Off-road vehicles
chew up public lands
Guest opinion by TONIA WOLF
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.
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, Mackay 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, northeast almost to Montana, and north to Salmon,
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
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."