Friends Of Allegheny Wilderness Oppose Federal Bill Opening Wilderness Areas To Bikes

The Friends of Allegheny Wilderness issued this statement Wednesday ahead of a December 7 U.S. House Subcommittee on Federal Lands hearing on HR 1349 (McClintock-R-California) that would open up federally designated wilderness areas to mountain bikes and other wheeled transportation--

“Friends of Allegheny Wilderness is proud to be one of 133 conservation groups from across the country standing side by side with Wilderness Watch to help keep machines like mountain bikes from terrorizing the peaceful, scenic hiking trails in America’s National Wilderness Preservation System-- just as Tionesta, Pennsylvania native and [federal] Wilderness Act of 1964 author Howard Zahniser had envisioned,” said Kirk Johnson, executive director for the Warren, Pennsylvania-based non-profit organization Friends of Allegheny Wilderness.

“Designated Keystone State wilderness areas like Hickory Creek Wilderness, and prospective wilderness areas like the proposed 9,700-acre Tracy Ridge Wilderness, are going to need the full unfettered protections provided by the Wilderness Act in the years to come, for future generations,” explained Johnson. “Especially now, with so many of our federal public lands across the country under attack from Washington, D.C., it is no time to begin such an overtly hostile dismantling of the most fundamental tenets of this foresighted law that Howard Zahniser worked for so long and so hard.”

“Further, with the advent and exploding popularity of dangerous motorized mountain bikes, known as ‘e-bikes,’ — which are impossible to distinguish from traditional non-motorized mountain bikes — allowing bikes on wilderness hiking trails is tantamount to allowing motorcycles and ATVs into the wilderness,” Johnson added.

As Pennsylvania’s Howard Zahniser, the author of the federal Wilderness Act, said in 1949--

“It is not for the sake of any privileged few that we are thus working so strenuously for wilderness preservation, but rather for all Americans. We feel that the privilege of a wilderness experience is something to which every American is entitled, including those who are not yet born. There is no person that we should like to see excluded. We are indeed trying to keep out buildings, roads, airplane landing fields, mechanical vehicles…and all the things that make the wilderness not the wilderness. That often makes it look as though we are trying to keep out people because these ‘things’ would all bring people. But, as we see it, they would not bring them to the wilderness because the wilderness would no longer be there for anyone.”

Click Here for witnesses and testimony at the hearing. Click Here for the Wilderness Watch testimony.

For more information on wilderness issues, visit the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness website.  Click Here to sign up for updates from Friends (right side of page).  Click Here to support their work.

(Photo: Proposed Tracy Ridge Wilderness Area.)