When did recreation become ”wreck-creation”? Like most people in the Bitterroot I choose to live here because I love to be outdoors. In the winter that usually means backcountry skiing. In the fall, hunting and fishing in any season. Rock climbing when I get a chance, and floating the Selway when I luck into a permit. However, when the trails are dry, you will usually find me on my mountain bike riding the challenging primitive trails in the remote reaches of the Bitterroot National Forest some of these areas are currently labeled recommended wilderness and Wilderness Study Areas. For good reason the Bitterroot National Forest considers their niche to be “Our Wild Backyard.”
Every morning when I wake up and look out my window towards Como Peaks and Tin Cup Ridge, I’m heartened by the foresight of people such as Frank Church and Lee Metcalf who made sure these truly special places would be set aside as Wilderness. While reading the Wilderness Act I couldn’t help but notice the emphasis on recreation. One criteria the landscape must possess to qualify as Wilderness, is having “…outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.” In the section of the act “Use Of Wilderness Areas,” the first use is recreation, “…wilderness areas shall be devoted to the public’s purposes of recreational, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation, and historical use.”
Looking for an adventure in a quiet, low impact, respectful way is part of the experience a mountain biker seeks in a trail. Mountain bikers love the natural world, and the thin ribbons of dirt that wend through the forests, over the rocks, and along the creeks. I think the idea that we are “wrecking creation” would come as a surprise to the seven out of ten Montanans who participate in outdoor recreation and along the way spend $5.8 billion and support 64,000 jobs in Montana, including two bike shops here in the Bitterroot Valley, according to a new report, “A Small Business Voice For Public Lands in the West.”
Last year a group of mountain bikers from the Bitterroot Backcountry Cyclists sat exhausted at the Blue Joint Trailhead after nearly twelve hours in the saddle. Blue Joint is one of the nearly 50-80 miles of trail we volunteer to clear on behalf of the Forest Service. Unfortunately, fires in the region over the last several seasons had kept us from clearing the most distant portions of the trail. We had heard rumors that it had gotten pretty bad back there, and we were totally unprepared for the carnage. The trail was nearly obliterated by fallen trees, and the farther we went the more we realized that our handsaws were inadequate for the job at hand.
Few people realize that mountain bikes are banned in congressionally designated Wilderness, in general leaving Wilderness Study Areas and recommended wilderness as the last best place for mountain bikers, remembering the words of Frank Church, “It is in the West alone that a person can still escape the clutter of roads, signposts, and managed picnic grounds.” The Forest Service has released their travel plan for the Bitterroot National Forest and as part of the plan 178 miles out of the 593 miles of trails currently open to mountain bikes will be closed. Some of the trails are familiar, such as Blodgett Canyon, but many are remote and rarely used trails. Nearly all of them are challenging whether on foot, bike, horse, or even dirt bike.
Recently the state of Montana released the 2014-2018 Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan that documented concerns related to continued access and lack of maintenance for these backcountry trails. The travel management plan will exacerbate these issues by restricting access, and lead to further degradation of the trails in which cyclists had previously kept maintained.
The Bitterroot Backcountry Cyclists value the relationship we have developed with the Forest Service, so in partnership with IMBA will we continue to participate in the ongoing forest planning process. The next step will be to submit formal objections. These objections consider that eliminating non-Wilderness uses such as bicycles without proving that they impair the Wilderness character is an authority to be used only by Congress. Travel Management Planning was design to manage motorized use specifically and therefore shouldn’t be used to manage bicycle use. Lastly the FEIS (Final Environmental Impact Statement) provides insufficient analysis of bicycle impacts to meet the requirements of NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act).
Over the years that I have worked on these trails I have discovered how passionate I have become about them. Recreation and preservation can be symbiotic. One thing I have come to believe is that to keep land wild and untrammeled it takes more than designations and words. It takes people who know the area, who have been there, gotten their hands dirty caring for it and who have a stake in preserving those lands for the future.
Lance Pysher, President
Bitterroot Backcountry Cyclists