06/04© Ronald L. Moody (2004)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Gasoline Alley or Wilderness Trail –
Hunters, Roads & Public Land

An early fall day and a new hunting season has the nimrod’s blood running strong. Somewhere in Montana he drives up the Forest Service road so familiar from cherished seasons past. Around a bend he suddenly brakes the pickup. A new steel gate bearing a Forest Service sign is locked across the road he has traveled freely in past years.

The tumblers click in the hunter’s mind: “The Government is locking people off the public land.”

On another ridge-top in the same National Forest a hunter who has toiled up a hiking trail in the morning dark stalks to the edge of an aspen meadow. Where he had scouted an elk wallow only two weeks before is now hashed by the distinctive tread marks of an ATV. Even as he stands and grieves for his wild place despoiled he hears the infuriating growl of the ATV’ers coming back through the grass meadow cutting new tracks in the fragile soil as they give it the gas.

The tumblers click in the hunter’s mind: “These motorhead vandals are taking over and ruining the public land.”

Soon thereafter, two letters to the editor in the Local newspaper scream both locked-mind verdicts with emotion-drenched rhetoric. Ironically, both convict the same agency and the same management activity for completely opposite outcomes with both verdicts attributed to some fictitious government policy.

Federal agencies that manage public lands (Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Fish & Wildlife Service) are tasked with the job of managing travel on public land in the same way that a private landowner makes rules on his or her land as to what they allow visitors to do with vehicles on their land.

The agencies are required to periodically update a document known as a Travel Management Plan. This plan becomes the rulebook for where the agency will allow roads and trails, what people can do on those roads and trails and when the vehicle ways can be used.

Federal laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) dictate the process by which the agency performs the travel management task. They must solicit opinions from the public, scientifically study the probable effects on the resource of various alternatives, and they must allow the public a meaningful opportunity to comment on the proposed plan before it is put in action. None of this guarantees anybody they will get the roads they demand; it is, however, a lawful democratic process for making a responsible management decision on use of public property.

Messiest part of the whole deal is the fact that, during the decision-making project, private citizens are free to be just as selfish, narrow-minded, and destructive of the public estate as they want to be; and the agency is required to consider their opinion regardless.

The public planning process works only when enough different private citizens attend meetings, listen and become informed before using their own knowledge and reasoning powers to make sensible recommendations. Adequate participation winnows out much selfish foolishness.

It’s a truism among land management professionals that every road on every piece of public land is somebody’s indispensable access road. And tens of thousands of miles of such roads cobweb the so-called wild lands of America. Meanwhile, across the country, examples are abundant of people damaging or destroying the natural values of public lands by driving ATV’s off roads onto fragile terrains. Agencies have a duty to stop this destruction.

On the other hand, the reality of modern life is that, to some degree, a motor vehicle is a necessary tool of gaining access to public lands for everybody – both for the hunter and angler and for everybody else. The challenge in every travel management decision is to find the balance of access necessary for legitimate use by people without degrading the resource with unnecessary roads and off-road abuse.

When uninformed hysteria and name-calling gets started in an agency public process, hunters will be found on all sides and at every extreme of the caterwauling. Some hunters want a quiet, natural, wilderness experience and they think they should be able to find it in the vastness of our public forests and plains. They point out that much of the big game hunted in roaded areas of public land is there only because of nearby roadless areas. Louder every year is the voice of non-hunters who want to recreate on the public lands during autumn without finding two-track trails everywhere and a hunter vehicle on every two-track. These folks vote too!

Many hunters feel threatened by these viewpoints. They calculate that creating new roadless areas means shrinking the places they can hunt on public land because their life style gives them only brief time periods for hunting trips.

At the other extreme are nimrods who see the hunt as an excuse for the thrill of the gas-powered joyride. And, unless enough sensible people participate to seek a balanced policy, the extremes dominate the debate.

Our American hunting ethic and the expectations of our society impose an extra burden of care on the hunter than is placed on other public land users. We are morally bound to repay the privilege of our hunt by conserving and preserving the wild animals and wild lands we enjoy. Shirking this duty will inevitably lead to extinction of the hunt in American life.

So! What values should the hunter bring to the public discussion of travel management on public lands? What rules should we demand of our land management employees? What policies should we assert to our fellow citizens who want to pop wheelies in our elk meadow? Or to the wilderness buff who wants motor vehicle roads to simply disappear from public land?

Management plans for public lands are constructed one-at-a-time to fit one-of-a-kind situations. No central list of hunter values will fit all situations. I have accumulated an incomplete list of generic concepts that guide me in trying to get the vehicle access I need to hunt on public land while avoiding harm to the resource and leaving space for wildness. I pass them on to help other hunters develop their own list. Here goes —

1. First, the hunter must be clear about his or her overall goal where motor vehicles and wild lands are concerned. The hunter’s objective is to be able to access the public land and enjoy the benefits of the land while causing the absolute minimum of physical or biological harm to the land or its ecosystems.
2. Access to the boundary of public land is the first and most legitimate need of all people who use the public land. The public land management agency should provide a ‘reasonable’ amount of motor vehicle access to the boundary of the public land area for use by the general public even if this means condemning right-of-way across private land. ‘Reasonable’ in this case means a balance of interests that may require the public to drive further because of resource protection needs; but does not require the public to drive so far, or walk so far, that a large part of the public is substantially denied use of the land.
3. After the hunter crosses the public land boundary, the number and size of roads he or she requires for hunting purposes within the public lands should be the absolute minimum necessary to provide a starting point for a vigorous, physical hunting endeavor.
4. For hunting on the roaded portions of public land, public agencies should center their travel management plan on two well-defined classes of hunters.
   - The urban (non-local) hunter with limited recreation time available who must drive to the public land in their motor vehicle in order to hunt on foot after parking their vehicle.
   - A reasonable amount of hunting opportunity for physically disabled hunters using established roads and trails. The wild, natural character of the public land should not be reduced solely in order to accommodate disabled persons.
5. Hunters should insist that agencies employ a specific legal definition of what constitutes a road or trail. For slippery political reasons bureaucrats sometimes don’t like to be pinned down on this point.
6. No new roads should be constructed in a public land area that has survived to the present as a ‘Roadless Area’. All wilderness areas and wilderness study areas (WSA’s) should continue as such.
7. State and County owned public roads with documented physical maintenance and historic use should remain open. This concept should not be construed to intrude new roads into roadless areas by manipulation of the RS 2477 rule.
8. No motor vehicles of any kind should be allowed off designated open roads.
9. The best method for planning a road system on public land so that important roads are preserved and unnecessary roads are eliminated is to follow a “closed until designated open” procedure. Public agencies, however, must employ and communicate an accessible process for individual citizens to participate in deciding which roads are opened and which closed.
10. After the road system is approved, a regulation should be enforced that roads are closed unless “signed” open.
11. All-Terrain vehicles (ATV’s) should be required to display legible identification plates. No special trails should be allowed for ATV’s except in strictly designated special-use areas with defined boundaries.
12. Effective law enforcement is absolutely necessary. An agency that shows inadequate budget for enforcement is deceiving the public and actually planning for degraded resources and user conflicts. When this happens it is usually the fault of your Congressional delegation.
13. ROAD DENSITY – As an arbitrary starting point for discussing road density on public lands I suggest the following: In typical roaded areas of western National Forests and BLM lands, the needs of hunters usually can be served with an average motor vehicle road density of 3-miles to 5-miles between roads. Ninety percent of roaded public lands should be within three miles of a motor vehicle road. Be aware that this density usually means closing a lot of established two-track ‘resource roads.’ With five miles between roads in most rugged western landscapes people can obtain both practical access and wild solitude within the same management scheme.
14. Hunters are under no obligation to tolerate or support vehicular abuse of the public lands by other user groups such as grazing permittees or dirt-bike enthusiasts. Hunters are required to respect other legitimate uses and non-uses.

I use this list as my starting point in travel management debates. Making this list has helped me keep my balance as a citizen hunter. The important thing for hunters, however, is to show up at travel management hearings, study the alternatives, and listen carefully to the explanations of the agency staff and other citizens before shouting one’s absolute truth.

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com

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