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Bush Administration Publishes Proposed Rule For Mountain Biking in National Parks

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For the next 60 days the Interior Department will be taking public comment on a proposed rule-change that could make it easier to designate mountain bike trails in national parks. NPS photo.

In what's being described as another example of the Bush administration whittling away the conservation ethic of the National Park Service, the Interior Department today published a proposed rule to "streamline" the regulatory landscape regarding mountain bikes in national parks.

Pushed by the International Mountain Bicycling Association, the rule, which is attached below and open to public comment for the next 60 days, would give individual park superintendents more power to authorize mountain bike trails in their parks. While conservation groups said the proposed rule could lead mountain bikers down hiking trails and into lands that are either proposed for or eligible for wilderness designation, IMBA officials said the proposal merely makes it easier for parks where mountain bikes make sense to allow their use.

"The proposed rule change will not diminish protections that ensure appropriate trail use. All NPS regulations, general management plan processes, and NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) still applies," said Drew Vankat, IMBA's policy analyst. "In fact, the proposed rule specifically requires at least an EA (environmental assessment) to open an existing trail to bicycles. Absolutely no environmental processes or agency policies will be shortchanged. The public will still have ample opportunity to comment both locally and nationally."

At Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, though, officials interpret the proposed rule as much more egregious, saying it could open thousands of miles of existing national park trails to mountain bikes. And Wilderness Society officials said the proposed rule change would degrade the Park Service's conservation ethic by creating user conflicts on trails and eroding the landscape.

According to PEER, current NPS rules require that backcountry trails may be opened to bikes only after adopting a park-specific regulation in the Federal Register, a process that allows public review and comment. The proposed rule, the group argues, would require a special regulation only for bike use on yet-to-be-constructed trails. As a consequence of this change, says PEER:

* Nearly 8 million acres of recommended or proposed wilderness lands in approximately 30 parks would be opened up to mountain bikes, which would be prohibited only in officially designated wilderness (the Wilderness Act of 1964 prohibits bicycles). This proposal also reverses a commitment made by former NPS Director Mainella in an October 4, 2005 letter to PEER that parks will not open trails to bikes in recommended or proposed wilderness areas; and

* It will be easier to open trails that are now open to hikers, horseback riders and other uses to mountain bikes, whose introduction often creates conflicts with these users.

"The pending proposed bicycle rule is an example of special-interest intrusion into national park management," commented PEER Board member Frank Buono, a former NPS manager. "The need for this change is mysterious as several parks have designated bike trails under the current Reagan-era rule."

In addition to PEER, a number of national park advocacy, hiker and other outdoor recreation groups are mobilizing to oppose this change.

"While we support mountain biking or other activities that get park visitors out of their cars, it is important that one of our national parks uses does not preclude other uses," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "The other concern is that mountain biking on narrow backcountry trails can create damage and new maintenance demands, which is precisely why the Park Service adopted regulations for mountain bikes on backcountry trails only after a stringent decision-making process."

At The Wilderness Society, Kristen Brengel said IMBA officials weren't being entirely truthful when they claimed the proposed rule changes nothing.

“They’re trying to make it seem that there’s no change, but there is a change. That’s the whole point of the document. They’re not accurate," she said.

Under the proposed change, said Ms. Brengel, park superintendents could make a "determination," which requires less scrutiny and public input than the special rule-making process, to expand mountain bike use in their parks.

"If you’re a park manager who thoroughly understands the policies, you should not designate any mountain bike use in eligible or recommended wilderness. The problem comes in when the very same superintendent and park managers get pressure from the mountain bike community to open up hiking trails to mountain bike use and these policies do not give those folks (park managers) a credible defense," she added. "They (the proposed rules) are lenient and appear to allow the use anywhere, and it’s a problem. ... Rather than having absolute clarity, a a manager or superintendent needs to make a choice between following one set of policies or another one.”

The National Parks Conservation Association issued the following statement:

The current National Park Service mountain biking rules, which have been in effect since 1987, have been working well in offering all visitors to our majestic national parks a safe and enjoyable experience, and should not be changed by the Bush Administration.

NPCA supports the use of mountain bikes in national parks under appropriate circumstances. However, the proposed new rule would, in certain cases, circumvent the normal public process and limit the opportunity for full public discussion of the use of mountain bikes on existing trails now used by hikers and equestrians. The rule also limits the scope of public involvement in Park Service consideration of mountain bike access. NPCA strongly believes national parks should offer full transparency on important park management decisions, including this one.

NPCA also feels that the proposed rules should explicitly state that Park Service-recommended Wilderness areas or areas that are now under study for potential designation as Wilderness, are off limits to mountain bike use.

Of the approximately 25 national parks where mountain biking is currently taking place on dirt trails, only Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California and Saguaro National Park in Arizona have completed the necessary public process and designated specific trails for mountain bikes. NPCA believes that all parks should come into compliance.

NPCA will be analyzing the proposal and will be providing comments to the Park Service. We encourage our members and other national park advocates to do the same.

Back at IMBA, spokesman Mark Eller said the proposed rule change would simplify, not weaken, the process to open up park landscapes to mountain biking, when appropriate. As for proposed wilderness areas or park lands eligible for wilderness designation, he said the group wouldn't fight official designation unless there had been existing mountain bike use on the land.

"Once it’s adopted as wilderness, we accept that there’s no bicycling in wilderness,” said Mr. Eller, who also put his faith in park managers to make appropriate decisions when it came to where to allow biking.

“We think they have good judgment and they won’t put mountain bike trails or shared use trails where they don’t belong,” he said.

While Mr. Eller suggested opposition to mountain biking in national parks is more of a perceptual issue than an on-the-ground problem, that view was challenged by Mr. Buono at PEER and Ms. Brengel at The Wilderness Society.

"The structure of the bikes, the nature of their use, makes them more than conveyances to take one into the backcountry. In some ways they are a thrill sport, similar to jet skis, or downhill skiing where the activity is by and large the end in itself," said Mr. Buono. "Our recent experience at Big Bend where mountain bikers want a new trail constructed near Panther Junction show that IMBA representatives want the NPS to construct a trail particularly suited to speed and sharp maneuvers. This has no place in the 'enjoyment' framework of the NPS mission. I am not a believer in 'all enjoyments are equal" under the Organic Act.'"

As for Ms. Brengel, she said mountain biking is definitely an enjoyable activity, but one that brings certain user conflicts with it into the national park landscape.

"I think bikes do cause damage. I think you can look at areas like Moab (Utah) and you can see some of the direct impacts of mountain bike use," she said. "In addition, they’re fast-moving vehicles on public lands. A land manager has to weigh having a vehicle on a route with a hiker, and user conflicts are a real problem on public lands. So it is unclear to me why the Park Service would decide to go from taking a careful look at user conflicts to not taking a careful look. It seems contrary to the pro-user mission of the park system.”

Interestingly, IMBA officials, in their current marketing efforts for their "National Bike Summit" scheduled for March in Washington, D.C., are promoting a session on "Developing National Park Service Singletrack Near You."

Comments

Fascinating discussion; thanks.

I hear that some trails in the more remote Wilderness areas also are abandoned or semiabandoned. Mountain biking access likely would keep them in better shape for all users intrepid enough to visit them. And the semiabandonment problem exists on parts of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. I tried riding north on the CDNST from Cumbres Pass in southern Colorado in 2007. There was blowdown everywhere and scant evidence of any human visitation on the trail. At one point I had hiked the bike over several hundred yards of blowdown dense enough that the trail was barely discernible. After four hours' arduous labor had gotten me only eight miles from the trailhead, I gave up and rode back down.


Ted-

Some serious thread drift here, so I'll try to be brief. I could go on for pages. It's true Olympic is one of
the finest NPS wildernesses south of Canada, but that is more in spite of NPS management than because of it.
Olympic is far less wild than it was before it became a National Park in 1938. If you've not read Carston Lien's Olympic Battleground, you need to.

Consider the following facts. Park management has pushed for a new visitor center at Kalaloch for decades.
Ten thousand gallons of human waste was drained from the Hurricane holding tanks into Lillian River to avoid
the cost of trucking it away; the employee who blew the whistle lost his job. The mandated Wilderness
Management Plan has been ready for over a decade, but yet to be approved because Park management wanted to continue it's non-conforming practices and keep backcountry development options open. I believe the Wilderness Society sued over the delay. The employee in charge of writing that plan has been largely shifted to non-wilderness duties and denied promotion.

You wrote "Backcountry trails are often semi-abandoned...Close-in trails often show very long blow-down
clearance-cycles." Here are the real reasons for that and they are not because of preservationists. A disproportionate share of the trail budget has historically gone into constant replacement of the unsustainable six-miles of boardwalk at Ozette and hundreds of trail bridges elsewhere in the Park. At least five in-house under-engineered major trail bridges quickly collapsed. New expensive high-standard frontcountry trails were constructed almost yearly at Quinault, Kalaloch, Mora, Soleduc, Lake Crescent, Elwha and Port Angeles HQ. Management has basically caved in to equestrian demands that more trails be opened to stock. They could even carry firearms and chainsaws.

I'll close with an example from here at Rainier. Management was so obsessed with the recently completed 25 million dollar VC, that simple maintenance of existing facilites was ignored. The worst consequence of this was a series of disgraceful heating oil spills totaling many thousands of gallons from uninspected & unmaintained storage tanks.

Fire back at this one all you want, but it's gonna be hard for me to see how anyone could seriously believe the 'pure preservationists' are in charge at these two Parks. BTW, I enjoy fat-tire biking immensely, but feel no need to do it inside any National Park, except perhaps on roads closed to vehicles.


tahoma,

I, and probably others too, would like to read a quick run-down of some of the specifics & generalities, a few paragraphs introducing us to the most important items & themes that you found notable in Carston Lien's Olympic Battleground.

Searching Google, there is this single return for the term ' "Carston Lien" "Olympic Battleground" ', as, in the present case, part of someone's comment. The key passage is:

"If you want to know the priorities of NPS management, “follow the money”, as Deep Throat said. The NPS’s parent Interior Dept has been mired in concession & conflict of interest scandals for years. Those interested in the sacred cow NPS's history of corruption, malfeasence, and retaliation against critics should not miss these authors:

Micheal Frome, “Regreening the National Park Service”
Carston Lien, “Olympic Battleground”
Alston Chase, “Playing God in Yellowstone” "

I don't know which sewage incident you refer to at Hurricane Ridge Lodge: few people are familiar with pumping out sewage vaults and tanker-trucking it away, and I imagine mishaps do happen. However, looking at the topo map shows that the Lodge is at 5,200' elevation near the crest of the Ridge, while the Lillian River below is at 1,100', and a bit over a mile and a half away, horizontally. There is no road nor trail from the Ridge down the slope toward the Lillian. Any spill that might occur, would be right at the top, and the Lillian is a long ways away.

tahoma says:

"Olympic is far less wild than it was before it became a National Park in 1938.

That statement runs counter to a great deal of evidence otherwise. There were many homesteads in the Park valleys in the 1930s, now all nice meadows or grown up in young timber. On the high ridges & mountains there was fairly extensive mining in the Park - at Hurricane Ridge, on the Lillian River, the Tubal Cain deposits, and dozens of other claims & active commercial mines, large & small. History gives evidence that homesteaders, meat-hunters and cougar-guides were engage in setting fire to entire mountain-sides - "Get rid of some of this damn timber, get something growing on the ground, and build up the game animals! (or run free-range cattle)"

There was active, big-time commercial logging in progress within the territory that became the Park. Heavy-duty on-going road-building accompanied the loggers.

Today's popular "Spruce Grade Trail" was an operating railroad chugging back & forth around Lake Crescent.

There were dams being built on the rivers, reservoirs being filled for power-generation, to serve as urban water-supplies, and to effect flood-control for low-lying valleys.

The Forest Service and/or CCC was dynamiting a Grand Canyon-style small-gauge road-like trail network through the sheer cliff faces of the interior-core of the most remote and inaccessible Olympic massifs.

No, tahoma & all: There was indeed far more vigorous human activity & affects on the terrain and watersheds, the flora and the fauna of the Olympics before and at the time the Park was established than at any time thereafter, and the Administrations since have consistently striven to suppress, remove, and revert all of that, ever since.

That they continue to strive, of course means that not all of their objectives have been successful or fully achieved. Too, there are concessions to access & enjoyment by the public, but these are at the interface with commerce & society, and peripheral to the main body of natural habitat that is the most ecologically valuable aspect of Olympic National Park.

I will agree with you, tahoma, that the Olympic Administration is a closed & draw-bridged shop, and that as part of their insularity & defensiveness, they will react strongly (even 'overreact') to critics within their ranks. An unfortunate situation, but well known in the Park System and other bureaucracies, and separate from & independent of whether a person or group is Liberal or Conservative, Preservationist or Conservationist.


Ted-

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Good points about the mines and homesteads; I'd forgotten about those.
Concerning your earlier comment about the NPS taking over, I guess it's not paranoia if they're really after you. I'd probably have a different perspective if I or my family were Peninsula natives. I'm sure the numerous Native Americans there have an even different perspective.

I posted late at night after a grueling week clearing massive amounts of snow from roofs & helping friends
evacuate portable possesions out the path of the coming floods here. That's no excuse, just an explanation, so
apologies for my several unclear remarks. Since this thread is about mountain biking, I was trying not to hijack it too much more than we already have. I was focused on your comments about trails, where I have a bit of experience. I should have said that Olympic trails are less wild than they used to be, though apparently not as well-maintained. Even the (trail) development faction is probably not eager to expand bike use though. Maybe that was part of your point? Aren't they allowed, even encouraged, on Spruce RR trail? FWIW, I saw bootleg bike tracks deep in the backcountry on numerous occasions, so if that occurs in a place as rugged as Olympic, it's probably not uncommon in many other Parks.

The book I tried to refer to is Carsten Lien (with an e, not an o), Olympic Battleground: The Power Politics of Timber Preservation. It's been years, maybe I should re-read it. It's an exhaustive history of the ebb & flow around the establishment and expansion of the Park. As I recall, the NPS resisted the idea of a Park initially, then had grandiose road-building plans as usual, even hotels. A fair amount of logging was also done within the boundaries by the NPS. Sorry I can't offer better examples, but I'm pretty sure the gist of it is that neither faction was consistently dominant in the early decades.

The sewage spill was no accident, though I'm sure management used that excuse. Probably the details are in
the PA newspaper archives. I should have said "into the Lillian drainage...".

I'm glad we can at least agree that NPS management is a "closed & draw-bridged shop, and that as part of
their insularity & defensiveness, they will react strongly (even 'overreact') to critics within their ranks". Well said!
I don't find the abstract labels you mentioned particularly useful, but read all your posts, so blog on.


The impact on National Parks that mountain biking induces is much higher than hiking or climbing (currently accepted). The disruptions to wildlife and ecosystems testify of this, and should be scientifically assessed. Hiking and climbing are low noise, low energy sports , compared to high speed biking downhill.
As a citizen , I request a thorough review of the proposal at the US Congress level, to assess if it violates the mandate of our National Parks. For instance, modifications of rules to favor mountain biking are likely to open the way for other high impact sports, including firearm sports and motor-engine sports in the wilderness of National Parks. Another high impact sport, BASE jumping is outlawed. Mountain biking has more environmental impact than BASE jumping. Nationals Parks were set up precisely to avoid this sort of human impact on the environment and the wilderness, therefore the assessment of the proposal should occur at the federal level.


tahoma,

No problem with the late-night comments, but the explanation is appreciated - Thanks!

Carsten with an "e" gets lots of good returns.

Mr. Lein's account no doubt addresses the $64 question: Why did it take over 40 years to form Olympic National Park, after everyone knew that the Peninsula was an exceptional habitat?

1.) Because the enormous trees in the lowlands were considered too valuable to have locked up in a Park. The State objected, industry objected, land-owners objected - and Conservation-oriented environmentalists objected.

2.) Even more important than #1, the production of Olympic Peninsula managed timberlands is the heaviest and most valuable of any forestry in the U.S.A. Only a few locales on earth exceed the per-acre timber-wealth of this Peninsula.

Therefore, when late-19th C. Preservation activism began lobbying to make a Park of the whole Peninsula, their goal 'mysteriously' eluded them ... for nearly another half a century ... until the first cut of the old-growth forests was nearly complete and the timberlands had been successfully converted to plantation.

Paradoxically, it is a credit to the principles of Conservation by which the timberlands have been managed, that to this day Preservation-principles still rate these commercialized forests as worthy to be converted into Park. ;-)


Just to keep the thread drift going, any thoughts on why there's so much uproar over energy development near the Utah parks and not a peep about the clear-cutting that runs near, if not up to, the southern boundaries of Olympic?


Because there's a thousand years worth of oil-shale?

Because folks see Saudi Arabia in the Rockies?

The Olympic Peninsula clearcut logging plantation system maximizes the CO2 draw-down capacity of this highly productive ecosystem, so we get a 'bye'. ;-)

Nah ... really it's hard to say for sure. It may well have more to do with how the eco-movement works, than anything actually at stake or in the offing.

To have a 'movement', over a sustained time-frame, there has to be new and somewhat novel concerns coming along to keep interest up. If folks will bite on 'energy in the Rockies', then the chicken done got to the other side of the road.


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