What's ho-hum in one park, when it comes to bikes, is decidedly more controversial in another. Which should make the coming few weeks interesting.
The ho-hum bicycle issue can be found at Grand Teton National Park, where officials are going through the machinations of passing the requisite regulations to allow bicyclists to ride on those new pathways the park installed along the Teton Park Road earlier this year. Here's the official wording that went into the Federal Register on Monday for a 60-day public comment period:
The National Park Service (NPS) proposes to designate certain multi-use pathways in Grand Teton National Park as routes for bicycle use; NPS regulations require issuance of a special regulation to designate routes for bicycle use when it will be off park roads and outside developed areas. Several segments of multi-use pathways have been constructed, or are planned for construction, and are located parallel to and generally within about 50 feet of existing park roads. Moving bicycle traffic off the lanes of motor vehicle travel will reduce real and perceived safety hazards, which will enhance opportunities for non-motorized enjoyment of the park, and encourage the use of alternate transportation by park employees and visitors.
Seems like a pretty cut-and-dried safety matter, no?
That's definitely not the case down in Big Bend National Park, where officials are expected in the next week or so to release their environmental assessment on a proposal to build a 3- to 5-foot-wide, roughly 5-mile-long "shared-use" trail, one with an emphasis on mountain biking, that would start near the visitor center at Panther Junction and run in a loop, crossing the Chihuahuan desert and wrapping Lone Mountain while providing sweeping views of the Chisos Mountains.
While the Grand Teton matter has received little if any opposition, the proposed trail at Big Bend has generated quite a bit of controversy due to 1) Whether this would actually be a 'shared-use' trail or one that hikers would avoid due to the speeds many mountain bikers prefer to travel at; 2) Why the park would spend so much time and effort on a trail catering to mountain bikers when there literally are more than 1,000 miles of single-track and dirt roads open to bikers in the vicinity, along with some 180 miles of dirt roads in the park that are open to mountain bikers, and at a time when park dollars are particularly precious, and; 3) Why this project even got off the ground at a time when the Park Service supposedly was in the middle of a five-year-long pilot program to study mountain bike compatibility in the parks, one that called for mountain bike use to be restricted to existing paved and unpaved roads in the parks.
The five-year study period, by the way, expires next year.
Support Essential Coverage of Essential Places
Comments
The only unpaved NPS trails where bicycling is allowed seem to be essentially unpaved roads (think the White Rim Road in Canyonlands) or what are essentially fire roads. Bear Valley Trail at Point Reyes National Seashore allows bikes. However - it's a fire road that's 12-15 feet wide and generally very hard packed. One can even see the tracks left behind by service vehicles that service the trash cans and pit toilets across from Divide Meadow.
There are mountain bike trails (shared use in some cases) at Mammoth Cave National Park and Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, just to name two park units.
George, I do not believe the NPS has come up with uniform standards for mountain bike trail construction. The folks at the International Mountain Bicycling Association believe they have strategies that work. You can learn more at this site:http://www.imba.com/trailsolutions/services/index.html
If you browse around that IMBA site, you'll get a feel for what IMBA wants in terms of mountain bike trails. Here's a snippet from their description of trail work at Northern Kettle Moraine State Forest in Wisconsin:
To expand mountain bike use in national parks, will existing hiking trails have to be rerouted and redesigned to "satisfy the singletrack experience" or to mitigate erosion tied to biking and slow high speeds? Or will new trails, such as the one proposed for Big Bend, be the answer?
A potential conflict with mountain bike use and national parks is that current regulations prohibit mountain bikes in officially designated wilderness. While IMBA professes a respect for wilderness areas, the group also works to realign wilderness boundaries to allow for mountain biking on public lands. Currently, a lot of national parks manage portions of their landscapes as wilderness, though no official wilderness designation might exist. For instance, there is no official wilderness in Yellowstone National Park.
Under IMBA's current push for mountain bike trails in national parks, lands that merit official wilderness designation could be impacted by the group's plans.
Again, the ban of bikes from wilderness came from a reinterpretation of the law in the mid 80s. That suits the Sierra Club and others just fine, but technically, the ban could be reversed without any action from congress. That being said, as a cyclist, all I see is a constant push from the self professed "environmentalists" to keep expanding wilderness and thereby restrict cyclists' access to trails. No wonder IMBA is fighting so hard to realign wilderness designation, but it's still a long term losing strategy since it seems that the quest for more wilderness will never end. A smarter way of doing it would be to reallow bikes in wilderness, since they're no more mechanical than kayaks, carbon fiber hiking poles, etc.
That way, we'd stop that inane internecine fight between cyclists and other user groups.
User conflicts are way overblown. We all know that the large majority of park users don't venture much past 1 mile from the trailhead. Separate cyclists from other user groups for the 1st mile, and then let people share trails.