No Place Distant: Roads And Motorized Recreation On America's Public Lands

9781597263115

No Place Distant

Roads And Motorized Recreation On America's Public Lands

David Havlick

Michael P. Dombeck

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Title Page

1 Introduction

2 From Bicycles to Board Feet: A History of Public Land Roads

3 The Ecological Effects of Roads

4 The Cutting Edge: Money, Politics, and Access

5 Industrial Revolutions: The Motorized Recreation Boom

6 Public Values, Public Lands

7 Changing Landscapes: Society, Technology, and Road Removal

8 The Road Ahead

Appendix: Contact Information for Selected Organizations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Island Press Board of Directors

ner said in Coda: Wilderness Letter, published in The Sound of Mountain Water (Doubleday, 1969):

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.

MIKE DOMBECK

Former chief, U.S. Forest Service, and acting director, Bureau of Land Management

Pioneer Professor of Global Environmental Management,

University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea.. . .

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

1 Introduction

In 1975, my parents took the whole family to our first big concert in Colorado. It was John Denver, live, and he was in his prime. Smoke machines pulsed during the rowdier songs, and even from our seats high in the arena we could see an occasional glint of laser light flashing off the singer’s round glasses. On our way home that night, and many times later on family trips, we broke into one of our favorite tunes from the concert: Country roads, take me home, to the place I beloooong . . . and right about there our voices cracked on the high note and we collapsed into a pile of whoops and laughter.

Like most American kids, I grew up surrounded by roads. I walked down a road to get to school, bicycled to swim practice on roads, and, nestled in my family’s car, cruised along glorious highway miles to go to the mountains, visit national parks, or vacation for the summer. Roads were part of the background, an essential feature of my daily life, and I rarely thought much about them.

Years later, I hiked with two friends through the Rocky Mountains. We walked for six months, from Mexico to Canada, into some of the wildest country remaining in the continental United States, but some of my clearest memories of the entire trip come from those times we had to cross or hike on roads. For the first time in my life, I had managed to get away from roads long enough to notice them.

More and more people are starting to notice certain kinds of roads—those found on our nation’s public lands—and a good deal of what we are discovering is troublesome. This book is about roads on public lands. These are generally not the roads we drive home on each day or the interstate highways that speed us across the country (though these deserve attention too). Public land roads tend to be modest in size, consisting of gravel or dirt or two lanes of pavement, but they are vast in number. Crisscrossing our national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and other federal lands, these public land roads cover more than half a million miles—enough to drive to the moon and back.

If you have ever visited the Great Smokies, Yellowstone, or other national parks, you have driven on public land roads. In national forests, you can scarcely miss them. The national forests, alone, are laced with enough roads to wrap around the earth more than eighteen times at the equator.

By comparison, the interstate highway system runs through most major U.S. cities and every state. At 43,000 miles it has been called the largest public works program in the history of the world, dwarfing the Panama Canal, Egypt’s pyramids, and the Great Wall of China.¹ Public land roads span nearly thirteen times the length of all the interstate highways.

This book examines the 550,000 miles of public land roads. Unlike the interstate highway system, most of these roads are not multi-lane thoroughfares and many are no longer even passable by high-clearance automobiles. To date, few people have considered the road system on public lands in any comprehensive way. Lacking this overarching view, we have put roads in many places without sound planning or a long-term vision and without considering the overall consequences or cumulative impacts.

Found most abundantly in the millions of acres of public land in the western United States, roads on our public domain vary in their characteristics and impacts but they all have one feature in common: they need to be noticed. These roads, and the surging industry of motorized recreation, now threaten to undermine many of the fundamental features that Americans have valued in their public lands for more than a century.

The Public Lands

To understand the roads, their impacts, and their possible futures, we first need to understand public lands. The lands discussed in this book are part of the U.S. public domain, owned by the citizens of the entire nation and managed purposefully by four different federal agencies. These agencies—the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Forest Service—employ more than 70,000 engineers, biologists, landscape architects, law enforcement officers, rangers, foresters, planners, and administrators to tend to the daily and long-term management of more than 600 million acres of land.²

Some of these lands are well-known, include outstanding natural features or wildlife, and attract millions of visitors each year. The national parks, in particular, have gained fame throughout the world. Many countries have created their own park systems after the U.S. model, which further contributes to the conservation and enjoyment of natural places. National parks such as Acadia, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Glacier are as varied as they are treasured. In all, there are more than 89 million acres dedicated in the national park system. These lands are to be managed for the conservation of natural scenery and wildlife, as well as for the lasting enjoyment of human visitors. And visit we do: in 2000 more than 287 million people came to at least one of the 384 units of the national park system.³ With highways intentionally linking one park to another, and scenic routes prominently constructed through their midsts, the way we visit most of these parks is on roads.

Though slightly less famous, the national forests cover more area, attract more annual visitors, and generate a steadier stream of controversy over their management than do their sibling parks. At 191 million acres, the national forests would appear plenty large—and some of them are—but they are pledged to a multiple-use agenda for management that frequently pits timber harvest against wildlife habitat, mining claims against water quality, and motorized recreation against wilderness protection. Roads flow through this mix like muddy water, providing access to hunters, for instance, even while degrading habitat needed for their prey. And with more than 345 million visitor days each year (a visitor day equals one person visiting for a 12-hour period), the national forest system in many places is struggling to keep pace with public demands.⁴

Although President Theodore Roosevelt protected the first national wildlife refuge in 1903, just a few years after the first national forest reserves were set aside and before all but a handful of national park designations, most refuges have dodged the mixed blessing of popularity felt by the national parks and national forests. The majority of the national wildlife refuge system’s 92 million acres are in Alaska, which makes them seem remote and inaccessible to many Americans. However, the refuges of the lower forty-eight states are the public lands most likely to exist within an hour’s drive from a major city.⁵ Whether for egrets or bison, alligators, elk, or humans, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages the national wildlife refuge system to preserve fish and wildlife habitat for future generations. Despite often spectacular settings and many units’ proximity to human populations, the national wildlife refuge remains the least attended of the four main public land types, with 35 million visitors each year.⁶

The final and largest chunk of public lands is managed, fittingly, by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Comprising some 236 million acres, BLM lands include large parcels of western lands that were never claimed for other private or public uses such as homesteads, railroads, national parks, state lands, Indian reservations, or military sites. Many of these lands developed a reputation primarily as range for cattle grazing. Though BLM lands in southern Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, and Montana are increasingly being discovered for their spectacular canyons, desert ecosystems, or recreational opportunities, these lands still struggle to shed their reputation as the lands that nobody wanted. More than 70 million visitors each year demonstrate that BLM lands are not, in fact, ignored, but these lands continue to receive some of the most liberal use and hardest impacts—from off-road vehicles (ORVs), cattle grazing, or mining—of any of our public lands.⁷

The BLM manages more than 80,000 miles of road on its lands, which ranks it a distant second to the Forest Service for having the greatest number of roads. At its latest count, the Forest Service recognized more than 386,000 miles of constructed road, as well as more than 60,000 miles of unplanned or illegal roads created by ORVs and other forest uses.⁸ The national wildlife refuges and national parks have relatively few roads of their own, checking in at slightly less than 10,000 miles each. In addition to the roads managed and administered by these federal agencies, another 115,000 miles of state, local, or private roads cross federal public lands. Although this book will focus on the 550,000 road miles under federal jurisdiction, many of the ecological, economic, and social impacts discussed should be applied to the entire network of nearly 700,000 miles. Table 1-1 itemizes road miles on the four types of federal land discussed in depth in this book.⁹

There are a few other categories of public land that are not much covered in this book. The Department of Energy and Department of Defense manage a number of areas for bombing ranges, missile tests, military maneuvers and training, and other purposes, but these are typically not open to the public and often have impacts other than roads or ORVs with which to contend, including undetonated explosives or radioactive wastes. The Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers also manage federal lands, primarily for flood control and hydroelectric projects, and again these fall outside the focus of this book. The total federal land base is approximately 634 million acres, including Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy lands.¹⁰

Public Land Roads

As Americans recognized public lands with special features, it rarely took long for people to clamor for access. Within five years of the first national park designation of Yellowstone in 1872 and more than two decades before the Duryea brothers built America’s first automobile, federal land managers set out to build roads that would allow people to see the geyser basins, wildlife, forests, and mountains of Yellowstone for themselves.¹¹

Table 1-1.

Road Miles on Federal Public Lands

Similarly, the national forests had scarcely reached their adolescence in the 1920s and ’30s before the proliferation of roads caused agency employees such as Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall to sound the alarm: America was losing many of its natural treasures to mechanized man.¹²

Other public lands, including many of those now managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and BLM, were roaded even before their designation as refuges or resource lands. In some cases, the road building has barely faltered since.

Roads on our public lands have been a mixed success. We have unquestionably been able to reach and utilize more raw materials from our nation’s forests, mineral reserves, grasslands, and waters thanks to roads. We now have easy motorized access to lands that once seemed unimaginably distant or difficult, from the summit of Pikes Peak to the dunes of Death Valley. As a case in point, some 300,000 motor tourists drive to the 14,110 foot crest of Pikes Peak every summer, but sedimentation and erosion problems caused by the road were recently the focus of a successful Sierra Club lawsuit.¹³ In other words, many people enjoy and make use of this road, even as others—and the courts—recognize that it generates unacceptably high impacts to the surrounding environment.

The financial ledger for roads is also cluttered with both liabilities and benefits. The wealth of our nation has often come rolling into market on public land roads. Driving the other direction, countless Americans have learned to value and appreciate natural beauty and our nation’s heritage by coming to visit and learn about public lands. Roads helped national parks, especially, become well visited and well loved. Early National Park Service director Stephen Mather falls off some lists of conservationists’ heroes for just this reason: Mather pushed for roads in many places as a way to boost the country’s support for national parks. Managers in some of these same parks are now trying to eliminate cars or remove roads to salvage the air and water quality, wildlife habitat, and natural experiences to be found there.

There is surely some merit to the idea that in order to appreciate a place it helps to know it, and the best way to know a place is to visit. Had I never been able to visit Yosemite or Rocky Mountain National Park as a boy tucked in my parents’ car, I might never have cared enough to walk away from these same roads on later family outings or as an adult. Yet there are many of us who also place tremendous value on lands that we will never see in Alaska or the Amazon or Antarctica, in part because they are so difficult to reach and have so few roads. Clearly we do not need to drive to an area to appreciate it, and for some places the fact that we cannot drive there makes it all the more precious.

Beyond the environmental effects or financial spreadsheets, the way we view roads on public lands is inextricably linked to our values as a nation and our values as citizens. In the end, our ideas about how public lands ought to be managed will dictate how we decide to treat roads and motorized access on our public domain.

Like Leopold, Marshall, or even Mather, I come to roads with a certain mix of appreciation and apprehension. I am grateful that millions of us can drive each year to visit our public lands, while I am also genuinely relieved that we cannot drive everywhere on these same lands. This book, then, is not written to convince anyone that all roads are bad; I don’t believe they are, and many roads provide a great service with relatively little harm. Rather, I contend that many roads—and especially certain types of roads—are causing problems for no particular good. By most measures, we currently have too many roads causing too many problems on our public lands.

Appropriate Access?

Roads on public lands, and elsewhere, continue to prove controversial because they represent so many things to so many people. If the benefit of a road could be isolated to one purpose covering a specific place and time, then we might be able to evaluate with relative ease its costs and the appropriate response of building it, maintaining it, or removing it. Unfortunately, roads and the equations we are left with which to evaluate them are far more complex.

For example, a single road will often cross many different environments as it connects point A with point B. The ecological impacts of the road will be different when it runs along a riverbank, cuts across a steep slope, drops down a gentle swale, or splits through a forest. Similarly, depending on the type and frequency of use, a road will vary in both its impacts and its usefulness. At different times of year, a road may be used for activities as varied as timber harvest, berry picking, hunting access, or winter recreation, or as a travel corridor by certain kinds of wildlife.

Depending upon your leanings for or against maintaining the current network of public land roads, you might point to firsthand experience (or scientific studies) to indicate that roads are good or bad for wildlife. In the 1990s, I attended a number of public hearings in Montana about roads and motorized access. There were always some people opposed to restrictions of any type. Pro-access citizens often mentioned that they had seen bear tracks, bear scat, and even live grizzlies on the very roads the agencies proposed closing. If these roads were so damaging to bears, then why were the critters using them on a regular basis?

I, too, have seen tracks, scat, and bears on roads. I have also seen roadside bears that have grown dangerously habituated to humans and cars, as well as dead bears that paid a dear price for their familiarity with roads. Grizzly bears use or avoid roads differently, depending upon the time of year, the sex of the animal, the availability of food, and the types of activities that occur in the area.¹⁴ The confounding truth is that for bears and many other animals, roads both kill and attract them. While some animals make use of roads for ease of travel, forage, or lack of competition, others cross roads simply because they have little choice. Still other animals will not cross a road even at the expense of breeding.

Different kinds of roads and road uses also create different effects. Busy roads tend to be far deadlier than little-used roads or routes closed to motorized traffic. Thousands of animals die each day from vehicle collisions on roads, while road salts and roadside carrion bring other animals near.¹⁵

As with many questions of values, Americans hold diverse views about roads. Some road and motorized recreation advocates contend that having easy motorized access to every part of the public lands is simply our right as Americans. Other folks, more inclined toward wildlife protection or human restraint, would like to see roads removed from public lands and motorized access strictly curtailed. Opinion polls as recently as 2000 showed that the majority of the American public favors increased protection for public lands that are currently roadless.¹⁶ And when we take the time to look at the ecological, economic, political, and ethical consequences of roads and motorized recreation on our public lands—as we will in this book—the ready conclusion is that a good number of our national forest and BLM roads, especially, are causing significant harm for very little good. Despite their ongoing costs, many of the roads causing adverse impacts are not even passable because of their deteriorated condition, lack of maintenance funds, or planned closures.

Although it may be tempting to cast difficult land management policies to a shoulder-shrugging middle ground of indecision, Americans have in fact established a deep tradition of managing our public lands for very specific uses. Most of us readily accept prohibitions against hunting in national parks, mining without a claim on BLM lands, or building shopping malls in national wildlife refuges.¹⁷ We make such accommodations in most aspects of our lives, where we recognize that a restriction in one circumstance is appropriate and just, while in another setting it might be unfair. In this manner, we recognize the value of free speech even as we refrain from shouting Fire! in movie theatres, or accept that if we drink too much alcohol we are not legally able to drive. These rules are not indiscriminate prohibitions against free speech or alcohol, rather they protect public interests from private lapses of judgment (or criminal intent).

Similarly, we have little cause to view road and motorized access limitations on public lands as unfair government interference or locking out the public. There are many good reasons for restricting motorized access on many public land areas. In even the most carefully managed wilderness areas, people are still allowed to visit, they simply need to leave their machines behind.

Motorized Recreation: Off-Road Vehicles

A few years ago in the mountains of southwest Montana, I came upon a crew working on a national forest trail where I had hiked regularly each summer. Unlike trail crews I had encountered in other places, I heard and smelled this group long before I saw them. When I finally reached their work site, I discovered that two of them were driving motorized all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and another was operating a bulldozer and backhoe rig. The noise and smoke of the vehicles easily obscured the sound of Red Canyon Creek and the scent of pine and fir.

The crew was busy converting the thin, rocky trail I’d hiked to a 5-foot-wide, smooth path that fit the four balloon tires of the ATVs. Even though the trail passed through a specially designated wildlife management area, including prime habitat for elk, moose, and grizzly bears, ATVs were allowed on it between July 15 and October 30, and snowmobiles had free license. This trail had been historically used by hikers, horse packers, and the occasional motorcyclist, but had been off-limits to others due to its narrowness and steepness. It was now being opened up to easy ATV and snowmobile access.

Trail widening projects such as this are not isolated events so much as they are part of a growing revolution in the way people recreate on public lands. Promoted at times by agency planners, as well as by vehicle manufacturers and users, recreation on public lands is making more and more noise in recent years. With wider trails and more powerful engines appearing every year, motorized vehicles are leading the recreation charge.

Motorized recreation and ORVs mimic the impacts of roads in too many ways to ignore in a book about roads. ORVs are now powerful and reliable enough to render nearly all backcountry, roadless lands vulnerable to the impacts of motorized access.a They include a wide array of machines designed to travel across snow, water, land, or air.

Along with increases in power and performance, ORVs have become increasingly popular. Four-wheeled ATVs are comfortable and easy to use and can carry plenty of gear for picnicking, fishing, or camping. This has allowed their sales to outpace that of motorcycles, which require more skill and have narrower appeal. Marketing campaigns by vehicle manufacturers such as Yamaha, Polaris, Kawasaki, and Arctic Cat have helped trigger the boom and have also played a role in motorized recreationists banding together to form vocal constituencies for greater motorized access.

Some slightly quieter changes in land management priorities have also supported the surge in motorized recreation. Traditional extractive industries such as logging, mining, and grazing are no longer the undisputed champions of local economies, and in many places their popular luster has grown increasingly tarnished by a legacy of clear-cuts, contaminated waters, and devastated range. A declaration of extractive industry’s demise would be premature in America at the turn of the twenty-first century—much of western politics is still dominated by livestock, mining, and timber associations—but federal land management agencies are increasingly changing to new revenue streams for their sustenance. To many, recreation of all types promises to be the cash cow of the future.

The Lay of the Land

The following seven chapters cover a range of topics that bear on the subject of roads, and to varying degrees, motorized recreation. Taken together, these topics challenge us to address the cumulative impacts of roads on our public lands, our values, and our lives. In order to place the profusion of public land roads in its historical context, Chapter 2 charts the development of roads in national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and BLM lands. The history of public land roads illustrates that the four agencies have had different incentives, or disincentives, for building roads at different stages of their development. For this reason, most road miles in national parks, for example, are paved and offer scenic views, while the majority of national forest roads are narrower dirt routes that wind through logged-over forests.

The historical overview also connects broader trends in society, such as the mass production of the automobile or the post–World War II housing boom, with the development of roads and roads policy on our public lands.

Chapter 3 offers an overview of the ecological effects of roads, generally, and public land roads more specifically. To evaluate what we ought to do about roads, we should first gain some understanding of how these roads affect us and the lands, waters, and wildlife of our nation. As mentioned above, roads built for different purposes come in different forms and places, and these differences also create a variety of ecological impacts. Roads affect their surroundings in two broad classes of impacts: those caused simply by the existence of the road, and those created by human and vehicular use of the road. Ecological effects of roads also extend beyond the land and soils to impact the flow, quality, quantity, and character of water; plant and animal life; air; and ecological processes. Most ecological effects of roads that scientists have identified are considered negative influences on biodiversity or ecosystem health, but in some cases there are also unexpected positive or ambiguous impacts from road systems.

Most roads have come to our public lands by intent rather than by chance, and Chapter 4 explores the policies, politics, and economics that have allowed this. From the first large federal road allocation in 1916, to the multibillion-dollar Transportation Equity Act for the Twenty-First Century, the United States has changed its position dramatically since James Madison declared federal road funding unconstitutional in the early 1800s.¹⁸ Changes continue to occur, as attempts to reform timber road programs have cleared some congressional and administrative hurdles. As we explore the federal programs that have helped spur road building on public lands, we must also consider our own role as citizens in this system. This chapter includes an appraisal of the costs and benefits of roads on public lands, which lends support to road removal—not continued road building—as a net economic gain.

With Chapter 5 we broach the contentious topic of motorized recreation, focusing on the two types of ORV that are most abundant on public lands: four-wheeled ATVs and snowmobiles. This examination of ORVs and their growing popularity offers a microcosmic view of many of the issues that also apply to roads: the social and political pressures that influence recreation programs, the economics of motorized recreation, and a philosophical look at their propriety on public lands. This chapter also examines the government’s program to charge recreation user fees as a way to boost agency budgets, and questions whether this comes as needed relief to cash-poor land managers or is the inappropriate commercialization of a public good.

In spite of dollar amounts or scientific studies, most decisions regarding roads and motorized recreation boil down to a matter of values. Policy makers and others may strive for balance and objectivity, but personal values and environmental ethics ultimately dictate many of the decisions we make for public lands. Controversies about roads and motorized access on public lands across the country highlight the fact that people care about these lands, how we get to them, and how we use them. Chapter 6 arrives at an appropriate policy for roads and motorized recreation on public lands, and shows how ethics, laws, and values have changed over time to guide us in this direction. Considering road policies as part of the public trust is another approach that may help us recognize the need for reform and for the development of a new set of land management ethics that we can apply to roads and motorized recreation. Many existing laws also highlight a steady shift in American attitudes toward public lands, from one of utility and resource extraction to one of public involvement and conservation.

As new access management plans spark debate from coast to coast, each month brings new reminders that the management of roads and motorized vehicles on public lands is undergoing change. Whether for swamp buggies in the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, snowmobiles in Yellowstone, or cars in the Yosemite valley, we are now questioning and changing decades-old habits. Chapter 7 looks at a number of these changing landscapes for motorized access, including how land management agencies, citizens, conservation groups, motorized users, politicians, and local communities are playing a role in the unfolding drama. New technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS), satellite imagery, and global positioning systems (GPS) have transformed our ability to monitor roads and their condition. Relatively new fields such as restoration ecology and conservation biology have also affected the way we apply science to problems caused by motorized access and roads. In this chapter we visit several sites where restoration ecologists and land managers have removed roads and are bringing degraded lands back to a healthier, less roaded condition. Many of these changes emphasize that we have the ability to dramatically alter the pattern of past road policies.

While the challenge of managing people and their competing desires for access may prove long and difficult on public lands, many remedies already exist for the ecological and economic ailments documented in this book. Roads serve essential functions in many aspects of our lives and have a place in the landscapes in which we live, as well as some of those we visit, but as with any technology roads must have limits if they are to be beneficial.

Chapter 8 continues with the idea that removing roads can be just as important to American progress as road building once was. In this final chapter, I point to signs of this progress and propose a number of actions for land managers and policy makers to adopt, for educators and students to consider, and for conservationists and citizens to promote. Working with sound information and policies, we can maintain a network of roads on our public lands that is relatively benign environmentally, that is functional and in good condition, that has acceptable costs, and that provides a variety of opportunities to access the places that remain so integral to our national heritage.

If we are able to think about public land roads as a dominant feature of many of our landscapes, then we may also find ourselves pressed to think carefully about how we manage public lands in general. For many of us, public lands and our treatment of them reflect public values. This is ultimately a book about values—those intrinsic to public lands and those we hold as Americans.

Ours is so much an age of technology and the machine that machines come to be loved for their own sake rather than used for other ends. Instead, for instance, of valuing the automobile because it may take one to a national park, the park comes to be valued because it is a place the automobile may be used to reach.

—Joseph Wood Krutch,

American Forests, April 1957

2 From Bicycles to Board Feet: A History of Public Land Roads

When the first car rolled out of the Ford Motor Company’s Detroit plant in 1903, the public lands we know today were but a twinkle in the nation’s eyes. The U.S. Forest Service was two years shy of its birth, the National Park