Put brakes on off-highway vehicles in forests

I have ridden off-highway vehicles and enjoyed it. They’re fun. In the spirit of fair play, I need to mention that.

The U.S. Forest Service, with whom I spent a 34-year career before retiring as deputy chief in 2002, just issued new regulations intended to blunt the threat posed by OHVs, whose use “has reached critical mass” according to Dale Bosworth, the agency chief.

I think that assessment is a serious understatement. OHVs – including ATVs, dirt bikes, four-wheel drives and snowmobiles – may be fun to ride, but they are ruining the last best places in America’s national forests.

Clean water, fragile soils, fish and wildlife are taking a beating, and there are fewer and fewer places to pursue quiet and solitude. And don’t get me started on how OHVs spread noxious weeds.

I commend the Forest Service for directing that OHVs be confined to “designated routes” rather than running loose on the land. But a small step in the right direction is not enough when a giant leap is needed. The new OHV regulation falls woefully short of the bold steps necessary to beat the problem.

This issue has been festering for more than two decades on public lands as OHV use has mushroomed. Manufacturers crank out ever-more muscular machines along with slick ad campaigns. And the Forest Service has been largely asleep at the wheel, except for some courageous officials who care enough about your public lands to try to stop the abuse.

Most private lands are closed to OHVs, as well as state-owned lands. National parks are generally closed to them (yet there is increasing trespass even there). That leaves other federal lands as the primary playground, and national forests are the choicest morsels – stunning beauty, vast room to roam, clear streams and skies and freedom to explore. Small wonder so many love it.

The Forest Service is long overdue in reining in abusive OHV activity to protect resources and restore balance with the majority of outdoor enthusiasts who prefer to pursue quiet, human-powered activities. OHVs have a huge “footprint” – they can easily cover 100 miles a day and are noisy. And instead of one family riding in a four-wheel drive pickup, now there are four or five OHVs tooling around.

All that tooling around by 30 million to 40 million OHV riders has created a web of hundreds of thousands of miles of unauthorized, renegade routes that finally spurred the Forest Service to say, “Whoa!” Well, sort of, because the Forest Service did not take a firm stand against these renegade routes.

I don’t know how much more “good times” our national forests can stand. Clean water and wildlife will continue to suffer along with increasingly disenfranchised recreationists who long for natural solitude.

The Forest Service has allied itself with the wrong values on this issue. Using smoking as an analogy, I make the point that smokers affect non-smokers, but not vice versa. OHV users similarly affect “quiet recreationists.” Society has settled the smoking issue by demanding that smokers practice their habit in confined areas.

The Forest Service needs to get on top of the OHV issue and require that their use be confined to relatively small, suitable areas, and leave most national forest lands the way they should be: natural.