By admin 
Anyone who’s been to Ellicott Rock or Bee Cove knows what these slices of South Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains have to offer.
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There are whitewater streams, ancient trees, endangered animals and rare flowers sprinkled through the area along the Chattooga River in the state’s northwest corner. That’s why the federal government gave extra protection to these places long ago – and it’s why a recent government plan to reduce the protection is stirring unrest.
The U.S. Forest Service is proposing to eliminate a rule in place for 25 years that protects the most special parts of the country’s national forests from logging, mining and development. Known as the roadless rule, it generally bans new or reconstructed roads in sections of national forests.
Vast acreages of these protected areas are in the western United States, but South Carolina and other Southeastern states have slivers of special lands that now are in jeopardy, including Bee Cove and the Ellicott Rock area, critics of the federal plan say.
Even though the acreage in the Southeast is comparatively small, that doesn’t account for the quality of roadless areas in the southern Appalachians, conservationist Buzz Williams said.
“Whatever figure the Forest Services comes up with to make this impact sound very small and unimportant, they’re really hiding the ball because of the absolute significance of these areas,’’ said Williams, founder of the Chattooga Conservancy, a more than 30-year-old advocacy group in the Carolina and Georgia mountains.
Williams called the plan to scrap the roadless rule a major threat to mountain forests, rivers and wildlife. Most of the roadless areas in South Carolina are near the Chattooga, the state’s only national wild and scenic river, which was the setting for the movie “Deliverance’’ in the 1970s.
“The collective damage that could be done because of this is one of the most dramatic changes I’ve ever seen in a negative sense,’’ Williams said.
The Forest Service, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says it wants to scrap the roadless rule to make fighting forest fires easier and because it is an intrusive obstacle to proper land management.
In an Aug. 18 statement, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins called the roadless rule “a one-size-fits-all restriction that has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to wildfire risk reduction work across large swaths of America’s national forests.’’
The existing roadless rule has made it harder to access areas so tree branches and brush can be thinned out or cleared, according to an Aug. 20 federal register notice. The buildup of brush increases chances of wildfires, a concern nationally but also in the South, federal officials say.
“Substantial acreage within potentially affected inventoried roadless areas has a relatively high likelihood of burning under high intensity conditions,’’ according to the federal register notice.
Conservationists say the risk of wildfire is actually made worse by allowing roads that could bring large numbers of people into these areas. It’s a threat the Forest Service acknowledged in its federal register notice.
In an email this week to The State, the Forest Service said repealing the roadless rule does not “trigger any immediate actions on the forest.’’ Instead, it will allow local Forest Service officials to evaluate management issues at the local level.
“Rescinding the rule allows managers to address local watershed, economic and wildfire-risk conditions within the same planning framework that guides the rest of the National Forest System and can respond to changing conditions over the 10-15-year lifespan of a forest plan,’’ the agency’s press office said in a Sept. 1 statement.
When the roadless rule took effect in 2001, it covered some 58 million acres across the country. That’s about 30 percent of the nation’s national forests. The idea in preventing new roads was to prevent disturbance of the most sensitive parts of national forests. The current plan to drop the roadless rule affects 45 million acres.
Nationally, roadless areas include the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, parts of the Willamette National Forest in Oregon and areas near the Frank Church wilderness in Idaho. Those areas comprise millions of acres.
South Carolina has about 7,500 acres of roadless areas, according to the Forest Service. Those are in the Sumter National Forest of Oconee County and in the Francis Marion National Forest of Berkeley County in the state’s Lowcountry.
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The roadless rule was established under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Republican President George Bush attempted to limit the rule, and it has been the subject of legal battles for years. But efforts to get rid of it have failed. Republican President Donald Trump is making another run at doing away with the roadless protections.
Forest industry officials, whose business depends on harvesting trees, say they favor the flexibility that would be provided to the federal government if the roadless rule is scrapped. Some roads are needed to provide access to prevent and fight fires, they say.
“The Forestry Association of South Carolina generally favors restoring control of national forest land to local foresters,’’ association president Cam Crawford said in an email to The State newspaper. “ The roadless rule, by restricting access to national forests, makes it more difficult to thin the forest to reduce the threat of wildfire, increases response time during wildfires, and makes forest management practices such as conducting prescribed burns (which are done to reduce the threat of wildfire) harder to perform.”
But environmentalists say scrapping the roadless rule comes with a cost to nature.
According to research by Williams’ organization, roadless areas in the Chattooga River Watershed of South Carolina, Georgia and North Carolina are home to 20 at-risk species. Those include rare plants such as the Carolina hemlock, an evergreen tree that grows on rocky outcrops, and flowers like the smooth coneflower and the small whorled begonia, a type of orchid that is a federally listed threatened species.
Rare or at-risk animals in the area include the hellbender, a large salamander that inhabits mountain creeks and five species of bats that are considered vital to controlling insect populations, according to the conservancy. Among those in the roadless areas are the northern long-eared bat and the tri-colored bat.
Most of the roadless sections in South Carolina are in the Oconee County mountains, including Bee Cove and parts of the Big Mountain and Ellicott Rock areas along the borders with Georgia and North Carolina.
Bee Cove, at more than 3,000 acres, is a difficult-to-access area off S.C. 107 that slopes sharply down the Chattooga Ridge. Upper Bee Cove Falls, a stairstepping waterfall, is among the features there. Seeing the waterfall takes effort because the slope is so substantial. Within Bee Cove are old growth trees and a variety of wildlife.
The more than 800-acre Ellicott Rock roadless area, which is made up of two separate sections, is in a historic spot where North Carolina, Georgia and South Carolina come together. One of Ellicott Rock’s two roadless areas is just below the S.C. Department of Natural Resources fish hatchery near the East Fork of the Chattooga River.
The other Ellicott Rock roadless section borders North Carolina off S.C. 107, just south of Cashiers, N.C. It has some of the most impressive old growth trees in the Sumter National Forest, Williams said. Trees of 200 to 400 years old are found near the state line, according to a March 1995 study by North Carolina forester Paul Carlson. Those included a hemlock, a chestnut oak and a pitch pine, the study found.
“Because of the steeply dissected terrain and variety of aspects and landforms, this sector contains the highest diversity of old growth forest types found in the Chattooga basin,’’ the report said.
Big Mountain is a roadless area mostly in Georgia, but parts extend into South Carolina, hugging the Chattooga River.
Despite the federal government’s push to eliminate roadless areas, the Chattooga Conservancy says it is hopeful that people will let the Forest Service know that they care about the natural wonders found in those protected sections of national forests.
About 11 percent of the public land in the Chattooga River Watershed of the Carolinas and Georgia is roadless. Protecting roadless areas will also protect water quality in the Chattooga, the federally designated wild and scenic river, the organization says.
Alexandra Adams, a policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said threats in South Carolina are emblematic of the threats to lands across the country over repeal of the roadless rule.
“It’s part of our national pride that we have these beautiful places to protect wildlife, protect water and take care of us, give us places to go and recreate,’’ she said.
The federal government is accepting public comments on the plan to eliminate the roadless rule. People have until Sept. 21 to comment. The federal rulemaking portal can be accessed at https://www.regulations.gov. The docket number is FS-2025-0001 or RIN 0596-AD66.
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The New York Times contributed.