I believe in the contiguous USA the furthest you can get from a road is only 20 miles. There are no undisturbed places left, really. Unfortunately preserving roadless areas is politically contentious here. Clinton enacted a roadless area rule at the end of his administration and Bush tried to reverse it a week later.
I agree, but the fact that there was a forest/logging road in that area as recently as 50 years ago does indicate that it is an environment recently impacted by humans.
I can't really know what people think is or isn't a road but these are objectively roads and I think you are understating the extent to which resource extraction activities use these roads today, and the degree to which any road, no matter how much or little used, alters the ecosystem through which it passes.
The point is that humans have touched it. There’s a perception there’s large segments of the American West and Midwest that haven’t been touched. Which is what they’re describing. Almost every place, at one point or another was close to the road. When we’ve only had cars for the last 100 or so, that’s quite a statement.
