Say "NO" to Wheels in Wilderness!

Issue Overview - Why it Matters

Certain government officials and private organizations are threatening the sanctity of the Wilderness Act by putting forth legislation that, if passed, would allow for mechanized transportation in Wilderness Areas across the country, including those right here in Eagle and Summit counties. ESWA is not against mountain bikes or other intrusive activities in our forests. After all, many of our members love to mountain bike, rock climb, and participate in trail races. However, ESWA strives to preserve our limited Wilderness Areas as pristine places of peace with minimal evidence of human impact for current and future generations. As such, ESWA, along with organizations like Wilderness Watch and Vail Valley Mountain Trails Alliance, opposes any effort to amend the Wilderness Act to allow for mechanized activities in Wilderness Areas. And we need your help to keep wilderness wild! 

The Problem

The National Wilderness Preservation System currently protects over 800 Wilderness Areas totaling over 111 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico, making it America’s most critical law for preserving wild places and the genetic diversity of thousands of plant and animal species. Yet designated wilderness is only 2.7% of land in the Lower 48, and still just about 5% if Alaska is included. The protections of the Wilderness Act include a ban on logging, mining, roads, buildings, structures and installations, mechanized and motorized equipment, and more. Its authors sought to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness” to protect places not manipulated by modern society, where the ecological and evolutionary forces of nature could continue to play out mostly unimpeded.

The goal of the Wilderness Act was to set aside a small proportion of public land in America from human intrusion. Some places, the founders said, deserved to be free from motorized, mechanized, and other intrusions to protect wildlife and wild lands. For over 60 years, the Wilderness Act has protected these designated Wilderness Areas from machines of all types, including cars, trucks, ATVs, OHVs, snowmobiles, drones, bicycles, and all other types of motorized and mechanized transport.  Over the last few decades, several groups who oppose the restrictions placed on the use of Wilderness Areas have sought to rip away these protections through legislation to amend the Wilderness Act. 

The most recent attack took place in 2024 when The Sustainable Trails Coalition, a mountain biking organization, partnered with Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee to gut the Wilderness Act. Senator Lee introduced a bill (S. 4561) to amend the Wilderness Act and allow mountain bikes and game carts on every piece of land protected by the National Wilderness Preservation System. Senator Lee’s bill was premised on the false claim that the Wilderness Act never banned bikes and that, supposedly, the Forest Service changed its regulations in 1984 to ban bikes. But bicycles, an obvious kind of mechanized equipment, have always been prohibited in wilderness by the plain language of the law (“There shall be…no other form of mechanical transport….”). The Forest Service merely clarified its regulations on this point in 1984 as mountain bikes gained popularity. 

Meanwhile, in response to growing demand for mountain biking trails, the Bureau of Land Management invites over a million mountain bikers each year to ride its thousands of miles of trails. And the U.S. Forest Service already has a staggering 130,000 miles of motorized and nonmotorized trails available to mountain bikers.

Unfortunately, the Sustainable Trails Coalition is not the only recreational interest group that wants to weaken the Wilderness Act. Some rock climbers recently successfully pushed Congress to allow climbers to damage Wilderness rock faces by pounding in permanent bolts and pitons rather than using only removable climbing aids. In addition, trail runners want exemptions from the ban in wilderness on commercial trail racing. Likewise, drone pilots and paragliders want their aircraft exempted from Wilderness Act protections. 

The list of those seeking to water down the Wilderness Act is growing. Most of these recreational groups say they support Wilderness, understanding how important it is when most landscapes and wildlife habitats have been radically altered by people. At the same time, they want to slice out their own piece of the Wilderness pie.  What many of these groups fail to appreciate is that Wilderness trails were not designed for the wear and tear of mechanized transport – and it goes without saying that use of untrailed areas by these mechanized recreationists will cause significant damage to both flora and fauna who call these places home. Moreover, given the current state of the Forest Service and its ongoing staffing shortages, there is certainly no way that our Wilderness trails could be maintained in a way that would allow for safe travel through mechanized means. Additionally, once the door is opened to mechanized use, there will be almost no way to prevent the creation of pirate trails, which lead to both safety and erosion issues.  

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…” — Wallace Stegner

The Solution

Must we be allowed to do anything we want in nature? Rather than weakening the protections that the Wilderness Act provides, we could try to reinvigorate a spirit of humility toward Wilderness. We could practice restraint, understanding that designated Wilderness Areas have deep values beyond our human uses of them.

Let’s cherish our wilderness heritage, whole and intact. We owe it to the founders of the Wilderness Act, and we owe it to future generations.  Please write your Representatives and Senators today and tell them you oppose any efforts to open Wilderness Areas to mechanized transportation.