An editorial in the Herald (Aug. 9) titled, “tiny percentage of wilderness should stay off limits to mountain bikes,” does a great job of uncovering the true motives behind the introduction of the “Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Areas Act,” which would open up designated wilderness areas to mountain bike travel.
While I am a mountain biker and adventure cyclist, I am a human-powered conservationist first. I have spent time bike-packing across some of the most incredible landscapes this region has to offer, oftentimes having to reroute trips to avoid wilderness areas, but with that I remain vehemently opposed to allowing mountain bikes in wilderness areas, as such would undermine our most sacred environmental law.
There are plenty of arguments for allowing mountain bikes in wilderness, some of which are coherent, but none will change my view because I believe there’s a much larger underlying issue: that we have fallen completely out of touch with wilderness.
We have seen incredible technological advances across all adventure sports, and now more and more people, particularly of my generation, are going into the wilderness for an adrenaline-seeking day trip, rather than lacing up some sneakers, throwing on a backpack and establishing connections to the land by exploring wilderness as our forefathers did.
That’s not to say that connections can’t be made in a day, but this trend should tell us that as conservationists we need to do a better job of building constituencies of people who not only care about the politics of protecting landscapes, but of people who will revel in sleeping under the stars in wilderness areas.
Too often, we portray protected landscapes for what they provide humans, such as how they benefit various user groups or their economic impact, rather than focusing on how they benefit nature. Wilderness after all is a place “...where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” In wilderness, nature is placed above the needs of man. Its value: intrinsic.
So for those reasons, let’s put this discussion of mountain bikes in wilderness to bed right here, right now.
Beau Kiklis
Durango
