The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) brought some early Christmas presents to the mountain biking community at the expense of wilderness.
Buried in the Act was a boundary adjustment to the Wheeler Peak Wilderness of New Mexico. The existing boundary had been put into place 50 years ago with the signing of the Wilderness Act. Since mountain biking (and any mechanical advantage) is not permitted in official Wilderness, technically mountain bikes were excluded from the Wheeler Peak Wilderness.
Approximately a mile of trail was removed from the wilderness protection to allow legal access (mountain bikers had already been illegally using the trail). The deletion of wilderness status allows the creation of a 15 mile long trail, much of it above 10,000 feet, that links the East Fork to Lost Lake and Middle Fork drainages to create what biking enthusiasts describe as a “ripping-fast single track”.
The change in the wilderness boundary was part of the Columbine-Hondo Wilderness Act that permanently protects 45,000 acres of the Carson National Forest in Northern New Mexico near Taos. The Columbine-Hondo was a wilderness study area since 1980.
Mountain bikers in the area consider this a small concession to balance out the loss of 75 trails they had been using in the Columbine-Hondo Wilderness Study Area. But that attitude is part of the problem created by the Forest Service’s lax approach to mountain biking in the WSA (as they do nearly everywhere else). Instead of banning bikes from WSAs as they should, the agency allows this incompatible use to flourish, thus creating a constituency that frequently opposes new wilderness designations.
This was not the only concession to mountain bikers in the NDAA. The proposed boundary of a 22,000 acre addition to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness was also adjusted to accommodate mountain bike use along the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River.
Similar exclusions and revisions to wilderness proposals in the Hermosa Creek Wilderness in Colorado. The original roadless area was more than 148,000 acres, and for decades conservationists had sought to protect about 100,000 acres as wilderness. However, due to active opposition from mountain bikers, the wilderness boundaries were shrunk to 37,000 acres with 70,000 acres being designated a “Special Management Area” to permit mountain biking to continue.
1 comment:
These exemptions come from inside the USFS and not from outsiders. Anything not associated with legitimate wilderness activities are being pushed into wilderness area by the tree huggers now in the USFS at the highest levels of that bureaucracy.
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