By Susan Hess. June 7, 2018. Friends of Mt. Adams is one of the latest organizations to voice opposition to pending congressional bills that would allow mechanized transport, including mountain biking, in federally designated wilderness areas. The mountain bike organization, Sustainable Trails Coalition, is one of the most vocal groups in favor of the bills. A group of 150 organizations have joined to oppose the bills including Portland Mazamas, Sierra Club, Cascade Forest Conservancy, Wilderness Watch, and Izaak Walton League.
If passed, the two bills (Senate bill S.2877 and House bill H.R. 1349) would change the intent of the1964 Wilderness Act, which specifically excluded all types of mechanized transport including bicycles in designated wilderness. A 1990 amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act allowed wheelchairs in wilderness.
The Act established a National Wilderness Preservation System of federal lands “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Trapper Creek Wilderness, Washington
A crowd draws a crowd and you are all on the wrong side of this. Wilderness needs more protectors and mountain bikers are conservationists who support the penultimate land protection designation, but not at their expense. Historical documentation proves bicycling and other human powered activities were never meant to be prohibited from these lands, despite what the extremist Wilderness Watch feeds you. Open your minds. Wilderness will be better for it.
I believe that the legislating of human powered bicycle use in National Wilderness Areas can be rationally discussed, but only with an agreed upon definition of Wilderness. This is necessary, of course given the simple fact that many individual’s or group’s (“crowd’s”) definitions of Wilderness Areas may evidence marked variability.
In general, many human associations in the USA. have deferred to the Wilderness Act for this definition as this law defines potential Wilderness Areas (individually approved by acts of Congress) as well as managing parameters for the four federal agencies administering Wilderness Areas. Initially, and perhaps still the U.S. Forest Service oversaw the vast majority of Wilderness Area acreage upon passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.
Regarding historical documentation of prohibited human powered activities, the 1964 Wilderness Act (36 U.S.C. 1131-1136) banned all types of mechanized transport in Wilderness. From my recollection, having worked with Payette National Forest, Big Creek (now Krassel) Ranger District within the Idaho Primitive Area (IPA) in the 1970’s, the National Forest Service later rewrote (~1982?) their initial policies and regulations, which understandably focused on the plethora of motorized machinery and transport utilized in wildlands before and soon after the passage of the Wilderness Act to emphasize the inclusion of ALL mechanized transport. This update, also forbade the use of Pelton wheels, hand carts, wheel barrows, horse drawn wagons, etc., and likely included bicycles, although I don’t recall bikes in the IPA or its 1980 Congressional designation, The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness.
For reference:
Section 4(c) of the 1964 Wilderness 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.” (emphasis added).
Congress also stated, in Section 2(a) of the Wilderness Act, that the purpose of the Act was, in part, to protect these areas from “expanding settlement and growing mechanization,….” (emphasis added)
Fortunately for Wilderness Areas and their dependent biota today and tomorrow, human permit/quota systems will of necessity come to pass administratively in many to most Wilderness Areas. Note: they are currently being developed for five Wildernesses in the Oregon Cascades. This Wilderness management effort is essential to minimizing homo sapien’s increasing impact on these uniquely wilder ecosystems for the well-being of all.
Paul Moyer, White Salmon, WA.
If you are healthy enough to ride and balance a bike you need to go elsewhere other than on wilderness trails. That’s why motor bikes have their own trails so that hikers can enjoy the pace and quiet of wilderness trails.