Online Exclusive: MTBs In National Parks?
Since the 1980s, mountain bikers have long battled for better access to National Parks. Now, thanks to a new regulation being considered by the National Parks Service, mountain bikers might finally be allowed to roll knobbies onto some of the most sacrosanct trail systems in the nation.
The impetus for the change is the decline in the number of visitors to national parks, which has the Department of the Interior considering new ways to drum up usership. The hope is that by allowing mountain biking, national parks can begin to court younger park visitors, whose numbers have dropped off in recent years. So why didn't anyone think of this before?
Some did. A few national parks already allow riding—about 40 out of the nation's 380 total parks. The reason that number is so low isn't an issue of local management, but of high-level bureaucratic roadblocks. Even if a given park superintendent knows he can gain visitors to his park by allowing mountain biking, the process required to get the new use approved is so difficult and lengthy that most superintendents don't even bother.
“Right now, a park needs something called a special regulation to allow mountain biking,” says IMBA Communications Director Mark Eller. Special regulations for mountain biking require the same process as other, much more damaging activities, such as commercial fishing. To minimize these kinds of things, the Department of the Interior makes special regulations difficult to get; as Eller explains, the process requires sending an application to Washington DC, getting signatures, more work, and then resubmission for another set of signatures.
A proposed change in the special regulation process would allow park superintendents to manage bike trails on their own accord, without such a lengthy approval process. Environmental review of the impacts would still be required in order to protect the land, but for the most part, the individuals running each park would be free to allow as much mountain biking as they see fit. Eller is unsure of how many of the 380 parks would be eligible for fat tire riding, as many of those parks are memorial areas or beach fronts, but estimates the number of new riding territories would be significant.
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