Mountain bikers challenge wilderness ban

Elisabeth Johnson loves riding her mountain bike in the forest near Galena Creek between Reno and Lake Tahoe.

But she doesn't like having to stop when the trail passes into the Mt. Rose Wilderness Area.

"You can't go all the way up," said Johnson, 32, of Reno. "You have to backtrack or do a shorter loop."

That's because mountain biking is banned in Mt. Rose and other wilderness areas which cover about 110 million acres across the United States.

Johnson is among mountain bikers who support a growing movement to loosen the ban.

A group called the Sustainable Trails Coalition is raising money from riders such as Johnson in order to hire a lobbying firm to challenge the interpretation of the ban on "mechanical transport" that's part of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the most significant conservation laws of the 20th century.

"It's about allowing access where it makes sense," said said Johnson, who has donated to the cause. "Somehow skiing is totally ok but bikes and strollers are banned."

According to the group's website they're not trying to force mountain bikes onto trails that can't support them. They are, however, seeking to give land managers the option of allowing riding on wilderness trails.

"Just as we oppose most blanket bicycle bans, so do we oppose the idea of imposing bicycle travel where it could only be disruptive," the coalition website states.

Mountain bikers say in the Reno-Tahoe area alone there are a number of spots where riders are forced to cut their trips short because trails run into wilderness areas.

Rider and trail advocate Kevin Joell of Reno cited the Rim-to-Reno route and parts of Tahoe Rim Trail as examples of local places where land managers should have the flexibility to allow bikes to continue into designated wilderness areas.

"If someone wanted to do a long distance ride, they have no other option but to ride along a busy highway with no shoulder to bypass these closed sections," said Joell, who also has donated to the Sustainable Trails Coalition effort.

He also points out some designated wilderness areas were drawn to go around roads, which effectively allows 4x4s and other motorized vehicles to go into wilderness areas even though human-powered bicycles aren't allowed on trails.

"A wilderness area you can drive to the middle of doesn't seem to 'untrammeled' to me," he said.

Mountain bikes don't belong in wilderness

While many mountain bikers are increasingly skeptical of the nationwide ban on bikes in wilderness, others in the conservation community defend the interpretation.

They say including bicycles in a ban on "mechanical transport" was an attempt by Congress to anticipate future forms of travel that could disrupt the "primeval character" of land set aside for wilderness designation, considered the highest form of land protection.

Changing the interpretation, they say, would open the door to other uses that might be even more disruptive than mountain bikes.

"I do believe that loosening the Wilderness Act ... would create a slippery slope," said Shevawn Von Tobel of Friends of Nevada Wilderness. Von Tobel said allowing mountain biking in some, but not all, wilderness would be "an administrative nightmare" and increase the likelihood of "the unintended consequence of allowing for future mechanized forms of transport that are invented down the line."

Opponents of such a change in the Wilderness Act also point out that most public land is not wilderness and people can ride mountain bikes on much of the land controlled by the United States Forest Service the Bureau of Land Management and in some national parks.

"There is plenty of federal land in this country, places where we can come to compromise," said Michael Carroll, senior director of national partnerships at The Wilderness Society.

Carroll said it's clear to him and other defenders of the current interpretation that mountain bikes shouldn't be allowed on land designated as wilderness.

"The interpretation that has banned mountain bikes is about mechanized transport," he said. "I don't think there is any way you can divorce a mountain bike from that phrase."

How we got here: A (brief) history of wilderness and mountain bikes

The idea of riding bicycles through the American backcountry dates back as far as the 1890s.

In 1896 the U.S. Army enlisted the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps to test whether riding bikes through the backcountry would be cheaper and more effective than traveling by horseback or on foot.

The infantry was made up of 20 Buffalo Soldiers, the term for the first peacetime, all-black regiments of Army soldiers who served mostly in the American West following the Civil War.

The 25th successfully completed a grueling, 1,900-mile bicycle trip from Missoula, Mont., to St. Louis, a journey that highlighted the usefulness of bikes for efficient travel in rugged terrain.

But the concept didn't catch on with the Army and when the Spanish-American War rolled around the further testing was suspended, according to a history of the regiment.

In the decades that followed the concept of wilderness as something with a fixed definition and worthy of protection began taking shape.

According to a history of The Wilderness Society, conservationist Aldo Leopold is credited with describing the concept in an article in 1921 in which he wrote wilderness is, "a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man."

Three years later in 1924 Leopold convinced the Forest Service to designate what is now the Gila Wilderness for special protection.

The Wilderness Society formed in 1935 and pushed for more protections but it wasn't until 1956 that the legislation that became the Wilderness Act was drafted. It took eight more years for it to become law.

The Act adopted the principles of Leopold's vision by defining the purpose of designated wilderness to retain "primeval character and influence." It also set forth strict prohibitions stating, "there shall be no temporary road, 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."

That wording has become the focus of the Sustainable Trails Coalition. It's discussed in detail in a 26-page academic paper by Ted Stroll, president of the coalition. The paper, titled "Congress' Intent in Banning Mechanical Transport in the Wilderness Act of 1964" is posted on the coalition website.

Stroll argues Congress' intent was to ban motorized transport and any non-motorized transport that would change the surrounding character of the land by requiring roads or enabling development or other scars on the land.

Mountain bikes in their current form didn't burst into the mainstream until the 1980s and, Stroll says, people shouldn't assume Congress had them in mind in 1964 when it approved the Wilderness Act. He says the interpretation should consider the impact of the activity on the landscape.

"You can take an entire horse and pack stock train through that wilderness ... at the same time you can't ride a bicycle, a 25-pound object that is environmentally benign," Stroll said. "Nobody has been able to budge the (Forest Service), the (National Park Service) or the BLM to reconsider their antiquated and counterproductive regulation."

Whether Stroll and his coalition will be able to budge anyone on the issue remains to be seen. So far, according to the Sustainable Trails Coalition website, they've raised about $38,000 of the $122,000 they need to hire Fabiani & Company, a Washington, D.C., based lobbying firm.

Carroll said efforts by mountain bikers to wedge their way into wilderness riding threaten to undermine broader conservation efforts on public land which often include bikers, hikers and other users working together to conserve the land.

"The main takeaway here is we should be spending our time working together," Carroll said. "Attacking wilderness, attacking conservation from the mountain bikers' perspective long term is the wrong way for us to be going."

Stroll sees it differently.

He cites data on outdoor activity participation in the United States that states among adults there are nearly 27 million people who participate in some form of cycling, defined as road, mountain or BMX. About 26 million adults participate in hiking, according to the same research.

Among young adults the difference stacks up more favorably for biking, with more than 17 million participants versus more than 10 million who participate in hiking.

Stroll says people who want to preserve wilderness can't afford to alienate mountain bikers.

"Younger people clearly are very interested in riding bicycles in wildlands," he said. If you wall these areas off ... you are reducing the conservation base to a tiny coterie of fervent believers."