THE TRUTH IS, IF YOU RIDE A MOUNTAIN BIKE OR SNOWMOBILE WE COULD ALL LOSE GROUND

When one group loses, we all lose. The skiers will probably be the next group on the list if it keeps going this direction.

The following is from an article in Bikemagazine in the Spring of 2009. the Forest Service is deciding what to do with OUR LAND. This article pertains to Montana.

The rules are clear when it comes to Congressionally designated Wilderness: no roads, no buildings, no mining or logging, no motorized travel, no mechanized transport, and no bikes. They were written into the Wilderness Act of 1964. But the policies on how to manage Recommended Wilderness are less clear, especially concerning mountain bikers. The question for the Forest Service boils down to this: If a piece of land is recommended for Wilderness, and the Forest Service is required to preserve the wilderness character of that land, since mountain biking is banned from Wilderness, should the Forest Service ban mountain bikers from Recommended Wilderness, even if people have been riding on the trails for decades?

Foresters in the Region 1 offices of the Forest Service debated this question. But while they debated, demands on these lands grew greater every year. More hikers were hitting the trails. Mountain bikers, too. And snowmobilers were riding higher and further into the mountains than ever before. The Forest Service felt compelled to do something. So instead of a policy, it created a philosophy. And the philosophy is this: These lands should be managed as if they were Wilderness.

In doing so, the Forest Service sidestepped Congress and created de facto Wilderness— land managers in Montana found a way to create what is essentially Wilderness without any oversight, legislation, public comment or approval of any kind.

The effects of this philosophy first rippled through Montana three years ago, when the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest released its travel-management plan, a document that dictates how the forest manages recreational uses. The Beaverhead Deerlodge includes 16 Recommended Wilderness Areas, and the new plan offered a similar recommendation for them all: ban mountain bikes, a move that closed 350 miles of singletrack in the forest to riders.