An environmental assessment is being conducted at Rocky Mountain National Park to determine whether a short section of hiking and equestrian trail known as the East Shore Trail should be open to mountain bikes.
Though the study is just getting under way, the impetus for it goes back a half-dozen years, to 2006, when talks were being held over designating official wilderness in Rocky Mountain.
During discussion of proposed wilderness in Rocky Mountain, "Advocates for bicycle use, which included the Town of Grand Lake and the Grand County Commissioners, made it clear that their support of wilderness designation for the park was contingent upon the consideration of bicycle use on the East Shore Trail," notes a Park Service narrative announcing the EA.
According to the Park Service, "(T)he East Shore Trail is an existing hiking and equestrian trail that runs roughly north/south along the east shore of Shadow Mountain Lake near the town of Grand Lake, Colorado (hence the name of the trail). The northern terminus of the trail is the East Shore Trailhead, which is located due south of the town of Grand Lake. The entire trail is 6.2 miles long and ends at the south boundary of RMNP. The East Shore Trailhead and the first 0.7 mile of the trail is situated on land administered by the USDA Forest Service where bicycles are currently permitted. The remaining 5.5 miles of the East Shore Trail is located within RMNP. Bicycles are currently not permitted on trails within the national park. The trail is also part of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail."
Since bicycles are not permitted in designated wilderness, some compromises needed to be made if the East Shore Trail was ever to be open to mountain bikers. So when the wilderness designation was made official in 2009, "(T)he wilderness legislation excluded the East Shore Trail Area from the wilderness boundary to 'maximize the opportunity for sustained use of the Trail without causing harm to affected resources or conflicts among users.' Consideration of bicycle use on the East Shore Trail was part of the legislation."
When the wilderness designation was defined, the official wilderness boundary was located 50 feet east of the East Shore Trail, a move that left open the possibility of allowing mountain bikes on the trail.
In August 2011, the Grand County (Colorado) commissioners wrote to the director of the Park Service's Intermontain Region asking that a two-mile section of the East Shore Trail be approved for mountain bike use.
As a result, the Park Service decided to conduct an environmental assessment on the proposal. Public scoping, a period in which the Park Service solicits public comments on a proposal, is currently under way. Among the questions being asked of the public:
1. Do you favor bicycle use on the two-mile section of the East Shore Trail currently under consideration? Please explain why you do or do not favor bicycle use on this section of trail.
2. If you do not favor bicycle use on the trail, can you suggest other alternatives to connect the towns of Grand Lake and Granby with a bike trail?
3. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, what are your recommendations to minimize conflicts among trail users (equestrians, hikers, bicyclists).
4. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, how many times are you likely to use this trail during the riding season? What would your destination be if you rode this trail?
5. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, to what standard should the trail be developed (e.g., how wide should it be and what surface should be used on the trail)?
6. If you do favor bicycle use on the trail, what should be done to dissuade bicyclists from entering the adjacent designated wilderness where bicycles are not permitted?
7. Please share any other comments you might have regarding the East Shore Trail.
Comments are being accepted through September 21. The environmental assessment is expected to be completed by fall 2013. You can comment on this proposal at this site.
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Comments
Anonymous of 3:24 and 3:38 must be kidding. You would walk up to a woman with a baby stroller or a cyclist and accuse them of having a wheel fetish? That is bizarre. She's just trying to walk her kid and I'm just trying to ride my bicycle. It's pretty simple.
Some puritans thought, I think circa 1600, that buttons were the work of the devil and that only hooks and eyes could be used on clothing. Yet I don't think any of us have a button fetish.
As for the other Anonymous who thinks it's nonsense to allow bikes in designated Wilderness or the national parks: he/she is likely to be disappointed at some point.
Practices tend to be sinful, not objects. When you say that some people believe that a "wheel" is a sin, you're imagining that an object is a moral being. So, the irony is that you've invested the wheel with some power over the human. This would explain its power over you--your rather bizarre accusation that some people consider wheels (or mountain biking) a sin. What people?
Anonymous 3:21, please understand that Wilderness was not created for the private enjoyment of your favorite hobby. :)
Right back at you!
Let me clarify, although I shouldn't need to, that some people consider the use of a wheel on wildland trails as sinful. As for who does? all one has to do is read any number of Internet threads, including on these pages, in which people object to bicycles on trails, and sometimes outright fulminate against them. Sometimes they offer specific reasons but just as often they assert in effect, that using a bicycle in a wildland represents a defilement or profanation of some sort. (Watch for such nebulous adjectives as "inappropriate" without further explanation; that's a giveaway.)
I repeat that in other countries, which lack America's puritan tradition and its still considerable influence over our mores, the issues that so perturb people on the NPT website and elsewhere are, if not entirely absent (and they often are), muted.
Here's another example. Where I live, there is a very large Latino population. In the local parks, Latinos couldn't care less who's on what trail. They don't have New England forebears. Everyone gets along. We also have large Asian and South Asian populations and they don't care either. Who cares? White people, mostly affluent, who've spent a lot of time reading and converting into scripture the writings of Thoreau, Emerson, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and their modern epigones—but not, e.g., William Cronon. You see them with their half-hidden scowls, pursed lips, and downcast eyes. You say hi to them and they don't reply.
They're laboring earnestly to immerse themselves in what they see as outdoor cathedrals. They find mountain biking, with the exhilaration it offers and the suffering it largely avoids (blisters, dust, flies, mosquitoes), disturbing. They wish that the local Sierra Club chapter could do something to extirpate mountain biking from anyplace but dirt roads.
To step back a bit and avoid the accusation that I'm painting with too broad a brush, obviously there is a range of concerns. Some people have legitimate worries about safety or unwelcome jarring experiences in certain areas. All of those worries, however, can be accommodated to an extent that any reasonable person should find satisfactory. This is done by a combination of responsible land management and the good will of most people. When wildlands become a kind of secular religion, however, no such accommodation is possible.
These objections to mountain biking have nothing to do with fallen-ness, unless you're forwarding an especially idiosyncractic reading of sin.
Following up on imtnbke's comments - I seem to recall that most of the "powers that be" of the USFS back then did not support wilderness because of the contraints it put on management, and when it was forced upon them, they responded with draconian rules with the mindset of "that will show them". Of course, that mindset lead to resource damage (no chainsaws allowed to the clear downed trees, so braided trails developed around obstructions). And little did they know that the Wilderness Nazis would totally embrace the draconian rules and clamour for even more closures and restrictions!!
In the case of this bike trail - along the edge of an artificial reservoir (Shadow Mountain Res.), along the boundary of the national park - I think this is a reasonable and appropriate use of the trail. The biggest obstacle will be keeping bikers off the Shadow Mountain Trail which heads east into wilderness. That trail is incompatible for both hiking and biking, especially with the potential of bikers bombing downhill past clueless day hikers.
The future threat to access to the backcountry of RMNP will be when they (park staff) develop a 'no chainsaws in wilderness' policy and then close off areas to any and all access under the guise of potential resource damage, because they will claim they don't have enough people to open the trails with crosscut saws. And with the large swaths of dead and rotting bettle killed lodgepole ready to start falling like matchsticks the next few years, this scenario will be on us sooner than many think......
KnowSomeButNotAll — you're right. In fact, by 1975-1977 the Forest Service had become so draconian in its interpretation of the Wilderness Act (no footbridges, no cabins, no bicycles, no hitching posts, and even no trail junction signs)* that both Frank Church and Morris Udall warned the agency that it was going way beyond what they had wanted as key legislators in getting the 1964 Wilderness Act passed. But the Forest Service ignored them and continued to tighten the screws even further, so nowadays you'd better not be found using a baby stroller in a Wilderness.
As you say, the theory is that the 1970s and 1980s-era Forest Service (it was under President Reagan, of course, in the 1980s) detested the Wilderness Act because it interfered with logging, so the agency decided to punish Congress for passing it by interpreting it absurdly. That was then. Nowadays, however, one has the impression that the Forest Service really believes in the rules it has passed.
In 1980, Congress actually passed a statute stating that bicycling is OK in the Rattlesnake Wilderness in Montana, but the Forest Service refuses to allow it anyway.
The Forest Service already has a no-chainsaws policy in place and has for years. It also does not allow its staff to use a wheelbarrow in Wilderness (again, a wheelbarrow suffers from having the accursed wheel). So yes, you're also correct that many Wilderness trails are falling into abandonment. No one uses them and no one maintains them. Some people, however, embrace this situation because they wish humanity would stay out of wildlands as much as possible. The more loss of trail mileage, the better.
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* In some places, you will find log stream crossings or footbridges and in many places you'll find trail junction signs. But even such things are controversial within the Forest Service and a number of national forests don't allow them. No cell phones either in one Wilderness, but that I can kind of understand.