MOAB, Utah – Mountain bike pilgrims who come to ride
Moab’s Slickrock trail find something new these days: a tollbooth.
Next to the booth, a sign reads: “Welcome to Sand Flats. All fees
are used here for improvements.”
A visit to this
mecca of mountain biking now costs $1 per person if you’re walking
or riding, or $3 for the first person if you drive to the
trailhead. Camping costs, too: $4 per night for the first person,
$2 each for everyone else in the group.
The price
comes as a shock to folks who haven’t been here in a few years. It
used to be you could throw your sleeping bag on the sand for the
night and spend the next day skinning your bike tires and knees on
the roller-coaster redrock, all free of
charge.
Locals knew the area as a party spot.
Four-wheelers left tire tracks up and down sandstone fins, and Jeep
trails snaked through the sagebrush. “The Slickrock area was always
a dump,” says Bill Groff, a longtime Moab resident. “We’d go up
there in the “60s and throw parties and break bottles. We saw it as
a sacrifice zone.”
Now, Jeep tracks have been
replaced by groomed gravel drives and picnic tables. Sand Flats
sports a sprawling 150-site campground with fire pits, trash cans
and pit toilets, and a freshly paved 100-car parking lot for
day-users at the Slickrock trailhead.
The
facelift is thanks to an innovative user-fee program put in place
by the Bureau of Land Management and Grand County in 1995. For the
Moab area BLM, user fees are a tried and true solution to
controlling an onslaught of recreationists. The agency has been
collecting fees from commercial river runners since the early
1970s. It started charging private boaters in 1983, and about three
years ago began charging mountain bikers as well. All this was
before Congress approved the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program
last year.
Moab officials say fees are the BLM’s
bread and butter, but not everyone has taken kindly to paying to
play on public lands.
Giving
an agency arms and legs
“We’ve been forced into
it here,” says BLM resource advisor Russ Van Koch. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, use of the Moab area exploded, but funding
grew only slightly. Hordes of river rafters, kayakers, Jeep
safari-goers and mountain bikers were taking an increasing toll on
limited resources.
The problem was most obvious
each spring, when hundreds of college and high school students
converged on Sand Flats for the spring-break bash. The seasonal
ranger who oversaw the BLM campgrounds and trails in the area was
overwhelmed. “It just kept multiplying and multiplying,” says Van
Koch. “People would roll in and all the campsites would be taken
and they’d just drive across the lands and leave new campsites and
new roads.”
In the spring of 1992, the Moab
sheriff’s department called in reinforcements and rounded up
underage drinkers at Sand Flats. They used the middle-school gym as
a holding center, Van Koch says, while they called parents and
said, “Your kids are down here. Come get “em.”
It was time to do something serious, says Moab’s
Chief Deputy Sheriff Doug Squire. “It’s quite a burden to be in a
place where people come to play, and the locals have to cover the
cost.”
With little funding for staff and
infrastructure, the BLM turned to user fees. But there was a catch.
If the agency collected fees, the law required that all but 15
percent be sent back to Washington, D.C. So in 1995, the agency
came up with a plan to keep the cash on the ground: Grand County
would collect fees at Sand Flats and set up a campground on state
land. The BLM pitched in where it could, funding the parking lot
and pit toilets, and the federally funded service organization
AmeriCorps sent workers to help build a tollbooth and clean up
campsites.
The program has made a big difference,
according to Squire. Theft and vandalism rates have dropped, and
the area feels more peaceful and organized, he says. “You hate to
start charging for that sort of thing. But then again, (mountain
bikers) are the ones who are causing the impact and they need to
shoulder some of the burden.”
Last year 1.2
million people used Moab area BLM lands. The agency collected about
$228,000 in fees from campers and river runners. Sand Flats saw
nearly 170,000 user-days, and the county pulled in
$129,000.
Today, congressional appropriations
don’t even cover salaries for the Moab BLM’s recreation staff, says
Van Koch. User fees make up the difference and pay for seasonal
staff salaries and campground and trail maintenance. They also help
cover search-and-rescue costs. Since 1992, fees have helped build
16 new campgrounds in the area.
“Without fees
we’d be here with no arms and legs,” says Van Koch. “It’s our best
long-term support. We can always count on people in that sense,
when we can’t always count on appropriated money.”
AmeriCorps is no longer helping with the
project, but at this point, the Sand Flats fee program is
self-sufficient, says Van Koch. And now the new federal test
program is kicking in. The BLM will soon be charging $4 per night
at nine campgrounds along the Colorado River as part of the
Recreational Fee Demonstration Program Congress passed in
1996.
Looking for cash in all
the wrong places
For the most part, mountain
bikers aren’t complaining about the new fees at Sand Flats. Locals
can earn a free annual pass by helping with trail maintenance, and
anyone can pick up a season pass for $10.
“I
haven’t heard anybody complain about paying a buck to ride up
there,” says Anne Young, an employee at Moab’s Chile Pepper bike
shop. “It makes a lot of sense. If it wasn’t for the fees, that
place would be one big toilet.”
But not everyone
approves of paying to use public lands. Down the street at Rim
Cyclery, owners Bill and Robin Groff think it’s a terrible idea.
The former miners say the BLM should look to Congress for its
funds, not to recreationists.
User fees are “a
way for agencies to get around doing their job,” says Robin. “They
don’t have to get up there and root and rah to get their share of
the pie. They just slap a user fee on us.”
There
is no doubt that land-management agencies in the West are
short-funded, he says, but user fees exclude people who don’t have
much money. “It makes an aristocracy out of park rangers and
federal land users,” he says.
Forcing visitors to
pick up the tab is insulting and bad for business, says his brother
Bill: “If it weren’t for the tourists, I wouldn’t be in business,
and this town would be a sleepy little dust bowl.”
The new, improved Sand Flats just sends people
elsewhere, where they do more damage to the land, adds Bill. Last
Memorial Day weekend, he flew over Moab in the small airplane he
used to scout mining claims before he and his brother opened the
bike shop in 1983. “I was amazed at how many people were out there,
in places I didn’t even know had roads to them,” he says. “There
were campers set up, tents set up, people camping on rocks – more
than I ever expected.”
But back at the police
station, Deputy Sheriff Squire shakes his head. “The times for free
stuff are over,” he says. “If you want to go play, you’re just
about gonna have to pay for it anymore.”
* Greg Hanscom, HCN
assistant editor
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Mountain bikers in Moab pay to ride.
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