Loving the West to Death

(Page 4 of 5)

THE CROWDED DESERT

I woke in the La Sals feeling divided and confused. Which is good, I think. Certainly better than feeling simple and certain. While Stegner's hopeful geography may be damaged, I still see strands of hope. And while Moab may stand as a symbol of how the West has been corrupted and commercialized, this did not stop my friend Dave from spending the past few nights alone with Baxter in the red rock desert, only an hour's drive or so from Moab, not another soul in sight, enjoying a kind of wild solitude not so different from that enjoyed by Ed Abbey or Ken Sleight half a century ago. In fact, it didn't stop me from getting up before dawn and driving down from Pack Creek to my favorite old haunt, a spot on BLM land where I used to camp surrounded by crazy H. R. Pufnstuf sandstone mushrooms. The bad news was that there is now pay camping there, but the good news was that almost no one was taking advantage of it, and I got to watch the sun rise over the rock gorgons while staring at the pronghorn antelopes that floated across the grasslands. I thought of an essay I recently read by Michael Branch, which taught me that the reason the pronghorns run so fast, much faster than any possible living predator, is that their speed evolved to outrun the long-extinct American cheetah.

Thinking of the land's immense past inevitably made me question its compromised future. My ornery impulse is to curse about the pay campsites, but sheer numbers make the old freedoms impossible. "So many cat holes were being dug that it turned the campgrounds into one big toilet," said Eric Paul, a ranger at Canyonlands National Park.

"The river corridors are being used like never before," echoed Kristen McKinnon, the owner of Wild Rivers Expeditions, in Bluff, a small town south of Moab. "But with care and effort you can take people to still-wild places. There's still a lot here. The important thing is to make our impact minimal. I like to think that people will return home more inclined to protect the places they live in. That having spent time outside in a beautiful place will trigger this."

Less optimistically, forces are now conspiring that may render efforts like
McKinnon's irrelevant. The national park lands themselves are still relatively secure, but at the center of the current debate are the public lands, the BLM lands that for many of us -- from mountain biker to rancher to ORV user -- make up the essence of what is left of wild Utah. The "management plan" put forward by the Bush administration, would open up vast tracts of the bureau's 11 million acres to mining and off-road vehicles while setting aside for preservation only a fraction of the 2.8 million acres the agency itself has identified as wilderness.

"These are not really plans at all," says Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust in Flagstaff, Arizona. "They are simply saying we are going to capitulate completely to the ORV community."

In 2007 Hedden accompanied Jon Huntsman, Utah's Republican governor, out to Canyonlands. Afterward, the governor, an ATV user himself, called the damage done by off-road vehicles that did not stick to set routes "an abomination," strong words for a politician to use about his own constituency. No one is suggesting banning these vehicles from BLM land, just restricting them to legitimate roads. But what is "legitimate"? Current laws say that drivers are allowed on any "existing roads," but this is defined loosely enough to include uranium mining paths that haven't been used for 50 years. In an effort to expand their turf, some off-road drivers actually seek out these old half-roads and, after driving up and down them a few times, photograph and GPS them to show that the roads officially "exist" and therefore can be used again and again.

"If you go out on just the absolutely legitimate roads, you could drive every day for the rest of your life," Hedden says. "But Moab invites everybody in the world to come here and go crazy for these festivals. Whole families in campers towing four ORVs. Then their kids ride out into the desert and create a zone of destruction. And the desert doesn't heal."

Once Anasazi dwellings or delicate desert soil are damaged, they stay damaged; the desert does not have the resilience of woodlands, and buildings that have stood for thousands of years can't simply be rebuilt. Of course, bike tires cause damage, too, but as Hedden points out, most mountain bikers who make long treks into the backcountry are by necessity prepared and by logic following known trails. The problem of motorized recreation is not just that it is available to all without much preparation; it's a problem of sheer scope. The wildly increased use of BLM land, and the great range of the new motorized users, has led to the destruction of thousands of acres and damage to thousands of Native American archaeological sites. Combined with the fact that there is almost no budget for enforcement -- "At the moment," says Hedden, "they have zero capacity to deal with anything" -- this paints a bleak picture. It's a geography of hopelessness. Perhaps the only answer, as Hedden sees it, is a zoning of BLM's millions of acres: some areas designated for off-roading, some for biking and hiking, and others preserved as pockets of true wilderness.

Which, of course, is the exact opposite of the intent of the new BLM plan, which provides few provisions to protect archaeological sites or riparian areas or wilderness lands.  In fact, if the plan is enacted, about 90 percent of the public land in the Moab area will be within half a mile of a potential ORV route. It should be noted that organizations like SUWA are not trying to exclude motorized use on bureau land, but simply to pare back the routes by 1,500 miles or so out of a total of 20,000 miles. Working against this effort is not just the Bush administration's determination to open it all up, but the old-school belief of most local governments that the lands are theirs to do with as they will. In other words, the cowboy myth is working to destroy the last cowboy wild lands.

Continued...