U.S. Forest Service managers in parts of Montana and Idaho are working to ban mountain bikes on landscapes that some day could merit wilderness designation, a move that isn't sitting well with the International Mountain Bicycling Association. Over at the National Park Service, meanwhile, officials have no intention of letting mountain bikers access lands eligible for wilderness designation.
“Existing lands that have been determined to be eligible for wilderness, they should not be considered for potential mountain bike trails at this point," says Garry Oye, the Park Service's wilderness and recreation chief. "We wouldn’t want to authorize a use if we’ve already determined that the lands should be considered for wilderness. We wouldn’t want to allow a use that would compromise that future designation. That’s consistent with our policies.”
Since 2005 at least IMBA has been working to expand mountain bike use in national parks. That year saw the organization and the Park Service sign off on a Memorandum of Understanding calling for a five-year pilot program that would explore mountain bike possibilities in the National Park System via pilot projects in three parks. Initially that MOU was aimed at opening more dirt roads and administrative roads to the cyclists, but not long afterward IMBA officials began talking of the need for single-track routes in the parks.
While those efforts led to a study in Big Bend National Park to create a "shared use" trail, one designed primarily with mountain bikers in mind, IMBA officials began working to change Park Service regulations that must be negotiated before a park superintendent can open park terrain beyond developed areas to mountain bikes. As the clock was running out on the Bush administration the Interior Department published a proposed rule to "streamline" the regulatory landscape regarding mountain bikes in national parks, but it quickly drew criticism from groups that feared how much Park Service landscape its passage could affect.
There are places for mountain bikers to ride in the National Park System. Hundreds of miles of mountain biking opportunities exist in the parks, ranging from the classic, 100-mile-long White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park to routes through the woods at Mammoth Cave National Park, the carriage paths in Acadia National Park, and even the rail trails in Cape Cod National Seashore. In all, more than 40 national park units off mountain biking opportunities in some form.
But not all public land landscapes are open to mountain bikers. This past Sunday's New York Times ran a story about Forest Service efforts to institute regulations that would ban mountain bikers from hundreds or even thousands of miles of trail that weave through lands that one day could be designated as official wilderness. While many mountain bike enthusiasts maintain that they should be able to enjoy their favored form of recreation on public lands, included those designated wilderness, land managers who oversee lands with wilderness characteristics are trying to prevent compromising those characteristics. And since officially designated wilderness is off-limits to mechanized travel -- even if that mode of transportation is a bike -- the forest managers are perhaps erring on the side of caution by moving to limit where mountain bikers can ride.
"There's no comparison between bikes made 20 years ago and those made today," Dave Bull, the Forest Service's director for recreation, minerals, lands, heritage and wilderness in Montana told the Times. "People are better able to get to places they couldn't reach before without hiking. They're pushing further and further."
Not only are the latest generation of bikes capable of taking their riders farther and farther into the backcountry, but their arrival, some believe, is out of sync with the wilderness concept.
“There is a wilderness experience, a truly backcountry experience, that is part of the idea and the concept behind wilderness," says Michael Carroll, associate director of The Wilderness Society's Wilderness Support Center. "It's preserving a landscape that is similar to the landscape that our fathers and their fathers before them were able to experience. It’s hard to argue that that experience has been preserved when you have heavy traffic zipping by on mountain bikes after you’ve spent two days hiking in.”
IMBA's communications director, Mark Eller, believes that sentiment can flow in two directions.
"Let’s reverse the hypothetical and say you’re in a remote area and you’re a solo mountain biker and you come across a gaggle of hikers," he offers. "Is that going to disrupt your quiet, the solitude on your mountain bike? Probably.”
Beyond that, says Mr. Eller, the debate over appropriateness, and righteousness, of trail use seems to be getting skewed.
“There seems to be the perception of conflict and the realities that people see on the trails are totally out of whack with each other," he said, adding a moment later that, "I have a hard time just categorizing one trail mode as always more pristine and contemplative than other.”
IMBA has worked to build alliances with the land-management agencies, from meeting around the country with officials to sending trail crews out to both repair trails and demonstrate how to build trails that will stand up to bike use. The group has not talked about cutting trails in national park wilderness areas -- though IMBA officials have talked in theory about realigning proposed wilderness boundaries to benefit mountain bikers -- but rather has focused on creating more riding opportunities elsewhere in the parks. With word that the New River Gorge National River is in line for $2 million to expand its network of bike trails, the group hopes to show that shared-use trails can be well-designed and used cooperatively by hikers and bikers.
“That’s what we’re hoping will be a great place for people to look to and see how it can work in a national park," said Mr. Eller, who agrees that not all national parks are suitable for backcountry mountain bike trails. "We think we’re going to be able to show how it can be done when it’s done right.”
While IMBA also has argued that the ban against "mechanized" travel in official wilderness should be reworded to one against "motorized" travel, that might create more of a battle than the group wants to enter in light of the longevity of that provision in the Wilderness Act, which was passed in 1964
“Any time you go back and modify the parent law, or parent legislation, you better do it with some good public debate, and I think that’s what needs to happen if we do need to go back and look at those things that were legislated in 1964," said the Park Service's Mr. Oye. "It’s not our intent to change the Wilderness Act to allow for mountain bikes, and it’s not our intent to compromise future wilderness designations by promoting mountain bike use in areas that” have potential to be designated wilderness.
At the Wilderness Society, Mr. Carroll adds that, “This is the camel’s nose under the tent. That’s been our argument for a long time. There’s no way you can say that they’re not mechanized. They say themselves that they want to see these big loop systems developed, and they say they want to be allowed in wilderenss. For us those things don’t add up.”
A mountain biker himself who enjoys riding the trails around Durango, Colorado, Mr. Carroll said the issue over mountain bikes in wilderness is personally a tough one -- "I've got tons of friends who are mountain bikers. It's a conundrum for me." -- but in the end he believes wilderness lands need the highest level of protection from impacts. With mountain bikes getting bigger and bigger, their impacts are getting larger, as well, said Mr. Carroll, referring to the Surley bike company's "Pugsley" model with its huge, 4-inch-wide tires.
“Protecting the resource, protecting it for what it represents, for the clean air and water, the wildlife, protecting it for future generations ... is the first priority of wilderness areas," he said. "We want to preserve that as a piece of the puzzle in terms of the management of our public lands. It’s not about 'our' use. ... I think it’s (the debate) unfortunate. There are so many people, if they could take a step back from their use and look at the larger resource issues, and the larger context, I wish they could see that this is about the greater good, not just about your specific use.”
Comments
Whether people are on the trails when you're on them is beside the point. If you went back there on your bike and ran into dozens of other users how would that have affected your perspective?
Isn't part of the beauty of getting into the backcountry the solitude that exists there? Last September I spent five days canoeing Yellowstone Lake with two friends. We never encountered another party -- just wolves, grizz, bald eagles and sandhill cranes. I thought it was wonderful. This past September I took several hikes in Yosemite, and ran into other groups on each of them. It was great seeing people out on the trail enjoying the park, but it wasn't the same experience I had in Yellowstone.
If I'm inferring your point correctly, Zeb, it's that the trails appear empty and so why shouldn't bikers be able to use them. I would reply that the "snapshot moment" you experienced didn't necessarily demonstrate that the trails are not been used, and at the same time it offered you the type of experience you were seeking. Didn't you enjoy it more having the trail to yourself than jockeying with others, be they on foot, bike, or horse?
As I indicated earlier, I'm working on a story regarding how Americans are using the outdoors. I think we'll all find the findings interesting, and hopefully it will lead to further dialog on what can be done to see that all groups can achieve the experiences they're seeking.
Kurt,
My point is that by and large, a few miles from the trailhead there's plenty of room to enjoy some solitude. I don't mind seeing people on the trail either. It's public land after all, so I expect to have to share it. I think that a lot of the push against cyclists is that they somehow impact other perception of their "solitude". That's understandable, but frankly is a really bad argument. Again, if one wants complete solitude, one should buy his/her own piece of land and stay there. Nobody should expect complete solitude on taxpayer funded trails. They're ours to share.
Thanks for the forum and important dialog here.
A few observations:
"There's no comparison between bikes made 20 years ago and those made today," Dave Bull, the Forest Service's director for recreation, minerals, lands, heritage and wilderness in Montana told the Times. "People are better able to get to places they couldn't reach before without hiking. They're pushing further and further."
And
"Not only are the latest generation of bikes capable of taking their riders farther and farther into the backcountry, but their arrival, some believe, is out of sync with the wilderness concept."
This is a motorized argument and is ridiculous to apply it to bicycles. I don't know about you all - but I still generate roughly the same (slightly less with age) amount of horsepower I did 25 years ago and still get to the same middle-of-nowhere locations under my own power regardless of what bicycle I am riding. While what we ride into the woods has changed considerably over the years, the motor of heart, lungs and passion has not. Definitely alot of BULL SPEAK!
###
“There is a wilderness experience, a truly backcountry experience, that is part of the idea and the concept behind wilderness," says Michael Carroll, associate director of The Wilderness Society's Wilderness Support Center. "It's preserving a landscape that is similar to the landscape that our fathers and their fathers before them were able to experience. It’s hard to argue that that experience has been preserved when you have heavy traffic zipping by on mountain bikes after you’ve spent two days hiking in.”
What is the goal of a Wilderness designation if not to preserve a LANDSCAPE? So bicyclists ride a 30 mile loop in a day that it takes hikers 3 days to complete - please explain how 30 miles of trail based bicycle travel is more impactful to the LANDSCAPE than hikers who set up camp off trail - usually near a pretty but sensitive meadow, affect wildlife and the ecosystem with cooking and shit in the woods for three days? Does the presence of bicycles really bust your backcountry spiritual chops? What exactly are you protecting? Wilderness designation is not a religion or exclusive holier-than-thou club, it is a land protection tool in a box of Congressional tools that can permanently protect our roadless public lands from mining, logging, new roads, structures and expanded motorized use. A companion designation to Wilderness such as a National Protection Area is a viable and commonsense way to preserve our spectacular public lands as we go forward with the dialog about protecting pristine areas where we have ridden our bicycles for decades without adverse affects to its wilderness (little 'w') character.
The cycling community is a huge conservation base and want to see our lands permanently protected but the Wilderness or nothing choice leaves us either supporting a bicycle banning protection tool or be opposed to new Wilderness designation. There is a better way. New, socially responsible Wilderness can be supported by the cycling community when it is part of a conservation package that can incorporate boundary adjustments, corridors and companion designations to preserve riding opportunities we've enjoyed for decades without issues. We don't need access to all trails but do want to preserve access to the historically and economically important ones. Bicyclists need to be at the table as responsible partners when the future of these lands are being negotiated.
###
As far as offroad bicycle access in National Parks - not in my wildest singletrack dreams would I want to ride my bike on the sensitive backcountry trails in Yellowstone, for example, but I'd sure support some bicycle access to pedal around the park on old road beds or power line cuts rather than a death defying road rides with Hawaiian shirt wearing, RV driving tourists. People do travel with their bikes and making some bicycle concessions can do nothing but better connect people to their surroundings - is this not the purpose of our National Parks? The modern National Parks were designed with automobile access as a priority but not bicycles?
Do not forget our cycling roots in National Parks! It's not a new concept or precedent!
http://www.nrhc.org/history/25thInfantry.html
I got your point Zeb. There is room for a variety of activities and we should support agency leaders who manage outdoor recreational use accordingly.
Kurt your anecdote is right on. Some areas draw more people and thus agencies need to aggressively manage the use in those places, but there are plenty just as beautiful spots that practically no one visits. Places where one hiker can run into one mtn biker and neither has had their outdoor experience ruined. In the USFS portions of the Sierra I routinely encounter mtn bikers, hikers, fishermen, and stock users on my favorite trails. Everyone is cheerful. Everyone is apparently enjoying themselves. Everyone is courteously sharing the outdoors. To me the conflicts on the ground appear to be few and far between, if they exist at all.
imtnbike brings up good points about generational differences. I suspect that some folks are clinging to a mythology about the fight to stop the "loss" of "wilderness." This mythology was instrumental in calling people into action during the environmental struggles leading up to the new millennium. Today, such a black and white, evil vs good vision is probably obsolete. For the future, an updated perspective may be in order.
Thanks for the forum and important dialog here.
A few observations:
"There's no comparison between bikes made 20 years ago and those made today," Dave Bull, the Forest Service's director for recreation, minerals, lands, heritage and wilderness in Montana told the Times. "People are better able to get to places they couldn't reach before without hiking. They're pushing further and further."
And
"Not only are the latest generation of bikes capable of taking their riders farther and farther into the backcountry, but their arrival, some believe, is out of sync with the wilderness concept."
This is a motorized argument and is ridiculous to apply it to bicycles. I don't know about you all - but I still generate roughly the same (slightly less with age) amount of horsepower I did 25 years ago and still get to the same middle-of-nowhere locations under my own power regardless of what bicycle I am riding. While what we ride into the woods has changed considerably over the years, the motor of heart, lungs and passion has not. Definitely alot of Bull Speak!
###
“There is a wilderness experience, a truly backcountry experience, that is part of the idea and the concept behind wilderness," says Michael Carroll, associate director of The Wilderness Society's Wilderness Support Center. "It's preserving a landscape that is similar to the landscape that our fathers and their fathers before them were able to experience. It’s hard to argue that that experience has been preserved when you have heavy traffic zipping by on mountain bikes after you’ve spent two days hiking in.”
What is the goal of a Wilderness designation if not to preserve a LANDSCAPE? So bicyclists ride a 30 mile loop in a day that it takes hikers 3 days to complete - please explain how 30 miles of trail based bicycle travel is more impactful to the LANDSCAPE than hikers who set up camp off trail - usually near a pretty but sensitive meadow, affect wildlife and the ecosystem with cooking and shit in the woods for three days? Does the presence of bicycles really bust your backcountry spiritual chops? What exactly are you protecting? Wilderness designation is not a religion or exclusive holier-than-thou club, it is a land protection tool in a box of Congressional tools that can permanently protect our roadless public lands from mining, logging, new roads, structures and expanded motorized use. A companion designation to Wilderness such as a National Protection Area is a viable and commonsense way to preserve our spectacular public lands as we go forward with the dialog about protecting pristine areas where we have ridden our bicycles for decades without adverse affects to its wilderness (little 'w') character.
The cycling community is a huge conservation base and want to see our lands permanently protected but the Wilderness or nothing choice leaves us either supporting a bicycle banning protection tool or be opposed to new Wilderness designation. There is a better way. New, socially responsible Wilderness can be supported by the cycling community when it is part of a conservation package that can incorporate boundary adjustments, corridors and companion designations to preserve riding opportunities we've enjoyed for decades without issues. We don't need access to all trails but do want to preserve access to the historically and economically important ones. Bicyclists need to be at the table as responsible partners when the future of these lands are being negotiated.
###
As far as offroad bicycle access in National Parks - not in my wildest singletrack dreams would I want to ride my bike on the sensitive backcountry trails in Yellowstone, for example, but I'd sure support some bicycle access to pedal around the park on old road beds or power line cuts rather than a death defying road rides with Hawaiian shirt wearing, RV driving tourists. People do travel with their bikes and making some bicycle concessions can do nothing but better connect people to their surroundings - is this not the purpose of our National Parks? The modern National Parks were designed with automobile access as a priority but not bicycles?
Do not forget our cycling roots in National Parks! It's not a new concept or precedent!
http://www.nrhc.org/history/25thInfantry.html
I've stated before in these threads that much modern "environmentalism" has less to do with conservation than with the quasireligious quest for a spiritual experience in the woods—a quest with strong exclusionary overtones and accompanied by no little self-righteousness. At its worst this strain of "environmentalism" brings to mind South African apartheid in its mythological underpinnings, zealous fervor to preserve the land for one's favored group, and demands for the exclusion of other groups based on ideological considerations. (Apartheid, some may know, is Afrikaans for "separateness.")
I thought of the messianic nature of some environmentalist thought when I read the following quotation in Kurt's article:
Forget about the facts that mountain bikers have no more effect on landscape preservation than hikers, are extremely unlikely to be "zipping by" in profusion in any wildland that isn't already impacted by swarms of people on foot and riding large dust-raising mammals, and that " 'the landscape that our fathers and their fathers before them were able to experience' " was quite often riddled with mines, sluices, stripped hillsides, mercury poisoning, deforestation, and the graves of the native peoples whom those " 'fathers and . . . fathers before them' " slaughtered.
Forget about all that and just consider the reverential tone of the statement that implies there is one correct and enlightened "wilderness experience" and "truly backcountry experience." This is where the temperance movement that sustains itself under the guise of environmentalism shows through. It's like the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, whose tenets include "right view" and "right action." "The practitioner must make the right effort to abandon the wrong view and to enter into the right view. Right mindfulness is used to constantly remain in the right view." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path.)
Reid Buckley, in an article in the November 2009 issue of The American Conservative magazine, put it well: "lurking in the American character is an unfortunate universalist reformism deriving from Calvinist intolerance. It's a handsome paradox: the more secular we become as a nation, the more Americans desire to establish the city of God on earth"—or at least on national park and national forest trails. Entire "environmental" organizations are built on this ethos. (Incidentally, The American Conservative magazine is not some purely reactionary rag but a mixed bag of stuff I don't agree with and articles and commentary that are thoughtful and thought-provoking. Its website is worth a look.)
I would like public policy regarding our national parks and national forests to be based on science, empiricism, and reason, and not on soothsaying, millennialism, eschatology, and gauzy and implausible views of an Arcadian past that never existed—a view as historically dubious as young-earth creationism.
I would suggest that by the time a discussion comes down to quoting from reactionary pundits and comparing the other side to apartheid, most of the salient points have already been made. Much of this has degenerated to "hooray for my side". That is not the usual timbre of talks in the Traveler.
I'm not a biker and not much of a hiker anymore either. I thought a Pugsley was an ugly dog. I just like the parks. We need more figuring out common solutions, rather than trying to be right or to 'win'.
Imtnbke,
That's quite a leap to make -- "that much modern "environmentalism" has less to do with conservation than with the quasireligious quest for a spiritual experience in the woods—a quest with strong exclusionary overtones and accompanied by no little self-righteousness. At its worst this strain of "environmentalism" brings to mind South African apartheid in its mythological underpinnings, zealous fervor to preserve the land for one's favored group, and demands for the exclusion of other groups based on ideological considerations. (Apartheid, some may know, is Afrikaans for "separateness.")" -- and it's one that can't go unchallenged.
I'd be curious to hear what you'd say to Native Americans, John Muir, David Brower, Ed Abbey, or even Jon Krakauer. There are many who do indeed find a spiritual experience in a wilderness setting, and to belittle them for finding that, is it so far removed from belittling a Catholic, or Jew, or Protestant, or Baptist for how they find their spiritualism?
And, really, I strongly question your contention that some sort of spiritual elitism is driving the divergent views in this and other discussions about wilderness. What is at stake is preservation of the landscape, a measured approach to using it, not a rabid mass consumption of it.