By Dave Kiel, Outdoor Recreation Planner, St. George BLM Field Office

Over the last 2 1/2 decades, mountain biking has been on a tear. Going from fringe outdoor activity to legitimate American pastime at a blistering pace, fat tires gained recreational and competitive legitimacy virtually overnight. It’s still hard to believe that mountain biking breezed into the Olympic Games 13 years ago with nary a hiccup from the often stodgy International Olympic Committee.

But that meteoric growth came with growing pains and the reason was simple—the vast majority of mountain biking is recreational and it happens on public lands. And whenever a new activity crops up on lands belonging to the American taxpayer, environmental impacts, confrontation, and controversy are sure to follow.

Mountain biking weathered the inevitable faceoff with hikers and equestrians as off-road cyclists took to “their” trails in increasing numbers. This early legitimacy was due in no small part to the creation of IMBA, who, along with some very dedicated clubs across the country, helped establish the fledgling sport as a viable use of public lands. Nowadays, when land managers consider outdoor recreation opportunities, mountain bikers have parity with other outdoor recreation activities.

Sounds pretty positive, doesn’t it? Well, there’s one missing component to this story that threatens the hard work of all those off-road cyclists who care deeply about both the sport and the environment—illegal trail building.

We all know that onetime illegal trails form the backbone of the riding opportunities in a number of Utah counties. That’s particularly true here in Washington County as a significant amount of our desert singletrack has a rather murky history. A lot of people in the BLM St. George Field Office (very few of them were mountain bikers) worked very hard to jump through the proper hoops and legalize those trails. Former BLM employee Cimarron Chacon even took it a step further and obtained National Recreation Trail status for the trail system on Gooseberry Mesa.

Now that the BLM and the Forest Service have accepted mountain biking as a legitimate and responsible use of public land, the days of outlaw mountain bikers constructing secret trails are over. Right? Wrong. Fueled by glorification in some of the glossy bike rags, illegal trail building and the pioneering of new routes is still occuring.

A brand new stretch of outlaw singletrack was recently constructed on Gooseberry Mesa, crossing BLM and private lands with impunity. Another trail was constructed on Smith Mesa, primarily on state lands, but public nonetheless. The lower section of the BLM’s Bear Claw Poppy Trail now has more new routes than it did when it was open to motorized use. For those of you who have ridden here over the years, this area was closed to motorized use to protect the Dwarf Bearclaw-Poppy and mountain bikes were allowed on two specified routes only. These have been signed repeatedly but the signs are ripped out as quickly as they are installed and trail proliferation is rampant.

Now, if the first thing you thought when you read the previous paragraph was, "Hmm, I wonder where that new Gooseberry singletrack is?" Well, that kind of complacency makes you part of the problem and I'm growing weary of defending mountain bikers as being environmentally responsible--because clearly, some of them are not. Now, I am fully aware that the vast majority of mountain bikers, including most readers of Cycling Utah, are responsible public lands users. But there's an aggressive minority out there who could care less and it won't take much to wipe out all the goodwill and legitimacy it took years to build. It's gotten bad enough that I'm no longer willing to jump to the defense when disparaging comments about mountain biking spill out in planning meetings.

The other day, a friend asked me the obvious question: “What’s wrong with building trails on public lands?” My first response was predictable, “Nothing, as long as the proper planning has been completed and clearances have been obtained. You wouldn’t build a trail across your neighbor’s property without permission, so why would it be okay to do the same on public lands?”

That’s a pretty obvious conclusion but there’s more to it than that. When trails are constructed illegally, all the safeguards designed to protect natural resources are being ignored and those resources are placed at risk. If you follow the rules, the proposed trail alignment will receive a number of clearances, with the most important being endangered species and archaeological resources.

Can you imagine the fallout that would occur if a trail were put through a sensitive archaeological site? Think about recent events in Blanding. Granted, it’s a bit apples and oranges, but would you really want to see mountain biking facing the same scrutiny and condemnation? And if you think you can recognize an important cultural site, trust me, I’ve been on the ground with archaeologists and if you don’t know what you’re looking for most people could walk right over a significant site and never even know it.

And what about endangered species? They come in two flavors—plants and animals, and illegal trail construction can not only damage their habitat, but once a trail is being used on a regular basis, it can disrupt the way wildlife use an area.
Finally, there’s public perception. One of the biggest problems facing land managers today is the proliferation of off-road vehicle routes. Like mountain bikers, I believe that the majority of OHV riders are responsible users. The reason their impacts are so glaring is because a simple twist of the throttle by a single rider can do a phenomenal amount of damage. But the degree of damage is not a valid excuse for the construction of illegal mountain bike trails. From a land manager’s perspective, both are surface disturbing activities and both are illegal. From the perspective of the public, it tends to lump mountain biking in with motorized use, rather than seeing it as a standalone non-motorized use.

The next time you hear about the new “secret” trail, think about what that really means. Yes, constructing new trails by the book takes longer, but it’s really not that difficult and it will ensure long term legitimacy for Utah mountain biking.

For more information about public lands trail construction, contact your local BLM or US Forest Service office. These are some useful links for contacts and further research:
http://www.blm.gov/ut/st/en/info/directory.html
http://www.imba.com/resources/trail_building/index.html
http://www.imba.com/resources/agencies/index.html