STANLEY, Idaho — The Sawtooth National Recreation Area is a 756,000-acre natural gem with friends in high places.
The Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, Michael Boren, is from here and oversees the Forest Service. The forest agency chief reporting to him, Tom Schultz, is from Idaho and once led the state’s Department of Lands. Two political appointees working for Boren and Schultz have ties to the area as well.
So if any place might have been spared the Trump administration’s moves to shrink the Forest Service, residents say, the Sawtooth should have been it — yet the agency appears as short-staffed as anywhere after losing more than half of the SNRA’s employees in the opening months of the administration in 2025. The Forest Service has said a larger reorganization at the agency should make leadership more attuned to local concerns, although some residents near the recreation area have raised concerns that won’t result in more on-the-ground employees.
Forest Service employees on the Sawtooth are “burned out and exhausted,” said Liesa Dean, a retired wilderness program director on the SRNA who lives in the region and remains in touch with current employees.
At the Idaho Conservation League, which often collaborates with the agency on forest projects, Central Idaho Director Josh Johnson said he’s surprised the Forest Service hasn’t done more to rebuild staff in the recreation area, given the neighborhood connections. It’s a popular spot that he said needed more employees even before the new administration took office.
“That wouldn’t be controversial,” Johnson said. “Everyone would love that.”
Yet signs of the agency’s diminishment locally are hard to miss: Tourists stopping by the ranger station in Stanley see two signs — a permanent one outside saying “visitors welcome,” and a note on the door that says the office is closed until further notice due to staffing changes.
In a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News, the Forest Service said it’s “looking at innovative ways” to provide affordable housing to employees, which would allow the Stanley office to reopen. The agency has signed a lease for a new housing development in nearby Ketchum — where the Sun Valley ski resort makes for a pricey real estate market — but officials are still working on specific terms with the developer, the Forest Service said.
A superlative area
The SNRA covers part of the 2.1-million-acre Sawtooth National Forest. It encompasses 11,000-foot jagged peaks that still have patches of snow in July, forests of lodgepole pine and a richly green valley dotted with ranches, including Boren’s on the outskirts of Stanley, population 117.
Boren’s ranch became a source of local intrigue in recent years. Boren has had disagreements with neighbors about his use of an airstrip on his ranch, for which he received a permit from the Forest Service. Neighbors complained about its impact on the area’s scenic easement; Boren, who maintained he did nothing wrong, sued them for defamation in a case that was recently dismissed.
Unlike many national forests, the SNRA is a mix of private property and federal land. Development is limited by the federal protections covering the area, including scenic easements meant to preserve the expansive views. Forest Service easements allow the public to access trails across private property.
“It’s hard not to speak in superlatives when referring to the Sawtooth National Recreation Area,” the Forest Service declares in a visitor guide.
The closed ranger station, about 12 miles from Boren’s ranch, already had limited hours before the Trump administration’s cuts, said Ed Cannady, a retired backcountry manager on the Sawtooth who’s now a director of the Sawtooth Interpretive and Historical Association. The SNRA headquarters, about an hour’s drive from the ranger station, remains open. But the shuttered ranger station is a publicly visible loss, Cannady said.
“That’s a source of information for the public,” Cannady said, including guidance on campgrounds and trails, “everything you need to know about the Sawtooth Recreation Area.”
In the meantime, the Forest Service said, it’s directing visitors to two facilities the Sawtooth Interpretive and Historical Association runs: the Stanley Museum and the Redfish Lake Visitor Center.
Personnel shakeups have hit the area, too.
The SNRA area ranger, Michael Fuller, is an acting capacity. Both the forest supervisor and the deputy supervisor on the Boise National Forest, about 70 miles to the west, are also in acting roles as the agency moves people around to plug bureaucratic holes.
Staffing changes come as a proposal to expand mountain biking trails in the recreation area raises questions about the agency’s ability to maintain them. Two local property owners who’ve proposed the idea say it could take pressure off other, crowded areas, but questions remain about the Forest Service’s ability to oversee or maintain them.
“We’ve got a lot of great trails, and we have a backlog of maintenance,” said Rebecca Rusch, an area resident who helped organize a survey to gauge public opinion on trail expansion. Most respondents didn’t like the idea, she said.
Agency reorganization
The Forest Service is also promising more attention to local concerns as the centerpiece of its agency-wide reorganization that’s slowly being implemented. Part of that plan is to dismantle the system of nine regional foresters, replacing it with 15 state directors — one of whom will be in Idaho. Those positions have been advertised, but no hires have been announced.
State offices will have around eight to 12 employees each, Schultz told the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture at a hearing Wednesday. That’s compared to several hundred in a typical regional office, he said.
Overall, fewer than 500 employees will have to relocate in the reorganization and most of those work in the Washington headquarters, Schultz said. A new headquarters will be established in Salt Lake City.
In most cases, he said, employees will be able to stay in their current work location.
Having the state office in the capital, Boise, should be helpful for the region, said Allison Ginn, the acting deputy supervisor on the Boise National Forest. It’s a setup more akin to the Bureau of Land Management and addresses a long-held view by Forest Service officials that over time, the old system took decision-making away from the field.
Officials haven’t promised to restore staffing levels, however, and they’ve downplayed potential losses resulting from the reorganization. As many as 6,500 people left the Forest Service nationally last year, officials have said, mainly through the voluntary departures the administration encouraged. The Forest Service has around 30,000 employees, or roughly the number it had during the first Trump administration, Schultz has said.
On the Sawtooth, the Forest Service said, “We are not anticipating that the reorganization would create additional vacancies and it should have no effect on current operations across the forest.”
As in other parts of the country, the Forest Service says it can’t maintain all trails without help from volunteers and conservation groups — a reality with or without the Trump administration’s changes. In some places in southern Idaho, Forest Service employees are doing on-the-ground work for the agency’s nonfederal partners, according to the Idaho Conservation League, meaning they’re paid by the organizations.
In work that’s less visible to the public — such as conducting environmental reviews of forest projects like habitat restoration, timber harvesting and wildfire mitigation — the forest agency will remain strained, too, residents said, although the administration has scaled back environmental reviews and limited public comment periods to accelerated the work.
The Forest Service is having trouble keeping up with what it already has and enforcing rules, thanks to positions vacated and not refilled, Dean said.
Dean said her husband recently visited Alice Lake, in the Sawtooth wilderness area, where the Forest Service prohibits groups bigger than 12 people.
“He encountered a group of 35. There’s nothing to stop that,” Dean said.
Where the Forest Service has scaled back on maintenance, groups like the Sawtooth Society, a nonprofit group of SNRA supporters, step in to keep trails in shape.
Last year, the Sawtooth Society tripled its related work, the organization said. That included 465 miles of trails and roadways cleared, 1,300 trees removed and 130 illegal fire rings removed, the society said.
In April, the Sawtooth Society appealed to the public for more help, including $80,000 in donations to help make up for the Forest Service’s reductions.
Otherwise, the society said, “this will leave our beloved wild places at risk of deterioration, destruction, or outright closure this summer.”
Contact Marc Heller on the encrypted messaging app Signal at hellmarcman.49
