JoseCuervo
New member
Herds of monsters are defiling the woods, and forest officials admit they can't control the destruction and disruption. It's those darn "minibikes, amphibious vehicles, snowmobiles, off-highway motorcycles, go-carts, motorized trail bikes and dune buggies," according to proposed rules that aim to reign in the stampede.
While the Bush administration contrives to overturn roadless protection and open vast areas of backcountry to more road-building for logging and energy development, the U.S. Forest Service can't handle vehicle abuse on roads and trails it already owns.
Advertisement
Off-road vehicle or all-terrain vehicle users in our national forests have increased from 5 million in 1972 to 36 million in 2000. The number of people who drove off road swelled 109 percent between 1982 and 2000.
The loud, smelly machines chase off wildlife, destroy fragile habitat, make new roads and ruts whenever the mood strikes their operators and interfere with hikers, wildlife watchers and hunters - especially hunters, although many of the offenders are hunters themselves.
"I think a lot of people come here to go hunting, and their real recreational intent is to ride their ATVs around ," said Dick Myers, who fields public questions and complaints for the Division of Wildlife.
Myers, a retiree who manages the division's communications center, says complaints about ATVs molesting big-game hunts on public lands have skyrocketed in the six years he has been lending an ear to frustrated hunters.
Most of the complaints arise from national forests and BLM lands during the second, third and fourth rifle elk seasons. Myers says the White River National Forest is the worst offender.
One complaint he remembers vividly came from a caller who accused the wildlife division of lying about Colorado's big elk herds. In six days of riding his ATV up and down a forest road at sunrise, lunch and sunset, the guy never saw an elk.
Myers commiserates with harried hunters but can't offer much help. The wildlife division is powerless to punish careless or illegal off-road use. That's the understaffed, underfunded Forest Service's job.
A draft of the proposed new rules ran July 15 in the Federal Register and is up for public comment until Sept. 13. It would designate forest routes for various types of motor vehicles while keeping them out of other areas. Without any requests for funding, the proposed rules would require the already overburdened agency to do environmental studies, classify thousands of miles of trails and roads, print and distribute off-road use maps and erect signs.
The timber industry - the leading builder of temporary roads that become permanent in national forests - would be exempt from paying for any "higher standard" roads that might be needed, beyond what it takes to haul out logs.
The proposed rules don't offer any insights into how forest officials might find the wherewithal to patrol and enforce newly apportioned traffic. Nor do they mention any specific penalties for violators.
If all that sounds like so many veiled excuses for the forests to justify the continuation and expansion of their controversial recreational fee-use program, you might have smelled the rat in the ATV exhaust fumes. Without funding and policing power, the motorized play plan will become just another public-lands vehicle running on empty.
Myers, who hears about 100 complaints about off-road vehicles every autumn, offers this insight: "You can make all the rules you want, but unless you enforce them, you're going to make no difference."
He suggests that, if the plan goes through, it could use some help similar to the wildlife division's Operation Game Thief program, which enables people to report poachers.
"The Forest Service should provide some convenient phone number like that so people can take ATV license numbers and report violators."
Here's another idea: Let's stop all this regulatory folly and simplify at the root of the problem: too many ATVs on some public lands. A few busy national forests already ration backcountry use to hike-in campers with limited permits to preserve fragile ecosystems.
There's no reason why motorized monsters shouldn't get the same limiting treatment. Especially during hunting season.
