Greetings, Beacon Nation. Tristan Scott here to muster up your Monday medley of news and information, starting with another round in the long legal fight over roads, grizzly bears and bull trout in the Flathead National Forest.

Two Northwest Montana conservation groups on Friday notified the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that they intend to sue over revised analyses of how road management in the Flathead National Forest affects threatened grizzly bears and bull trout.

Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan, represented by Earthjustice, said the new analyses largely repeat errors that federal courts in Montana have already found unlawful. The groups said the agencies again failed to rationally consider the effects of unauthorized motorized use of closed roads, and of so-called “impassable” roads, on the two species. A road counts as impassable under the forest plan if just its first stretch, as little as 50 feet, has been blocked with measures such as fallen trees, boulders or scarified ground, even if the rest of the road remains on the landscape. The notice gives the agencies 60 days to address the alleged Endangered Species Act violations before the groups file suit.

The notice follows a complaint the groups filed June 5 in U.S. District Court in Missoula challenging the Forest Service’s approval of the West Reservoir Project near Hungry Horse Reservoir. The project includes 4.7 miles of road construction and reconstruction, 2,001 acres of logging and 4,654 acres of prescribed fire across a 129,608-acre action area. The Forest Service signed its decision authorizing the project March 11 and acknowledged then that it is likely to adversely affect grizzlies and bull trout.

The June lawsuit alleges the agency improperly used the Endangered Species Act’s emergency consultation procedures, a modified process meant for situations such as disasters and national security emergencies, to avoid the formal review that normally results in a biological opinion from Fish and Wildlife Service. The groups said no unexpected emergency existed. They point to an April 2025 memorandum from the Secretary of Agriculture designating an “emergency situation” across roughly 59% of the National Forest System because of wildfire and insect and disease risks. The complaint says the Forest Service did not invoke emergency procedures for the West Reservoir Project until its March decision, after earlier documents said consultation would be completed.

The legal fight over the forest’s road rules dates to 2019, when the groups challenged the 2018 Flathead Forest Plan. The plan replaced longstanding limits on road density in grizzly habitat and loosened standards for reclaiming roads. Federal courts ruled in 2021 and again in 2024 that Fish and Wildlife Service had not adequately evaluated those changes. The groups said no valid biological opinion for the forest plan is in place, and that the agencies released the revised analyses, along with the first evaluation of the West Reservoir Project’s specific effects, only after the June suit was filed.

We’ll keep tracking where this latest development leads. In the meantime, here’s the rest of the Daily Roundup.