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Boots and wheels fight over the trails
Tuesday, September 7, 1999
By ROBERT McCLURE
DARK DIVIDE, Skamania County -- John Rankin pauses from huffing and puffing his way up a steep ridge trail. He points to a 3-inch-deep rut gashed into the chalky pumice soil below.
"You can see what a motorcycle does to a trail," Rankin says. "Then the rain comes along and swooshes it out, and you've got ruts."
Out here in the outback, amid the stately Douglas fir and Pacific silver fir festooned with feathery moss, people who love the outdoors are coming perilously close to hating each other.
The hikers fear that, by making the trails easier and safer for dirt-bikers, the Forest Service will encourage more use by motorized two-wheelers. That, they say, means less enjoyment for those getting around on two legs.
Caught somewhat in the middle are mountain bikers and people like Rankin who enjoy riding horses in the backcountry. While some see the damage dirt bikes can do, others fear that the hikers, represented by the Washington Trails Association, might soon want them out of the backcountry, too.
On this day, Rankin is hiking a trail in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwestern Washington along with representatives of the Forest Service, the dirt bikers, the horse riders and the hikers. They are previewing plans to construct 18 miles of new trail and improve 20 more trail miles.
The plans would connect long segments of trail to make them into loops suitable for a daylong dirt-bike ride.
An earlier plan by the Forest Service to improve trails in the Dark Divide, an 85-square-mile wilderness between Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens, was thrown out by U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein, who ruled that hikers' concerns had been ignored.
A similar struggle is unfolding concerning the Mad River area of the Wenatchee National Forest, north of Leavenworth.
In a lawsuit over use in that area, Rothstein last week ruled in favor of the Washington Trails Association. She temporarily blocked Forest Service plans to improve the Mad River trails, a move the Forest Service figures would prompt a 10 percent increase in motorized travel.
"There are a lot of people who want to be out experiencing nature in the backcountry, and most of them want to hike," said Craig Engleking, backcountry advocacy director for the Washington Trails Association. "As the recreational population increases, we're looking at a fixed amount of land. We have to look at how we're going to manage the remaining areas."
This conflict springs from the ways that Washingtonians are spending leisure time in the great outdoors. While there are more hikers, a significant number of recreational users choose motorized transport -- dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles and personal water craft.
The National Survey of Recreation and the Environment, last conducted in 1995, estimated there are 1.6 million hikers in Washington, compared with about 704,000 off-road enthusiasts.
And as the state's population continues to expand, legions still relish the solitude of an afternoon in the woods -- a quiet afternoon in the woods, that is.
Even the dirt bikers are after solitude.
"We all want that experience to be one where we're up in the national forest, it looks nice and it feels good," said Dave Hiatt, a Tacoma dirt biker and activist. "None of us want to destroy it."
Dark Divide, the hikers point out, is the largest remaining piece of backcountry in Western Washington that is not sliced up by roads and is still in contention to be designated a federal wilderness area. That designation would prevent logging and other commercial activities allowed in some other areas of the forest. It would also keep out dirt bikes.
The more dirt-bike trails are built into an unroaded area like Dark Divide, the hikers say, the harder it will be to eventually persuade Congress to designate it as wilderness.
The dirt bikers say the hikers are overreacting.
"There are some people who don't want to even think about interacting with a mechanized vehicle," said Bruce Miller, a dirt-biker and hiker from the Seattle area.
Miller said when he is on two wheels and encounters someone on foot, he often gets a dirty look -- or worse.
"That takes a lot away from my experience in the backcountry that day, too," he said, echoing the words that hikers often use to describe encounters with the dirt bikes.
Hiking activists say dirt bikes leave huge ruts in the trails in some areas, a view confirmed by Forest Service employees. Hikers also complain about the noise and, to a lesser degree, the smell of the dirt bikes.
Off-road vehicle noise had been legally limited to 105 decibels, registering about midway between the noise of a subway and that of a discotheque, according to the "Washington Off-Road Vehicle Guide," a 1990 state government publication.
Recent changes reduce that to 96 decibels, Hiatt said. That is about equal to heavy city traffic or a subway.
But most modern trail bikes are much quieter than in the past, Hiatt said.
"It's quieter, by far, than your average lawnmower," Hiatt said. "We do not want noise out in the woods."
The dirt bikers point out that while thousands of miles of trails are open to hikers, they are much more limited. Out of about 10,000 miles of trails in Washington, less than 2,000 miles are open to dirt bikes, Hiatt said.
"From a motorized standpoint, what we want is more miles," said Jack Shrock, who showed up for the recent Forest Service workshop on the Dark Divide trails wearing a Northwest Trail Riders Association cap that advises, "Tread softly."
Although it sounds forbidding, Dark Divide is actually not particularly dark. Its most prominent features, in fact, are relatively sunny ridges. The area was named for John Dark, a 19th-century gold prospector and speculator, as were nearby Dark Mountain and Dark Meadows.
The trails association filed suit against the Forest Service's plans to improve the Dark Divide trails in 1995, alleging that their concerns had been ignored by the Forest Service, which got a $150,000 state grant to improve the trails.
Judge Rothstein agreed in 1996, ruling that the Forest Service acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" and that hikers' concerns were "either ignored totally or brushed aside summarily."
Now the Forest Service is taking another long look at how it can improve the trails in the Dark Divide and pass judicial muster.
The Forest Service is hungry for money to improve the trails. And by providing access to the dirt bikers, the federal agency can tap into state gas-tax money.
"If at some point in the future someone decided (Dark Divide) all needs to be wilderness, you still would have a better trail system," says Jack Thorne of the Forest Service.
Actually, though, this is what peeves hikers the most. They are angry about the way the Legislature decided to divide the gas-tax money, about $4 million a year.
The Legislature set up the system in the early 1970s on the theory that some of the gas being taxed was used off state highways, such as on Forest Service roads or by four-wheelers in the wilderness.
Later, in the 1980s, the Legislature decided that 20 percent of that money should also be dedicated to hiking-only trails, because hikers use gas on Forest Service roads to reach trailheads. And at the request of law enforcement officers who have to patrol the backcountry, 20 percent was set aside for education, such as safety classes for off-road enthusiasts, and for enforcement of regulations, such as putting deputies on trails.
Overall, that's 60 percent for trails that allow off-road vehicles, and 20 percent for hiking-only trails.
"Those percentages were established in statute many years ago and were not based on any good hard data on who was consuming fuel to do what," said Jim Fox, policy adviser at the Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation, the state agency that divvies up the gas-tax money.
Bills to change the allocation system, or to at least study the question, were filed in the last legislative session by Reps. Mike Cooper, D-South Snohomish, Adam Klein, D-Seattle, and Sen. Ken Jacobsen, D-Seattle. None passed.
That left about $2 million to be spent on trails that allow motorized use -- money the cash-strapped Forest Service would love to use in the Dark Divide.
The Forest Service gathered hikers, dirt bikers and equestrian enthusiasts for the hike up the steep trail recently as it revived plans for the trail upgrades blocked by the hikers' group's legal action. The Service wants "a negotiated settlement that everybody can buy into," explained Harry Cody, a Forest Service supervisor.
The man in charge of the trails project, the Forest Service's Buddy Rose, told the assembled interests that "eliminating motorized use on all these trails is not something we're going to entertain.
"Eighty-five percent of the miles of trails in the (Gifford Pinchot) forest are not available for motorized use," Rose said. "I know some people would like to see that be 100 percent, but personally, I have a problem with that."
Still, the Forest Service must proceed carefully. It must make sure increased use of motorbikes in the backcountry doesn't scare away threatened or endangered species, such as the mountain goats that populate the Goat Rock Wilderness to the northeast of Dark Divide.
Determining how many motorcycles can pass by an area frequented by goats without chasing them off "is going to be impossible," said Tom Kogut, wildlife biologist at the Gifford Pinchot forest.
For the hikers, there is a key symbol of how motorized trails are transforming wilderness: pavers.
The manufactured stones are used to repair and stabilize trails rutted by dirt bikes. They are 4 inches thick, 2 feet long and 16 inches wide. In the past, regular cement blocks have been used, said Randy McLandress, district trails and wilderness coordinator at the Entiat district of the Wenatchee National Forest.
Without the pavers, ruts up to 4 feet deep can develop in the trails.
"We use them quite a bit," McLandress said. "It's been a godsend for people who take care of the trails."
P-I reporter Robert McClure can be reached at 206-448-8092 or robertmcclure@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Dirt-bike riders and hikers are squaring off over Forest Service efforts to improve backcountry trails.
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