Thousands of miles of forest roads will soon open to off road vehicles in northern Lower Michigan.
Governor Rick Snyder signed a law last year permitting ORVs on all Lower Peninsula forest roads ... except those closed by the state.
More than six thousand miles of roads will open on January 1st.
Scott Whitcomb with the Department of Natural Resources ... says state officials have decided to keep another 12-hundred miles closed to ORVs.
“In general we’re trying to balance the desire for motorized recreation and public access against the potential for resource damage, potential conflicts with other users in the forest. So we had a lot of different things that we weighed back and forth in coming with that decision but that’s how we arrived at it.”
The DNR has drawn maps of all the forest roads in the northern Lower Peninsula.
It’s working on similar maps for the rest of the state.