Pro/Con: The off-highway vehicle debate revs up
By Dave Skinner

Dave Skinner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He writes and rides in Whitefish, Montana.

  I've had motorcycles in some form, on- or off-road, since I was 11 years old. That's how I went fishing or just exploring, dodging logging trucks as I gallivanted through the Flathead National Forest in Montana. It was, and still is, great fun; try it sometime.

  That's not to say that there aren't problems with motorized recreation. Most things worth having -- motorcycles, guns, automobiles, ORVs, chainsaws, power tools, snowmobiles, cell phones -- all share a common trait. Stupid people shouldn't have them, and there's the rub.

  Only a small number of recreationists of any kind -- especially dummies -- belong to organized groups that try to teach responsible behavior outdoors. For example, while there are 65 million gun owners, less than 5 million actively defend their rights as National Rifle Association members. On a smaller scale, the same reality faces motorized recreation advocacy groups such as the Blue-Ribbon Coalition, to which I proudly belong.

  Just like the NRA, groups like the BlueRibbon Coalition, based in Pocatello, Idaho, the American Motorcyclist Association and many smaller clubs, spend a lot of money on educational efforts. BlueRibbon has jumped in with both feet on damping down noise from our vehicles, a position I agree with. There is also the "Tread Lightly" campaign, which seems a nice way of saying, "Don't Be Stupid."

  Manufacturers such as American Honda are a bit more blunt, running safety ads themed: "Stupid Hurts." Really. From what I've seen, most of us aren't stupid when we recreate, and many are helpful. Locally based wheel-sport clubs have donated hundreds and thousands of hours on the ground for trail maintenance and repair. But I suppose our organizations will keep growing our efforts to reach the unreachable, and yes, the lazy. We'd have it no other way: It's the right thing to do.

  But now, it seems, another challenge looms. In April, on last year's Earth Day, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about the four "great issues" facing today's Forest Service. Bosworth did not talk about the usual environmental bugaboos of grazing, mining and logging. After all, those other multiple uses on the public lands are pretty much gone, much to the regret of many Westerners, myself included. So what's next?

  Fire and fuels, invasive species, habitat fragmentation and, said the agency chief, "unmanaged recreation." As someone who has lived in sight of Forest Service land pretty much all my adult life, I've got lots to say about each. But since Chief Bosworth specifically stated, "OHV use alone affects more imperiled species than logging and logging roads combined," it's kind of obvious which fan the fertilizer will hit next.

  Chief Bosworth's talk added urgency to a long-running debate among motorheads. In a nutshell: Do we compromise with our critics or change our credo from "Tread Lightly" to "Don't Tread on Me?" Must we fight fang-and-claw against every closure, every restriction?

  I'm with the fang-and-claw faction. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the chief of the Forest Service would someday declare motorized recreation a "peril." But I never imagined that the log trucks (and my logger neighbors) would disappear, either.

  What happened? Well, as my friend Bill Sutton puts it in every issue of his off-road recreation newsletter: "Stay on the road, smile at the hikers, eat a good breakfast, don't pick your nose, and it will not make any difference to the greenies. They don't like you." 

  Sadly, I think Bill is right.
  Selfish environmentalists seem to think "multiple use" means two people hiking the same trail. They want to get rid of logging, mining, cattle and any recreation that doesn't meet their pristine standards. That I washed my bike before loading up to prevent seed spread, that I have a quiet muffler, that I stay on the trails (that I've helped maintain), that I wear safety equipment, that I use a hanky -- it won't make any difference, ever.

  To uncompromising critics, I and 36 million other motorheads, like the loggers, ranchers and miners who literally "have gone before" from the public lands, are not to be lived with but eliminated. The rights of all Americans to use and enjoy their public lands in a responsible manner don't matter.

  Well, those rights matter to me. They should matter to everyone. And they dang sure better matter to Chief Bosworth.

Off-road vehicles are chewing up our public lands

By Tonia Wolf
Tonia Wolf is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. She writes in Boise, Idaho, where she is a board member of the Golden Eagle Audubon Society.

  It's hard to find anybody these days who would 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 recreationists, has acknowledged that "noise is the single most important issue that can affect 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 wildlife. 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."