habitats

Single-Track Trail Mix

Gordy Slack

A bare-breasted amazon, gauze streaming from her waist Isadora Duncan-style, stands above a crowd of huddled masses that extends to the horizon, which is just barely penetrated by a tiny Eiffel Tower far in the distance. Over her head the goddess holds an object that will free the awed crowd from the dreary gravity of their joyless lives; it will let them fly efficiently through their days, which will be full of grace and free of horse manure. Of course, the object she holds is a bicycle.

The 1898 image was one of a score of utopian "the bicycle will save the world" posters in a recent exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. Another poster from the time shows the bike as an instrument of nature, with bird wings attached. The posters seem queerly naive today, maybe because the gauzy amazon is so at odds with the Road Warrior and gearhead fashions that now dominate cycling. But also because in the past decade and a half, the bike's righteous environmental reputation has been muddied.

Heated conflicts between mountain bikers and hikers have spread just about everywhere off-road biking has gone. Parks are threatening to close trails to bikes in Minnesota, Washington state, at the Grand Canyon, in Denver, Des Moines, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Even in Las Vegas. And a major struggle continues over trail space on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, the incubator and hatchery of mountain biking three decades ago and the place where it became a near religion in the 1980s. Over the past few years, land managers there have banned mountain bikes from a majority of the narrow, single-track trails. In the 1996 precedent-setting case that is the mountain bikers' Alamo, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in Marin County vs. Babbitt, upheld the National Park Service's right to prohibit bike access to many cherished trails.

As an avid and utopian cyclist and a dedicated environmentalist myself, these battles are like a feud in my family. I feel like Rodney King: Can't we all just get along? Well, apparently not.

Michael Vandeman, chairman of the Wildlife Committee of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, devotes a huge part of his waking life (and a substantial part of his dream life, too, I suspect) to combating bike access to parks and forests throughout the Bay Area. "The costs of mountain biking are enormous," he says. "It is dangerous to participants and non-participants, and it ruins the experience of nature for all the non-bikers.... You don't go to a park to be around a bunch of machinery." But most importantly, he says, "it's harmful to wildlife. Animals are run over, scared away by the noise bikes make, and are generally harassed."

"Yes, mountain bikers cause environmental damage," says Eric Muhler, president of the Bicycle Trails Council of the East Bay (BTCEB), an advocacy group representing mountain bikers, "but so do hikers and horses. The question is, what's an acceptable amount of damage, and how do you balance inevitable damage against the value of access?" Muhler points to the New Zealand Department of Conservation-sponsored Cessford study-one of the few scientific studies of the effects of mountain biking on trails-which found that mountain bikes cause damage that is different than, but not necessarily worse than, damage caused by hikers. The study makes the point, perhaps too radical in its ramifications to consider seriously, that building the trails in the first place does most of the serious damage.

Muhler says that most cyclists love the parks they ride in and will work to protect them. Also, the sport draws into the parks people who would not otherwise be there at all. Bicycling on trails may bother some, says Muhler, but it is the way a huge and growing set of people experience nature.

"Getting rid of bikes on trails is not discriminatory," Vandeman counters, "unless it's discriminating against a machine. Banning bikes isn't banning bikers," he says. "It's making access equal for everyone.

"But the worst thing about mountain bikes is that they bring more people into wild places," he says. "I've never been convinced that bringing people to nature makes them want to preserve it. For a lot of people, being in wild places just gives them a greater appetite for recreation, not for preserving wildlife."

Vandeman, who is considered Public Enemy Number One among mountain bikers and who has received threats and hate mail for his relentless activism, insists on calling mountain bikes "off-road vehicles." He believes they should be kept out of parks altogether. Although Vandeman is the most outspoken and extreme of the anti-mountain bikers, he has many sympathetic compatriots, among them older hikers and equestrians who remember a time when they had the trails to themselves.

IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, THE mountain biker versus hiker controversy has come to a boil in Joaquin Miller Park, a 425-acre city park that has allowed bikes on nearly all of its narrow trails. Cyclists have been riding here for a long time, but as other trails around the Bay Area close to them and as the park's reputation as a friendly and beautiful place to ride spreads, cyclists' numbers have taken off.

At the turn of the century, the poet Joaquin Miller lived on this land high in the Oakland Hills overlooking the entire bay and city of San Francisco. By the time Miller arrived, the great old-growth redwood forests here had already been logged. Miller is said to have replanted these then bare hillsides with 75,000 trees, including those that have become the tall, century-old coast redwoods that form the heart of the park today. They are the oldest second-growth redwoods in California, and they represent a rare second chance for the beleaguered habitat type in the East Bay. The redwood grove is also at the heart of the current controversy. It is this high plateau grove, which breaks in steep slopes on its western side, that has become a favorite area for mountain bikers, some of whom leave the trails to jump and fly over the edges, ride down natural drainage paths, and forge trails where none were planned.

Joaquin Miller Park's management is trying to enforce its rules, but it is also being careful not to alienate the cyclists. Bikers represent a large and growing portion of the park's users, and the 360-member BTCEB contributed about 2,000 volunteer hours last year: building and repairing trails, fixing drainage problems, and staffing an all-volunteer bicycle patrol squad that rides the trails attempting to educate other cyclists and keep them within the law.

"The bike group is having a positive influence," says Martin Mataresse, Joaquin Miller's superintendent. "On the other hand, there's not a lot of volunteer work by the hikers, just a lot of complaints." He adds that there is "no evidence that cycling has been detrimental to the trees."

What about any rare or endangered plants or animals in the park, I ask? "There's no baseline data for what kinds of plants and animals live in the park. We'd really have to study that further to know," he says. Good idea.

Alec Karp, who has been hiking in Joaquin Miller for more than a decade, got fed up with what he says was Mataresse's lack of concern. For one thing, Karp had seen the California Native Plant Society's list of dozens of rare and endangered plants in the park. For another, Karp could see for himself the bicycle-caused erosion, run-over plants, and exposed redwood roots. "It was obvious to us that bikes were harming the park," he says.

So Karp and a group of other hikers invited an expert at redwood forest management to come take a look. Mia Monroe, the site supervisor at Muir Woods National Monument, famous for its own redwood forest, was appalled by what she found at Joaquin Miller. In a letter to the Oakland City Council she decried the park's resource management problems: "Active destruction of redwoods by allowing them to be recreational hotspots (bicycle use around the upper side of redwoods on slopes), trail placement that is exposing root systems and destabilizing the banks, creation of gullies where there is not a current drainage pattern.... Extensive illegal bicycle trails that were in very steep, erosion-prone areas as well as in drainages.... Loss of redwood forest ecosystem elements such as healthy soil, diverse ground covers, protected and vegetated stream systems, invasion of weedy species," and on and on. She urged the council to "consider closing the already seriously damaged areas in the significant redwood areas for the season...and immediately implement temporary erosion control measures."

Fearing loss of some of their most cherished remaining single-track trails, cyclists responded to the threat of closing Joaquin Miller with military ferocity: "We will have to go to a def-con three strategy involving TV, civil disobedience, arrests, and a bunch of ugly stuff that should be totally unnecessary," wrote Muhler on a computer listserve for mountain bikers. In February, the park management struck a compromise by imposing a rainy-season biking moratorium on two of the main trails in the area in order to study the issue further.

Before we see a nuclear conflict between two groups that should be righteous allies, let's replace some of that emotion with data. Clearly, the natural resource values of parks must come first. Without them intact, who'd want to go there by bike or by foot? Or by wing or seedpod for that matter? Where bikes are safe and ecologically suitable, their riders need to sit down with hikers, equestrians, and other park users and try to figure out a way to minimize their impact on these more traditional users. And where bikes--or hikers, or horses--aren't compatible with ecological integrity, lock us out.

Gordy Slack is senior editor of California Wild.