This was very interesting. I often wondered what the road quality was like in people getting to some of their claims. I assumed the Forest Service was in charge of maintaining the roads, but wondered how often they graded them, or even traversed down them. I suspected with budgets getting tighter and tighter, road quality was terrible.
Where I live, back roads are maintained by individual towns, and so they might get graded twice a year on the busiest roads, and mere ATV or snowmobile trails, on the more obscure ones.
Myself, I live in Maine so there are no “claims”, a landowner has mineral rights automatically to the center of the earth on the land they own, but except for one location (a gravel pit), all my streams have no access at all. For me it means at least a ¼ mile hike to the closest stream, and a 1-1/2 mile hike to the farthest one away. One stream is big enough that I might take the bulldozer and push a road to it, but at ¾ of a mile, that is a pretty big expense at this point.
I figure with my luck, by the time I make heavy haul roads to all the major points of my farm that I need them, we will all be driving hovercrafts by then! (LOL)
