Transportation corridors (roads and trails) in U.S. Federal Lands contain numerous unstable and potentially unstable slopes and slope failures. Although slope failures that cause significant blockages, property loss, or loss of life are not common at any given location, any slope failure along a transportation corridor is a problem for the agency responsible for providing and maintaining safe movement of people and goods along our roadways and recreators along our trails with limited budgets.  However, there is little in the literature to guide FLMAs, Tribes, and local state agencies (like County, City, and State and Metro Parks) with low to very low traffic volumes and various levels of trail usage in how to manage slopes using asset management principles.  This project will provide guidance to manage slopes by developing and implementing an asset management-based unstable slope management program for Federal Land Management Agencies and Tribes that can be adopted by other local state agencies with similar assets and infrastructure assessment needs.

Under the 1^st phase of this project, two primary road corridors with known unstable slopes were identified for use in the field demonstration of the Unstable Slope Management Program (USMP). The road corridors are in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on Forest Service Road 25 and 99, respectively.  The first task of this phase of work included identifying stakeholders in partnering agencies, providing, developing, and presenting geotechnical asset management materials to educate the team about unstable slope asset and performance management .  These meetings generated input from the partners to refine the Alaska DOT’s unstable slope rating criteria for FLMA’s very low to low volume roads and significant trail network usage.  A draft USMP rating form, calculations, and rating criteria definitions were produced prior to demonstrating the field inventory and condition survey at approximately 20 unstable slopes consisting of both, soil and rock unstable slopes of varying condition and severity.  The Phase 1 report wincludes final versions of the unstable slope rating forms, calculations, and rating criteria definitions as well as maps of the demonstration corridors with completed rating forms, site photographs, and a ranked list of the slopes with their slope ratings.  This report will also include a narrative detailing “how to do standardized unstable slope ratings and minimize personal bias.”  This narrative will be used to develop a field manual that will describe the USMP for FLMA’s processes for the four generalized areas: Inventory and Condition Survey, Performance Standards and Service Life, Identifying Corrective Actions, and Taking Corrective Actions, and it will be utilized to describe how to use the USMP database and Geographical Information System (GIS) interface platform under Phase 2.