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Mountain Bike Use Subject Of Environmental Assessment In Rocky Mountain National Park

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An environmental assessment is being conducted into whether a short, two-mile section of the East Shore Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park should be open to mountain biking. NPS photo.

An environmental assessment is being conducted at Rocky Mountain National Park to determine whether a short section of hiking and equestrian trail known as the East Shore Trail should be open to mountain bikes.

Though the study is just getting under way, the impetus for it goes back a half-dozen years, to 2006, when talks were being held over designating official wilderness in Rocky Mountain.

During discussion of proposed wilderness in Rocky Mountain, "Advocates for bicycle use, which included the Town of Grand Lake and the Grand County Commissioners, made it clear that their support of wilderness designation for the park was contingent upon the consideration of bicycle use on the East Shore Trail," notes a Park Service narrative announcing the EA.

According to the Park Service, "(T)he East Shore Trail is an existing hiking and equestrian trail that runs roughly north/south along the east shore of Shadow Mountain Lake near the town of Grand Lake, Colorado (hence the name of the trail). The northern terminus of the trail is the East Shore Trailhead, which is located due south of the town of Grand Lake. The entire trail is 6.2 miles long and ends at the south boundary of RMNP. The East Shore Trailhead and the first 0.7 mile of the trail is situated on land administered by the USDA Forest Service where bicycles are currently permitted. The remaining 5.5 miles of the East Shore Trail is located within RMNP. Bicycles are currently not permitted on trails within the national park. The trail is also part of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail."

Since bicycles are not permitted in designated wilderness, some compromises needed to be made if the East Shore Trail was ever to be open to mountain bikers. So when the wilderness designation was made official in 2009, "(T)he wilderness legislation excluded the East Shore Trail Area from the wilderness boundary to 'maximize the opportunity for sustained use of the Trail without causing harm to affected resources or conflicts among users.' Consideration of bicycle use on the East Shore Trail was part of the legislation."

When the wilderness designation was defined, the official wilderness boundary was located 50 feet east of the East Shore Trail, a move that left open the possibility of allowing mountain bikes on the trail.

In August 2011, the Grand County (Colorado) commissioners wrote to the director of the Park Service's Intermontain Region asking that a two-mile section of the East Shore Trail be approved for mountain bike use.

As a result, the Park Service decided to conduct an environmental assessment on the proposal. Public scoping, a period in which the Park Service solicits public comments on a proposal, is currently under way. Among the questions being asked of the public:

1. Do you favor bicycle use on the two-mile section of the East Shore Trail currently under consideration? Please explain why you do or do not favor bicycle use on this section of trail.

2. If you do not favor bicycle use on the trail, can you suggest other alternatives to connect the towns of Grand Lake and Granby with a bike trail?

3. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, what are your recommendations to minimize conflicts among trail users (equestrians, hikers, bicyclists).

4. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, how many times are you likely to use this trail during the riding season? What would your destination be if you rode this trail?

5. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, to what standard should the trail be developed (e.g., how wide should it be and what surface should be used on the trail)?

6. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, what should be done to dissuade bicyclists from entering the adjacent designated wilderness where bicycles are not permitted?

7. Please share any other comments you might have regarding the East Shore Trail.

Comments are being accepted through September 21. The environmental assessment is expected to be completed by fall 2013. You can comment on this proposal at this site.

Comments

Anonymous, while cute your answer completely misses the main point. I do not want to have an exclusive (hence private) enjoyment of wilderness land on my bike. I'm perfectly happy to share with others, including you.

Looking forward to seeing you on the trails (wilderness or not). :)


I hope people can tolerate a further response to Anonymous of 8/15/12, who wrote:

These objections to mountain biking have nothing to do with fallen-ness,
unless you're forwarding an especially idiosyncractic reading of sin.

Although I mentioned earlier the dogmatic nature of posts opposing mountain biking in Wilderness, probably even better evidence that a strong faction within wildlands environmentalism is a modern-day temperance movement is this:

Everything has a cost, and if rational calculation ruled among the orthodox conservation organizations like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, PEER, the retired National Park Service employees association, etc., they'd be eager to urge the agencies to allow mountain biking generally in the national parks and national forests, whether Wilderness zones or not.

The benefits would be:

1. A lot of volunteers to reopen and maintain Wilderness trails that have been lost.

2. A broader constituency for Wilderness expansion and more national parks.

3. A broader constituency for the NPS and Forest Service budgets.

4. More young people interested in America's wildlands.

As for costs, the main one I can think of, along with the opposite of the four benefits above, is that every acre that isn't roadless is susceptible to this:

Thus is the perfect the enemy of the good. But compromise isn't possible when for one side something is a sacred value.

There is nothing wrong with having a spiritual attitude toward nature; it's when it turns into a dogma that it becomes a problem. You see evidence of a Shaker-like attitude in things like this quotation, which adorns the North Cascades National Park website:

"[color=#336633]The wilderness is a place of rest—not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.[/color]

[color=#336633][color=#336633]–David Douglas,[/color][/color][color=#336633][color=#336633] from "Wilderness Sojourn"[/color][/color]
Now, for some people the foregoing is sublime scripture. But I think it's silly, even though I respect his fervent feelings. It's silly because who is he to say that everyone is off balance during their daily life? He speaks for himself only, but doesn't seem to realize it. In addition, it is dogmatic: Wilderness is what my values for it are, and no other values.

[color=black]http://www.nps.gov/noca/planyourvisit/cascade-pass-trail.htm[/color]


Anonymous, while cute your answer completely misses the main point. I do not want to have an exclusive (hence private) enjoyment of wilderness land on my bike. I'm perfectly happy to share with others, including you.

Looking forward to seeing you on the trails (wilderness or not). :)

A hunter or jet skier could of course say the same thing.


All this suggests is that there are competing ideas of the sacred. But it's hard to reconstruct what the sacred would be for someone who considers wheel[-ing] a sin. Again, I don't know who these people would be. Many of us can see wilderness as sacred in a Christian sense (which is the context presupposed by "sin"), such as Muir, perhaps Transcendentalists, Heideggeger, etc., but none would see wheel[ing] as a sin. Does anyone really consider riding a bike or driving a car alienation from divinity? In other words, one can hold wilderness to be sacred, and simply not see wheel[ing] as a part of the sacred, the same way eating Skittles or playing Fantasy Football aren't. But that's a far cry from calling these things sins.

There's an irony in your description of the sacred as a dogma. In describing those who have concerns about mountain biking in designated wilderness, you're ascribing to them some sort of fervent religious dogma (i.e. fanaticism)--i.e. you're not allowing for the possibility that their concerns can be reasonable, despite your disagreement with them, and that is the mark of the dogmatic.


Dear Anonymous,

In fact I have addressed your point about people's reasonable concerns. You can find it above. I'll also quote here what I wrote above:

To step back a bit and avoid the accusation that I'm painting with too broad a brush, obviously there is a range of concerns. Some people have legitimate worries about safety or unwelcome jarring experiences in certain areas. All of those worries, however, can be accommodated to an extent that any reasonable person should find satisfactory. This is done by a combination of responsible land management and the good will of most people. When wildlands become a kind of secular religion, however, no such accommodation is possible.

What do I mean by responsible land management? Well, one idea, in use all over the country already, would be that bicycles would be allowed in National Park and National Forest Wilderness zones on alternate days of the week. That way, people who don't want to be around bicycles can plan accordingly. That—the potential for some form of social conflict—is really the only concern that bicycle use presents. Environmental concerns were long ago recognized as baseless. Bicycles cause about the same amount of trail wear as hiking boots and vastly less than horse and packstock hooves. And mountain bikers are much less likely to (a) cut switchbacks and (b) litter than hikers, and (c) don't leave the kind of traces that backpackers do with their nightly camps.

I hope this addresses your point satisfactorily. What do you think?


[size= 14px; line-height: 18px; background-color: #ffffff]A hunter or jet skier could of course say the same thing.

[/size]

Slippery slope argument... :) Jet skier: not human powered. Hunter: definitely has an impact on the environment. Good try though.

It's actually pretty funny. Whenever I call out peopel on their anti bike bias, the argument keeps shifting.

I came to the conclusion that the opposition to biking comes from 2 points of view: 1) the enviro fanactic who sees national parks and wilderness as some kind of new age outdoor cathedral that cannot accomodate a bicycle (it's not rational, but then again we're talking about faith here) and 2) current users who just don't want to share but are not willing to publicly admit it (obviously, not something to be proud of).


not human powered

Okay, not mechanically-propelled.


Hunter: definitely has an impact on the environment.

Mountain biking has a pretty obvious impact on wilderness. Take for example a 30-mile loop trail into the wilderness. Hiking, by the very nature of the practice, limits the volume of humans in this 30-mile wilderness. Moutain biking conceivably brings a much higher volume of people into that 30-mile loop, obviously presenting a greater impact on wilderness--i.e. it turns backcountry wilderness into front country, much the same as a road would. But maybe a permitting system could be used for mountain biking, similar to how it used for backpackers to reduce impact.


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