape itself is difficult to ignore. Winding tributaries cut through broad green meadows, with fauna popping up wherever there’s water, surrounded by a sweeping mountain backdrop.
From the sky, the reason this landscape has drawn so much attention is clear.
