Mountain biker navigates a curve on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail north of Ogden in Utah’s Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Forest Service photo by Eric Greenwood.
“If we ever allow the remaining wilderness to be destroyed, something of us as a people will be lost…”
— Wallace Stegner
The goal of the Wilderness Act, now celebrating its 60th anniversary, was to protect a small portion of America’s public lands from human encroachment. Some places, the Founding Fathers said, deserved to be spared from motorized, mechanized and other encroachments in order to protect wildlife and wilderness.
But now a handful of mountain bikers have joined forces with a Utah senator to undermine the Wilderness Act.
This June, the Sustainable Trails Coalition, a mountain biking organization, cheered when Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced a bill (S. 4561) that would amend the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes, strollers and hunting carts on any piece of land protected by the National Wilderness Preservation System. To stop these encroachments, every local wilderness manager would have to go through a laborious process to say “no.”
The U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on September 3, 1964, to “preserve the wilderness character” of 54 wilderness areas totaling 9.1 million acres. Today, this initiative is a true conservation success story.
The National Wilderness Preservation System now protects over 800 wilderness areas totaling over 111 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico, making it the nation’s premier law protecting wild places and the genetic diversity of thousands of plant and animal species. However, only 2.7% of the Lower 48 states are designated as wilderness areas, and if Alaska is included, that’s still only about 5%.
The Wilderness Act protects, among other things, logging, mining, roads, buildings, plants and installations, mechanized and motorized equipment, and much more. Its authors sought to secure for the American people “a permanent wilderness resource” to protect places that are not manipulated by modern society and where the ecological and evolutionary forces of nature can continue to operate largely unhindered.
However, some grazing lands remained, and patenting of mining rights was permitted until 1983. Many private mining rights still exist in designated wilderness areas.
Senator Lee’s bill is based on the false claim that bicycles were never prohibited under the Wilderness Act and that the U.S. Forest Service changed its regulations in 1984 to ban bicycles. However, bicycles, an obvious type of motorized device, have always been prohibited in the wilderness by the clear language of the law (“There shall be no other form of mechanical transportation…”) The Forest Service only clarified its regulations on this point in 1984, when mountain bikes were gaining popularity.
Unfortunately, the bikers in the Sustainable Trails Coalition are not the only advocacy group seeking to weaken the Wilderness Act. Some climbers, for example, are urging Congress to allow climbers to damage wilderness rock faces by driving in fixed bolts and pitons, rather than using only removable climbing aids. In addition, trail runners want exemptions to the ban on commercial wilderness trail racing. Drone pilots and paragliders want their aircraft exempted from Wilderness Act protections, and recreational pilots want to “lock in” challenging wilderness landing sites.
The list of those trying to weaken the Wilderness Act is growing.
Most of these recreational groups say they support wilderness because they understand its importance, as most landscapes and wildlife habitats have been radically altered by humans. At the same time, they want to carve out their own piece of the wilderness pie.
Do we have to get everything we want in nature? Instead of weakening the protections offered by the Wilderness Act, we could try to revive a spirit of humility toward wilderness. We could exercise restraint and understand that designated wilderness areas have a deeper value that goes beyond our human use.
In response to the growing demand for mountain bike trails, the Bureau of Land Management invites over a million mountain bikers to ride its thousands of miles of trails each year. And the U.S. Forest Service already has an incredible 130,000 miles of motorized and non-motorized trails for mountain bikers.
Do mountain bikers and others who demand access to nature reserves really have to tame the wilderness?
Let us preserve our wilderness heritage, whole and intact. We owe it to the far-sighted founders of the Wilderness Act, and we owe it to future generations.
