Bill opening wilderness areas to bikes sparks controversy

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — Rose Wakeland, 13, who got her first two-wheeler at age 2, flew over a jump on a dirt trail here one recent morning like an old hand. “Good one, Rose!” a friend shouted.

Taking to the rocky, root-tangled trails of northwest Washington on a mountain bike is a rite of summer in this outdoorobsessed corner of the nation, where the North Cascade foothills kiss the edge of town.

But now in places like this across the West where communities and wild places meet — from Colorado’s Front Range to the necklace of towns around Lake Tahoe — a debate is raging over what the future should look like out on the trails, and whether hiking boots and knobby tires can coexist.

A bill in Congress would open up biking in federally designated wilderness, where “mechanical transport” has been banned since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act in 1964. Conservation groups have mostly lined up in opposition to the change, fearing an erosion of land protections, and some cycling groups are opposing the bill for similar reasons. But many other riders, including Rose’s mother, Char Waller, argue that wilderness rules must adapt to a generational shift in how young people like her daughter recreate. Wild places get saved and protected, she said, only when people love them and use them.

“It’s time to reinvent the wheel,” said Waller, the director of education at the Whatcom Mountain Bike Coalition, and a leader of the weeklong bike camp Rose was attending.

What complicates the debate for people on both sides is that Senate Bill 3205 — the Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Areas Act — is sponsored by two Republican senators from Utah, Mike Lee and Orrin G. Hatch, neither of whom is known as an environmentalist. The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, ranked them near the bottom of Congress last year in its scorecard.

Some wilderness supporters say they believe the bill is in fact a kind of stalking horse, purporting to do one thing while really doing another.

“We think the bill is a fundamental attack on one of our bedrock conservation laws — it’s championed by two of the most anti-environmental members of the Senate, and it has language in it that is really designed to drive a wedge between the recreation community and conservationists,” said Michael Carroll, the senior national partnership director at the Wilderness Society, a Washington-based group.

Some cyclists said that such a wedge was nothing new.

Many are still wincing from last year’s creation of a 431-square-mile wilderness complex in central Idaho called the Boulder-White Clouds. Before it was wilderness, the area was popular with mountain bikers, who had advocated a national monument designation that would have allowed riding to continue. But then a political shift turned momentum toward a wilderness designation, and with the stroke of President Barack Obama’s pen, the trails were closed and the cyclists were out.

“It left a bad taste in a lot of peoples’ mouths,” said Eric Brown, the trail director at the Whatcom Mountain Bike Coalition.

Now, the new wilderness bill has brought some of those tensions back to a boil. The International Mountain Biking Association, for example, one of the nation’s biggest cycling groups, supports an expansion of cycling in wilderness, but at the same time opposes the bill that might achieve that end.