Wilderness lovers lose if mountain bikers win battle

Imagine hiking with your family on a trail in the Gila Wilderness or Sandia Mountain Wilderness. Suddenly your peace and quiet and the natural pace of a hike in the woods are shattered by a mountain bike screaming down the trail, narrowing missing you, shattering your solitude, and startling you and all wildlife in its path.

Unfortunately this scenario could soon be happening in a wilderness near you. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., recently introduced a bill in Congress at the behest of a group of mountain bikers that would eviscerate the 1964 Wilderness Act and allow bicycles in every wilderness in the nation.

The bill, HR 1349, was introduced on March 15 on behalf of the Sustainable Trails Coalition. This bill would weaken the Wilderness Act to allow bikes, strollers, wheelbarrows, game carts, survey wheels and measuring wheels in every wilderness in the nation. In an especially cynical and disingenuous move, the mountain bikers also seem to hide behind people with disabilities: the bill lists “motorized wheelchairs” and “non-motorized wheelchairs” as the first uses to be authorized in wilderness — even prior to listing “bicycles”, though the 1990 amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act have clearly allowed wheelchairs in designated wilderness for more than a quarter-century.

The STC had a bill introduced last year in the U.S. Senate by the two Utah senators. Fortunately, that bill went nowhere. Unfortunately, the new bill could very well advance in the current anti-wilderness Congress, allied with the new Trump administration that seems hostile to conservation. McClintock, a member of the Natural Resources Committee, also chairs the subcommittee on federal lands. He is in a significant leadership position and could move this year’s mountain bike bill in Congress. Last year, anticipating the 2016 Senate bill to open wilderness to mountain bikes, Wilderness Watch spearheaded a sign-on letter to Congress in opposition to opening up the national wilderness preservation system to bikes. It resulted in a total of 114 wilderness-supporting organizations from around the nation signing on, clearly showing strong opposition to the mountain bikers’ efforts.

The 1964 Wilderness Act prohibits bicycles in the national wilderness preservation system. The law — 36 U.S.C. 1131-1136 — bans all types of bicycles as well as all other forms of mechanical transportation in designated wilderness. Section 4(c) of that act states, “[T]here shall be… no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area.”

Furthermore, Congress stated the purpose of the Wilderness Act was, in part, to protect these areas from “expanding settlement and growing mechanization …” — Wilderness Act, Section 2[a].

In a deft use of falsehoods and “fake news,” the mountain bikers have claimed that the Wilderness Act actually allows bikes in wilderness. They claim that the U.S. Forest Service put the ban in place only in 1984 when the agency explicitly named bicycles as one of the prohibited forms of mechanical transport in wilderness — the agency’s earlier wilderness regulations, written in 1965, did not specifically name bikes as a prohibited use since mountain bikes had not yet been invented.

The STC arguments also evince an incredibly narrow and selfish view of wilderness as just a recreation “pie” to be divided up among competing recreation user groups, with seemingly no regard for wildness, wildlife habitat, solitude or future generations’ desires for truly wild wilderness.

For over a half century, the Wilderness Act has protected from mechanization and mechanical transport these wildernesses, even if no motors were involved with such activities. This has meant, as Congress intended, that wildernesses have been kept free from bicycles and other types of machines. Wilderness advocates believe that this protection has served our nation well, and that the “benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness” — as the Wilderness Act proclaims — would be forever lost by allowing mechanized transport in these areas.