It’s hard to find anybody these
days who’d even try to argue that off-road vehicles
don’t damage public lands throughout the West.
The
U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded in 1999 that “with an
increase of off-highway vehicle traffic, i.e., motorcycles,
four-wheel drive vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, the Bureau of Land
Management and Forest Service have observed the spread of noxious
weeds, user conflicts, soil erosion, damage to cultural sites and
disruption of wildlife and wildlife habitat.”
In
response, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth formed a national OHV
Policy Team in January 2004. One hope of the team is that
designating trails will eliminate a lot of the destructive
cross-country travel, lessen damage and reduce conflicts with
hikers and other, quieter recreationists.
Unfortunately,
studies have already shown that once a trail is designated on
public land, more riders are drawn to the area. This increases
damage and also increases the creation of side trails. In the
Paiute Trail in Utah, for example, an established OHV recreation
area with 47,000 annual riders, even OHV users express frustration
at being unable to tell designated trails from user-created trails.
The Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation wants to
attract tens of thousands of riders, so it has proposed nearly 500
miles of designated routes in central Idaho. These routes would
link the communities of Challis, McKay and Arco and wind throughout
the Pioneer Mountains, the Big Lost River Valley, the Lost River
Range and the Little Lost River Valley. This is an area of
approximately 3,500 square miles that is already crisscrossed by
3,000 miles of roads and user-created trails.
Unmentioned
in the Idaho agency’s proposal is that within one mile of the
trail there are at least 50 threatened, endangered, or
state-sensitive wildlife and plant species. In addition, many of
the streams crossed by these trails are choked by sediment. The
state agency plans to eventually expand the trail system south to
Richfield, Idaho, northeast almost to Montana, and north to Salmon,
Idaho, resulting in thousands of square miles of public lands
dominated by a single use: off-road vehicles.
Does
off-highway use conflict with other visitors to public lands? The
increased numbers, dust, noise and threat to safety are not what
most non-motorized users seek. Peace, solitude, and the feeling you
are alone with nature are all destroyed by the intrusive whine of
even distant OHVs.
Clark Collins, founder of the
BlueRibbon Coalition, which represents motorized recrecreationists,
has acknowledged that “noise is the single most important issue
that can effect our future on public land use. It’s an
extremely serious issue, and I know it’s a difficult one for
me to deal with.”
While noise is transitory, what wheels
do to trails and their surroundings persists. Funds are available
to rebuild OHV trails, but not for repairing the damage that rugged
vehicles do to streams, hillsides or habitat for wild life. Because
not even OHV riders like to ride in damaged areas or on washed-out
trails, riders explore new areas, climb new hills, ride through
different streams and seek out different meadows — abandoning
their destroyed and unwanted playground.
Off-road drivers
are responsible for the damage they do while riding. The push,
however, for public-land based multi-county OHV-designated areas
comes from politicians and businesses, which have sniffed out yet
another commodity to exploit on our publicly owned lands.
If there is a solution, perhaps it is the same one we’ve
arrived at for heavily rafted rivers or over-hunted lands:
restricted use. Institute a permit system that limits the number of
users, and when and where they go. Strictly enforce it. Place the
burden of proof on the OHV users to post a bond, just like any
other consumptive use that ultimately requires extensive
restoration.
Meanwhile, those of us who value our public
lands because we like to stretch our legs, listen to birds, hear
the wind in the trees, fish in clean streams or photograph unmarred
landscapes, must make our values known to land managers,
politicians and certainly to motorized users.
To quote
writer Edward Abbey, “Machines are domineering, exclusive,
destructive and costly; it is they and their operators who would
deny the enjoyment of the backcountry to the rest of us. About 98
percent of the land surface of the contiguous USA already belongs
to heavy metal and heavy equipment. Let us save the 2 percent
— that saving remnant.”
Tonia Wolf is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). She writes in Boise, Idaho, where she is a board member
of the Golden Eagle Audubon Society.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
