Dear Forest Service Officials,

I wish to submit these comments on the Plan Revisions for the Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests.  These are incredibly valuable national interest lands that citizens like me from all across the country want to see protected.

I strongly support the Citizen Alternative formulated by the Friends of the Clearwater (FOC).  I urge the Forest Service to adopt it as the agency's preferred alternative.

In particular, I urge the Forest Service to recommend as Wilderness all the roadless areas as identified in the FOC alternative.  The agency should recommend as Wilderness the Weitas Creek, Pot Mountain, Fish and Hungry Creeks, and the Upper North Fork Clearwater roadless areas, the Cove-Mallard additions to the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the Rapid River addition to the Hells Canyon Wilderness, all of Meadow Creek and all of Gedney Creek, Warm Springs Creek along the Lochsa Slope, and the wildlands near Elk Summit.  Furthermore, the agency should recommend  as Wilderness all of the roadless additions to the Gospel-Hump Wilderness.

The standards in the Forest Plan for water quality, wildlife habitat, and fish habitat should be enforceable and non-discretionary, not like the fuzzy standards proposed by the Forest Service.

The Forest Service should rely on natural processes for creating diverse forests.  The desire future condition should be process-oriented rather than end-point oriented.

The Forest Service should also ignore the terrible recommendations proposed by the Clearwater Basin Collaborative (CBC).  That collaborative seeks to bargain away my own interests in wilderness protections for these national forests, without giving me any say in their backroom deals, while seeming to violate NEPA, the Wilderness Act, and probably many more federal statutes.  The CBC does not represent me nor any of the millions of citizens across the country who are part-owners of these national forests and want to see them protected by wilderness designation.

Please adopt these requests in your planning, and please keep me on your contact list for next steps on the Forest Plan revision.

Sincerely,

Kevin Proescholdt
2833 43rd Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN  55406