The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling that timber groups feared would complicate the management of national forests containing certain trails.

The case before the nation’s highest court pertained to an underground portion of a natural gas pipeline approved to cross about 600 feet beneath the Appalachian Trail in Virginia’s George Washington National Forest.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided the U.S. Forest Service could not grant permission for the pipeline to cross the trail because it’s within the National Park System, which prohibits such easements.

In a 7-2 opinion written by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court has ruled the 4th Circuit incorrectly determined the Forest Service lost jurisdiction over the pipeline crossing by granting the National Park Service an easement for the trail.

“Sometimes a complicated regulatory scheme may cause us to miss the forest for the trees, but at bottom, these cases boil down to a simple proposition: A trail is a trail, and land is land,” Thomas said.

The same real estate principles apply to the Forest Service and the National Park Service as they would to private landowners who enter into an easement agreement, he said.

“If a rancher granted a neighbor an easement across his land for a horse trail, no one would think that the rancher had conveyed ownership over that land,” Thomas said. “Nor would anyone think that the rancher had ceded his own right to use his land in other ways, including by running a water line underneath the trail that connects to his house.”

While the fate of a natural gas pipeline in Virginia may seem far removed from the controversies over timber in Western federal forests, the American Forest Resources Council and 16 other forestry groups were alarmed by the 4th Circuit’s interpretation of the law.

The 2,000-mile-long Appalachian Trail is just one of 15 trails that “stretch almost 38,000 miles across 32 states, and affect 60 different national forests, grasslands, scenic areas, and management units,” according to AFRC.

If the Supreme Court had sided with the 4th Circuit, this approach to the law would “balkanize” the National Forest System’s land use plans for its property, impeding fuels reduction and other forest projects, the timber groups argued.

“You’d have trenches of national park land running through your national forests, and it would be quite messy,” said Lawson Fite, general counsel for AFRC.

In the West, the Oregon National Historic Trail, which is more than 2,000 miles long, and the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, which is 4,900 miles long, would be directly implicated by the change in jurisdiction ordered by the 4th Circuit, he said.

If the Supreme Court had adopted that legal interpretation, any project containing a strip of land with a National Park Service trail would also need approval from that agency, which often has more restrictive regulations for its property, Fite said.

It’s already hard enough for projects to go through the Forest Service regulatory process, let alone a separate process for the National Park Service, he said. “Instead of one cook, you’d have two on a whole slew of things.”

The National Park System trails could effectively act as a thread that would be pulled out and cause the management of the entire National Forest System “sweater” to unravel, he said. The Supreme Court decision has prevented that while reaffirming that major land use changes should explicitly be done by Congress.

“It wasn’t necessarily about the pipeline or not, but this is not the way to analyze these types of issues,” Fite said.

Several national environmental groups — including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society and Defenders of Wildlife — urged the Supreme Court to uphold the 4th Circuit’s decision.

According to the environmentalists, the federal government and the pipeline company greatly exaggerated the “catastrophic consequences” of the 4th Circuit’s decision, partly because pipelines could still cross the trail on non-federal property.

The environmentalists also claimed allowing the pipeline to cross the trail would undermine a “fundamental purpose” of national park units within national forests, which are meant to provide such areas with the “highest level of protection.”