All-terrain vehicles
aren’t good or bad in themselves; it’s all about
context. When my son was lost for an entire night in the mountains
of northeast Oregon, search and rescue volunteers from Union County
showed up on their ATVs and set out to bring him home. I was never
so glad to see machinery in my life. They helped find him later
that morning.
Then there are those other occasions. A few
years ago, I was slogging through deep snow near the Malheur River
east of Juntura, Ore., in search of chukars — Eurasian partridges
— when I heard the distinctive growl of ATVs. I looked up to see
two of them cresting a hill above me.
I had a bad feeling
about their presence in a place with no established trails. My
concern was proven justified a few minutes later when I cut across
their track. The two machines had simply driven straight uphill
from the river, taking advantage of the deep snow to drive on top
of sagebrush and bunchgrasses. The weight of the machines crushed
the sagebrush, leaving a trail of shattered branches and trunks.
Where the snow was shallow, tires had cut through to the soil,
gouging it out and spraying it across the snow.
By the
time I headed back that evening, the ATVs were gone. They had, for
the most part, followed the same track down the hill. At least they
hadn’t carved a new track across the virgin desert, but their
second trip completed the destruction of the sagebrush, breaking it
down so completely that when the snow melted, it would no longer be
high enough to prevent ATV travel. Predictably, ATV drivers began
using the track regularly, and now it is a deeply rutted scar from
which hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of dirt washes directly
toward the Malheur River.
Another time, after I had
killed an elk near Enterprise, Ore., and was hiking back to my
vehicle to pick up a backpack to begin hauling the meat, I met the
rancher who owned the land on which I’d been hunting, and he
offered to help bring the animal out — an offer I quickly
accepted. We hauled the elk up to an established trail, loaded it
onto his ATV trailer and pulled it back to his house. The rancher
and his machine saved me four roundtrip hikes of three miles each.
It would have taken me a long, exhausting day.
Last year
was a different experience. I was hunting chukars on the Owyhee
River down in southeastern Oregon. I came up out of the canyon far
from any road and worked along the rim into the wind with my
pointer, Sadie. The dog became almost immediately
“birdy” and began moving slowly and carefully. Her
careful approach didn’t help. A covey of 25 birds flushed
almost 100 yards away and bailed off into the canyon. Bad luck, I
thought. Two hundred yards later, a second covey of similar size
flushed wild, this time nearly 125 yards away. Over the next mile
the same thing happened again and again.
Then I found the
cause: ATV tracks running along the canyon rim. Hunters using ATVs
were busting through the desert, creating their own trails so they
didn’t have to walk while they hunted some of the best chukar
ground in North America. And it was flat! What incredible laziness!
The birds had been harassed into a level of paranoia I’d not
seen anywhere else in the state, even where hunter numbers were
much higher.
It’s true that most of the habitat
damage done by ATVs isn’t caused by hunters, but by a small
percentage of recreational riders. Their concept of the outdoors is
a warped desire for a place where they can go fast without regard
for laws or for anyone else around them. But hunters are far from
innocent. Far too many have made the unethical use of ATVs the
linchpin of their hunting experience, and instead of confining
their driving to established trails as the laws require,
they’ve succumbed to the lure of the easy way.
“The hill is too steep, I’ll just make my own
trail.” “I’ll just ride along until the dogs
point the birds. Then I’ll get out and walk.” In
following rationalizations like this, they damage both the game
animals they pursue and the land on which wildlife depends.
In their slimy devotion to laziness, these hunters make
one thing crystal-clear: The only thing worse than an unethical
hunter is an unethical hunter on an ATV. And hunters like that are
too stupid to know what they have lost.
Pat Wray
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is an avid hunter and outdoor writer who lives
in Corvallis, Oregon.
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