It hurts to see that.
it is a huge waste of the ability to walk upright under one's own power.
Wheelchair friendly hiking
Out here the issue is that a large portion of the fed lands are already under Wilderness Designation. And any new designations are bound to impact existing trail. And there are some *epic* singletrack trails locked up in the areas out here. I would love to see STC's idea of local-ish control of individual areas without the blanket ban.
I personally think that the way the National Parks do it today is how it should be patterned for Wilderness Areas. National Parks can allow bicycles on trails - and they do. RMNP is about to open a section of trail on the west side of the park to cycling. Mammoth Caves NP has a network of trails open to bikes. I'm sure that there are others.
Let's not forget cattle grazing.
Backpacking in the Tetons felt like I was really far away from mankind. It was cool and a little sad to be able to look up and see swarms of satellites zooming around.
Yeah - it really doesn't take much effort (well, relatively speaking) to get "out there" in the West. Despite the doom-and-gloom that the general population eats up, there is a SHITLOAD of uninhabited, rugged land out here.
But there are some really special places that if they allowed easier access too, it wouldn't be so special. That Teton Trip was all in the back-country, but there was this one lake easily accessed by a spur trail. Never saw a soul on that trip except for that lake. It was packed with people. That whole loop I hiked could be ridden in a day, I could only imagine the amount of people who would be riding that trail.
Out where? If it's in the Sierras, there are only fairly small isolated patches that are wilderness. Although this tends to be the highest high country, it's not all of it and there are corridors through the high country where trails could be built. With this in mind, connecting the 49, 80, 50, 88 corridors and other similar projects around California would be FAR more valuable than trying to get into the wilderness to ride the PCT and associated trails, many of which aren't suitable for riding anyway. There's a huge amount of mountain-land that isn't wilderness that could be used effectively, kind of like how they've done in Arizona, connecting several places in the state with the Arizona Trail, the Black Canyon trail running from near Prescott and Camp Verde all the way down to Phoenix and a few other similar routes. Colorado trail is another example. I find CA to be rather lacking in this regard, at least from my time growing up there, and in the bigger picture I would think that IMBAs time and energy would be better spent on projects like this across the country, rather than trying to get into the wilderness areas.
This x 100. No one is asking bikes to be automatically allowed on all trails in all wilderness areas, but the current blanket non-negotiable ban just plain sucks.
Thanks for a good argument why your logic is flawed. There are shitloads of great hiking trails out there, and much lower mileage of epic singletrack in the great outdoors. If I am given the choice of a total, unavoidable loss of access for MTBs in my beloved riding area, or a (relatively low) risk that some of the area *might* be open to logging and mining, why would I choose the Wilderness route? Eliminate the 100% ban, give the power to local authorities to open/close access to trails that is based on practical consideration, show me that this is not just an trick, and I'll support the expansion of Wilderness to new areas like the biggest Sierra club bigot.
