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Too Many Roads In The Pole Mountain Recreation Area?

Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest

One of the state’s most popular recreation areas is getting too much love with roads and camp sites in the Pole Mountain area cropping up everywhere. So the Medicine Bow National Forest is tackling a large-scale travel plan that would help decide what roads and camp sites should be kept, and which need to go.

Spokesman Aaron Voos says the agency relied in part on public comments to create their proposed plan.

“It’s just going to be just over 30 miles of decommissioning. And so decommissioning means that there was physically a road and there will no longer be a road there. You know, the road base is torn up, it’s re-seeded, it’s changed so it no longer looks like a road.”

Voos says, the plan also proposes converting about six miles of roads into off-highway vehicle trails and curbing the number of campsites in the Veedauwoo area by assigning designated camping spots.

“There are camp sites just all over the place,” he says. “One little camp site leads to another. It’s kind of the spider web effect. And so we’ve proposed designated dispersed camping along the #700 road. Meaning you can still disperse camp. You just have to camp in a spot that’s been designated. It’ll have a sign.”

Voos says, for the next month, people can comment on the proposed road plan at their website or by stopping by the Medicine Bow National Forest office in Laramie.

Melodie Edwards is the host and producer of WPM's award-winning podcast The Modern West. Her Ghost Town(ing) series looks at rural despair and resilience through the lens of her hometown of Walden, Colorado. She has been a radio reporter at WPM since 2013, covering topics from wildlife to Native American issues to agriculture.
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