ShareTrails | Twelve Days of Legal Updates| Day 11: Tonto National Forest Plan Objection

Twelve Days of Legal Updates: Our Twelve Biggest Fights and Twelve Big Reasons to Support BlueRibbon Coalition this Giving Season

In September 2022, the Tonto National Forest in Arizona released their final updated plan for the National Forest. The Arizona State Association of 4WD Clubs is a longtime member organization of BlueRibbon Coalition, and they were the BRC member with a strong substantive record of engagement on this plan. As part of our mission to support our member organizations we helped them prepare an objection to the final plan based on deficiencies related to motorized access, failure to consider President Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing Equity for underserved groups – such as those with disabilities, and because we have concerns about justifying motorized access restrictions through implementation of the Clinton Roadless Rule.

The USFS accepted the objection letter, and ASA4WDC will be a participant in the objection resolution meetings. We plan to work closely with them through this process to ensure that we are keeping as much of the Tonto National Forest open to the public as we possibly can. This will also be one of our first efforts to protect access for the disabled with the Biden Executive Order on Advancing Equity as the basis. It will be interesting to see if this executive order will result in meaningful change for providing access to public lands for the disabled.

We will be sharing additional legal updates from Arizona as part of our 12 days of Legal Updates. If you care about public access to public land in Arizona, we invite you to join the Arizona Adventure Alliance. This joint membership program is a great, affordable way to join four groups that are fighting hard everyday to keep Arizona open for Adventure.

There are two ways that you can join:

Review Benefits of Membership and Join Directly

Join by Donating to our Yellowstone Snowmobile Adventure Sweepstakes

Join By Entering our Yellowstone Sweepstakes – Use promo code ARIZONA, Enter at the $100 level, and you will become a member of the Arizona Adventure Alliance, Receive 50% more Entries into the Sweepstakes, and you will be supporting our legal efforts to keep public lands open.

As 2022 comes to a close we have prepared a “12 Days of Legal Challenges” series to update you on our most important fights to keep your public lands and waters open for adventure. You can sign up to receive these updates and to receive our future action alerts below.