Every year, outfitter Lee Livingston sends some of his staff up popular trails in Wyoming’s backcountry before the season starts. The wranglers and guides spend long days using handsaws to clear out the dozens and sometimes hundreds of dead or damaged trees that have fallen across the trails, rendering them impassible.
And it’s only getting worse.
“We’re dealing with the perfect storm, or imperfect storm, whatever way you want to describe it,” said Livingston, who has outfitted hunting, fishing and other backcountry recreation trips out of Cody, Wyoming, for more than 40 years, mostly on lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service. “You’re having more burns. And you have a lack of funding, which results in lack of trail crews. All of this is coming together to make our backcountry less and less accessible.” In response, Livingston and the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association petitioned the Forest Service to allow outfitters to wield chainsaws in designated wilderness areas to clear neglected trails.
The thing is: Chainsaws are machines, and motorized and mechanized uses are banned in designated wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act — among the most sacrosanct of U.S. conservation laws. But Livingston likes his odds, given that the agency recently gave the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association a conditional permit for gas-powered chainsaw use in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness for seven months each year over the next three years. The association will be allowed to clear a total of 61 trails extending more than 540 miles.
Added to that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been circulating a draft memo directing Forest Service offices to prioritize opening trails, trailheads, closed roads and airstrips using “all means at their disposal,” including chainsaws. While the memo doesn’t explicitly mention wilderness areas, it will likely be used to justify approving more petitions like those from Wyoming and Idaho, said Dana Johnson, a policy director with the environmental group Wilderness Watch.
Wilderness and conservation advocates like Johnson have denounced these moves as a perversion, if not outright violation, of the law under the guise of much-needed trail management and improved access. “It’s not a question of … ‘if we don’t authorize chainsaws, (trails) can’t be cleared,” said Johnson, whose group is currently debating whether to sue over the exemptions. “I think the Forest Service is no longer interested in supporting traditional tools, and chainsaws are easier.” She also fears that allowing commercial groups broad exemptions under the law is another step toward stripping away the protections that make wilderness, well, wilderness.
“I think the Forest Service is no longer interested in supporting traditional tools, and chainsaws are easier.”
The use of chainsaws in designated wilderness areas has long been contentious even within the Forest Service, largely due to the vague language in the Wilderness Act. While it bans temporary roads, motor vehicles, motorized equipment, aircraft landing and other forms of mechanical transport, it also says “except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration,” including “in emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the area.” But what, exactly, constitutes an administration’s “minimum requirements” or an emergency has been left for federal agencies to decide.
Agencies occasionally approve limited chainsaw use to clear massive blowdowns after storms or wildfires, and at times for fire prevention, using public safety as the justification. In 2019, for example, the Forest Service wanted to permit crews to use chainsaws to clear trails in the Weminuche and South San Juan wilderness areas in Colorado, citing visitor safety and the need for access and a reduction in resource damage, according to news reports. Then Wilderness Watch sued, and the Forest Service rescinded the decision.
Outfitters say that historic blowdowns that threaten public safety are exactly what they’re facing now, and there appear to be few alternatives. The Trump administration has cut more than a quarter of employees from the Forest Service since February 2025, including many trail crews. And even before that, trail crews — hindered by staffing cuts and inadequate funding — struggled to maintain the thousands of miles of trails that crisscross Western wilderness.
Even some former Forest Service trail crew members believe the agency should allow limited wilderness chainsaw use, ideally by government employees but also by nonprofit partners or permitted outfitters if necessary. People won’t defend what they don’t understand, said Claire Thompson, who spent eight years clearing trails for the Forest Service in wilderness and non-wilderness areas in Washington. “If we let so much wilderness become completely inaccessible to hikers and recreationists, we run the risk of potentially losing wilderness protection.” The National Park Service has also been more lax approving chainsaws to clear wilderness areas on land it manages, Thompson said.
In its petition to the agency, the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association tried to honor some wilderness values, opting for battery-powered chainsaws instead of gas-powered ones. “They’re quiet,” Livingston said. “There’s no exhaust. It makes sense.” Outfitters already operate under Forest Service permits, so the agency has oversight and control. Besides, the American public wants wilderness trails, Livingston said, and chainsaws are an efficient way to clear them.
But arguing for efficiency in managing wilderness — which covers about 2% of the public land in the Lower 48 — misses the point, said Johnson. “There should be a few places left in the U.S. where our demands on the landscape and our desires and conveniences are not primary, that those areas are protected for something else,” Johnson said. “If that means we have to slow down or that means we can’t get into certain trails as easily, then that’s what it is.”
For Mark Squillace, a natural resources professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s law school, allowing chainsaws for long periods over thousands of acres follows neither the letter nor the spirit of the Wilderness Act. “Chainsaws are a disturbance to the peaceful nature of the wilderness,” he said. “I wouldn’t be an absolutist on this issue, but I don’t like the idea that they’re giving some general authority for third parties to use chainsaws.” Instead, he argued, the Forest Service must reinvest in trained trail crews to maintain public access to the backcountry. Ultimately, clearing trails on public lands is the government’s responsibility.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.
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