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Well, our best riding here is in state managed forest too. We don't have many of those 'off-limits' wilderness areas, yet, but I fear them coming. Not so much to eliminate riders, as to eliminate meth labs and those who drive up into the woods to dump their garbage. That is why the private forests close. They have no interest in public access and the trouble they bring.

So far the state land is all working forest, and the natural forest was long ago replaced with douglas fir. I don't know that horses are necessarily ~banned~ off trail, but cutting across somewhere and making new trail is frowned upon by the trail riding proponent groups. It's harsh to make a bunch of rules, but it'd be bad if everyone cut across their own way. That's what the off road motor-bikers do.

So... knowing that it's a working forest and not a preserve, I don't mourn the clearcuts, they're temporary and create open areas where berries for bear and browsables for deer grows. It doesn't look a lot different, ecologically speaking than the natural old growth, fire and rebirth cycle that would happen if we werent' there. Within a few years it's growing up again.

I have to differ with you about the clear-cuts. Now, let me say up front that I know nothing about forestry, but I just don't think that taking a mixed hardwood forest and replacing it with a pine monoculture is a sound forest management practice. They could select cut the mature trees and let the rest grow while replacing what they cut with similar species. The pine beetle infestations of the last several years are just one example of too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. When pines are scattered throughout a hardwood forest, if one area gets pine beetles, there's probably not another pine grove close enough to get them too, so the outbreak is confined to just the trees in that area. But when the pines go on for miles, there's no stopping it. It's like a fire in that it jumps from one tree to the next.

And I would agree with you about the clear-cuts functioning in a similar way to the cycles of burning and regrowth that would occur in a natural old growth forest, IF that's what they let happen, but it isn't. They let good timber to to waste in the areas that they don't cut, like the wilderness areas, then suppress naturally occurring fires until the deadwood piles up so deep on the forest floor that you can't even walk through it and if, god forbid, there is a fire at that point, there is so much fuel that it would take the whole forest with it.

I do agree with you about the fact that they don't like the public to have access because it allows them to see what is actually happening on public land and they don't want the hassle.

(Off soapbox now)