House bill moving forward to allow bikes in Wilderness

elkduds said:

HR 1349 "Wheels over Wilderness"


HR 1349 just passed the natural resource committee on its ways to the House. If you aren't familiar with it this bill would amend the Wilderness Act to read Section 4(c) of the Wilderness Act (16 U.S.C. 1133(c)) is amended by adding at the end the following: “Nothing in this section shall prohibit the use of motorized wheelchairs, non-motorized wheelchairs, non-motorized bicycles, strollers, wheelbarrows, survey wheels, measuring wheels, or game carts within any wilderness area."

Opposed, no bikes in Wilderness! Share your views w legislators.

https://www.backcountryhunters.org/whoa_let_s_slow_down_here

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jlmatthew said:

How about a bill to only allow recurve bows and flintlocks for hunting in Wilderness area's? Or better yet, how about a bill to ban "ALL" modern hunting equipment to include clothing and optics. Get the wilderness area's back to really being wilderness area's!

Nothing better for a true wilderness hunt experience than a 60X spotting scope and a rifle capable of a 1000 yard shot!

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jlmatthew said:

How about a bill to only allow recurve bows and flintlocks for hunting in Wilderness area's? Or better yet, how about a bill to ban "ALL" modern hunting equipment to include clothing and optics. Get the wilderness area's back to really being wilderness area's!

Nothing better for a true wilderness hunt experience than a 60X spotting scope and a rifle capable of a 1000 yard shot!

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Schaaf said:

I wonder what percentage of the House has spent more than one night in a Wilderness area.

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brymoore said:

I oppose mountain bikes in wilderness areas.

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Straight Arrow said:

bicycle coming at you or behind you at 30, 40, or 50 miles per hour

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Let's be clear, if we can. What is being done here is, like the bill to to open the airstrips in wilderness areas to public use, to build yet another constituency against the idea of wilderness, which is repugnant to many politicians on the right. This bill brings a new level of dissent from less-informed mountain bikers, and that dissent can be cultivated to attack the idea of wilderness. The bill also sets up a guaranteed conflict between horse and mule packers and riders- they wont be able to use the same trail systems as the bikers, or people will get killed. Now, we know that the trail budgets for USFS are almost zero already. Wilderness trails cost- because of the requirement for hand tool use only- about 20% more to build an maintain than front country trails. So there will be no new trail system, only accidents and further conflicts, all of which will undermine the idea of wilderness and set the stage for new attempts to repeal the Wilderness Act. It is a chess game, even if most of the anti-wilderness players are ham handed red faced goobers who don't know exactly what they are playing- in the end, they will smash the board and defecate on our rug, but they will win if we are not careful.

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I think what's often lost on bike folks who advocate for this bill is the danger of cracking open a bedrock environmental law. My concerns aren't so much with bikes on the trail per se (though there have been issues in places). Now with damage by bikers (the science is fuzzy on that, too, and there needs to be more done). My issue is that the authors of the Act made a decision to draw the line where they did for a reason. (And contrary to arguments to the contrary, historical documents show that bikes were as much on their minds as anything else.) Here's a hypothetical: What if, in 20 years, mag-lev hoverboards are THE thing to have. Everyone uses them for all transportation. It's hardly silly to imagine some new, unforeseen technology like that coming over the horizon and changing how we move--just as no one anticipated people riding 50 miles into the backcountry on bikes with enormous tires, 35 years ago. If and when that happens, will we move the line, then, too, to allow these devices -- because the Act doesn't mention them, and because they are not "mechanized" in some sense of the word? I think it's pretty clear that the writers of the Wilderness Act drew their line where they did, to keep these places for nature, and not to accommodate us and our whims, as our whims change over generations. This, I think, is what mountain bikers don't seem to try to understand. They are thinking about their own recreation. What's more, they're pursuing their own self-interest in a year that will go down as possibly the worst on record for the environment in the US.

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wllm1313 said:

I think it's crazy people choose to ride any but the most bomb proof of horses in those areas.

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onpoint said:

It used to never cease to amaze me how so many are willing to bemoan the constant chipping away at (fill in whatever thing you care about being chipped away at) and seem to be totally OK with with always being on defense.
I'm very rarely amazed anymore.
Wonder if "we" will ever decide to go on offense......

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