Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Nasty, Brutish, and Loud (Cont.)


	Trail of Tears? Ripping down the flanks of a share dump located outside the boundaries of the Hatfield-McCoy

YAMAHA RAPTOR. HONDA RUBICON. Polaris Sportsman 500. Kawasaki Mojave. Suzuki King Quad 4x4.

In 2000, 734,000 all-terrain vehicles were sold in the United States. The ATV industry—whose biggest players include Honda, Yamaha, Polaris, and Kawasaki—aims to crack the million mark by 2004, and the hope is not unrealistic. The sale of ATVs has risen 120 percent since 1997, and the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America, an Irvine, California-based trade group representing nine top manufacturers, is laboring ardently to keep that number trending upward. In 2001, it put roughly 43,000 people through its free half-day ATV Ridercourse.

Then there's the BlueRibbon Coalition, which represents 600,000 U.S. motor-sports enthusiasts, all in the off-road-vehicle (ORV) category, from ATVers, snowmobilers, and jet skiers to motorcyclists and dune buggyists. The Coalition has a simple message for the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management: "This land is ours," it trumpets on its Web site (www.sharetrails.org). "We ride safely. We are courteous toward other users. We care about conservation. Yet environmental extremists continue their attacks. With emotional hysteria."

Founded in 1988 and based in Pocatello, Idaho, the BlueRibbon Coalition is funded mostly by mom-and-pop ORV dealers, though in the early nineties it also got financial support from corporations that shared its desire for wilderness access—Exxon, for instance, and Chevron, and Boise-Cascade. At present

its constituency is hoping that Congress will authorize the construction of the Great Western Trail, a 4,455-mile off-road corridor zigzagging from Montana down through Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. It's not a pipe dream. The BLM already offers ATVers unlimited access to 36 percent of its lands (and limited access to another 45 percent). The Forest Service, which currently allows ATVs on 60,000 miles of unclassified "ghost roads" out of the 445,000 miles of roads it oversees, published a study in 2000 embracing the Great Western Trail concept.

And the Bush administration is pro-ORV. Interior Secretary Gale Norton suspended Clinton-era bans on jet skiing at four national parks last year and is now lending a sympathetic ear to motorheads fighting a Park Service proposal to ban snowmobiling in national parks. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management has welcomed ATVs and other motorized vehicles onto eight of the 20 national monuments Clinton designated during his presidency. Ironically, in the latest political turnabout, Utah governor Michael Leavitt announced in January that he would ask President Bush to use the Antiquities Act—as Clinton did— to turn the red-rock backcountry of the San Rafael Swell into a 620,000-acre national monument accessible to off-road vehicles. Under President Bush, "there's been definite improvements in the treatment of ORV recreationists," says BlueRibbon Coalition executive director Clark Collins.

The prophets of eco-doom are, of course, shrieking, and also jockeying to influence the BLM and the Forest Service, both of which will revise their respective off-road policies one region at a time over the coming decade. For starters, the Wilderness Society alleges that ATVs are ripping trees and wildflowers from the hills of Kentucky, muddying the sparse streams of New Mexico, scaring grizzlies and wolves in Montana, and mercilessly crushing slower creatures, such as the endangered desert tortoise in California.

In May 2000, the Wilderness Society and the Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads joined with Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Bluewater Network, and 80 other environmental, hunting, and animal-rights groups to form the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. This alliance is now urging the Forest Service and the BLM to keep ORVs on designated trails and out of riparian zones, as well as areas that the agencies have short-listed for wilderness designation. It also wants the Forest Service to resurrect the so-called 40-inch rule, officially dropped in 1990, which banned ORVs wider than 40 inches—meaning most of today's ATV rigs—from singletrack trails. One NTWC affiliate, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is currently waging a lawsuit in federal court in Utah, arguing that the BLM has illegally allowed ORVs to rampage through prospective wilderness areas, neglected to update its land-management plans to account for burgeoning ORV use, and broken its promise to close areas already ravaged by ORVs.

"Off-road vehicles are out of control on our public lands," says Scott Kovarovics, director of the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. "Every year, manufacturers make them bigger and more able to go anywhere, over anything. They are destroying the backcountry worse than ever before."

BlueRibbon honcho Collins vows that his group will counter its environmental foes by "riding responsibly." "We will continue to be good citizens," he says. But sometimes his allies resort to distinctly un-Gandhian forms of civil disobedience. This past Thanksgiving, 190,000 ATV and dune-buggy enthusiasts invaded Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, about 150 miles east of San Diego, for a long weekend of racing and raucous partying; by the time it was over, 220 people were injured, 70 were arrested, and three died. In November 1999, in the desert near El Centro, California, a group of ATV riders vented their feelings about restrictive regulations by stealing the keys to a BLM-owned four-wheeler and then heaving full cans of beer at a group of police and BLM rangers. Twenty people were arrested. Two months before that, four ATVers turned themselves in to Forest Service rangers in Blanding, Utah, after being photographed motoring through a prospective wilderness area.

"We were legally breaking the law," said Joe Lyman, one of the riders and a member of Southern Utah Land Users, an ORV access group. "But we didn't feel we were doing anything wrong morally."

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