I live in Durango, Colorado. The Alpine Loop is essentially in my backyard. And the transformation of that corridor over the past two decades is not subtle. What used to be a quiet, remote experience in the San Juans has become, on a busy summer weekend, something closer to a motorized carnival. The noise alone travels for miles. The dust lingers. The erosion compounds year after year. The wildlife moves out.
My personal ethical framework is fairly simple: if what I am doing is causing harm to someone else, it is morally wrong. That applies whether we are talking about interpersonal behavior or how we use shared public land. OHVs, particularly the newer side-by-sides, do not exist in a vacuum. Their use imposes real costs on everyone else who uses that land, including hikers, backpackers, wildlife watchers, and photographers. It also imposes costs on the land itself, which is not owned by any single user group but held in trust for all of us.
The argument that OHV users have a right to access public land is valid. So do I. The problem is that their form of access degrades mine and everyone else's. That asymmetry matters. A hiker does not ruin an OHV rider's experience. The reverse is not true.
Nixon's original executive order on off-road vehicles was not some radical environmentalist document. It was a common-sense framework built around a simple idea: manage competing uses so that no single use destroys the experience for everyone else. Revoking it does not expand freedom in any meaningful sense. It tips the scales in one direction by removing the guardrails that allowed land managers to protect places before they are already damaged.
The framing that this is about "access" is worth pushing back on. Foot travel, horseback, mountain bikes in designated areas, and non-motorized use of all kinds represent access too. What OHV advocates are really arguing for is prioritized access, the kind that physically and acoustically displaces every other form of recreation and does lasting damage to the terrain itself. That is a very different claim, and it deserves to be named as such.
I am not opposed to OHV use in areas specifically designed and designated for it. That is a reasonable accommodation. But treating it as a default right that must be accommodated everywhere on federal land, at the expense of quiet, ecological integrity, and every other user, is not a principled position. I can't wait for this clown to go.
The OHV advocates and allies and fellow travelers often talk about historical, traditional, constitutional rights and privileges. As if 1776 was all Freedumb above all else. But even way back, plenty of laws and regs and lawsuits addressed what they often called "nuisances." Google AI notes "Typical complaints involved noxious odors, smoke, or vibrations." Sure resembles a side-by-side to me.
I recall decades ago when the OHV coalition started to come on strong and made their presence and desires known. It rattled and worried me a little bit, but I couldn't imagine it ever really going anywhere and becoming a big deal. I misjudged my fellow Americans and their laziness and boy was I wrong. And while I appreciate and even admire Matt’s calm, unifying, and reasoned approach... what if Americans were just a little bit less lazy? I haven't traveled. I don't know what the rest of the world looks like or how the rest of the world treats these ATV type of vehicles or if they even exist anywhere else as recreation vehicles. But my guess is it's an American phenomenon and I think it says an awful lot about who we are. When I was rangering for the BLM, I did an awful lot of my patrolling by bicycle and other human-powered means. In my later years I was in my 60’s. It wasn't too uncommon for somebody in an ATV to come up alongside me and express that they wished that they could do that. Of course I would think to myself - but wisely not say - that if you got your fat ass off of your ATV and put it on a bicycle, you WOULD be able to do this. It’s not rocket science. My least favorite thing to see was parents who had supplied their little kid with a mini dirt bike or their own ATV. Yup...raise your kids to be a new generation of lazy fat asses. What a great idea.
Sorry for being rude and kinda ranting. But holy cow...frustrating!
Petromasculinity. Hate to use that cute word but it's true. Trump and the oil companies have made merika great by promoting the manliness of fossil fuels. I see it every day as people, mostly men drive their OHV's to the desert that is Tonto National forest and create more trails. The forest service has allotted a giant swath of desert to the powerful OHV lobby and leaves little land for anything else. I see it every day as much of the housing around me has been sold to people with OHV's and giant pickup trucks. The ads on my weather channel sight constantly hammer home the need to own one of these vehicles. And the forest service and other fed agencies are pretty much run by men that either agree to this land usage or are afraid to disagree. The desert will not recover in our lifetimes because men have nothing better to do than drive their nasty vehicles on it.
Until the OHVs started getting souped up, culminating in the Razor, it seemed like a bit of a long-term truce between quiet and noisy backcountry recreation around here. Now any area where they congregate is a sacrifice zone. Marble and the Lead King Loop being in my local area.
Interesting about the helium plant in the middle of Dolores Canyon Solar. I had thought that thing was one of the CO2 compressor stations. I guess that was the case for the proposed solar SW of there in Montezuma County. The powerlines and substations already at these things make for a inexpensive connection for solar w/o the need for some new tall "gen-tie" line. Looks like the vegetation is taking nicely under the solar. Despite the exclusion of big mammals, with the right reseeding, biodiversity sometimes goes up under solar when perennials replace row crops and annual plowing and the critters return after a few years, and the raptors then find them.
Few ever hear of it, but there is nifty group called Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute. I just watched a webinar with a biologist who had tracked desert foxes in and around some Mojave solar projects, and another who had followed box turtles in and out of a solar farms in Arkansas. https://rewi.org/webinars/wildlife-solar-movement/
I live in Durango, Colorado. The Alpine Loop is essentially in my backyard. And the transformation of that corridor over the past two decades is not subtle. What used to be a quiet, remote experience in the San Juans has become, on a busy summer weekend, something closer to a motorized carnival. The noise alone travels for miles. The dust lingers. The erosion compounds year after year. The wildlife moves out.
My personal ethical framework is fairly simple: if what I am doing is causing harm to someone else, it is morally wrong. That applies whether we are talking about interpersonal behavior or how we use shared public land. OHVs, particularly the newer side-by-sides, do not exist in a vacuum. Their use imposes real costs on everyone else who uses that land, including hikers, backpackers, wildlife watchers, and photographers. It also imposes costs on the land itself, which is not owned by any single user group but held in trust for all of us.
The argument that OHV users have a right to access public land is valid. So do I. The problem is that their form of access degrades mine and everyone else's. That asymmetry matters. A hiker does not ruin an OHV rider's experience. The reverse is not true.
Nixon's original executive order on off-road vehicles was not some radical environmentalist document. It was a common-sense framework built around a simple idea: manage competing uses so that no single use destroys the experience for everyone else. Revoking it does not expand freedom in any meaningful sense. It tips the scales in one direction by removing the guardrails that allowed land managers to protect places before they are already damaged.
The framing that this is about "access" is worth pushing back on. Foot travel, horseback, mountain bikes in designated areas, and non-motorized use of all kinds represent access too. What OHV advocates are really arguing for is prioritized access, the kind that physically and acoustically displaces every other form of recreation and does lasting damage to the terrain itself. That is a very different claim, and it deserves to be named as such.
I am not opposed to OHV use in areas specifically designed and designated for it. That is a reasonable accommodation. But treating it as a default right that must be accommodated everywhere on federal land, at the expense of quiet, ecological integrity, and every other user, is not a principled position. I can't wait for this clown to go.
Well put!
Couldn't have said it better!
The OHV advocates and allies and fellow travelers often talk about historical, traditional, constitutional rights and privileges. As if 1776 was all Freedumb above all else. But even way back, plenty of laws and regs and lawsuits addressed what they often called "nuisances." Google AI notes "Typical complaints involved noxious odors, smoke, or vibrations." Sure resembles a side-by-side to me.
I recall decades ago when the OHV coalition started to come on strong and made their presence and desires known. It rattled and worried me a little bit, but I couldn't imagine it ever really going anywhere and becoming a big deal. I misjudged my fellow Americans and their laziness and boy was I wrong. And while I appreciate and even admire Matt’s calm, unifying, and reasoned approach... what if Americans were just a little bit less lazy? I haven't traveled. I don't know what the rest of the world looks like or how the rest of the world treats these ATV type of vehicles or if they even exist anywhere else as recreation vehicles. But my guess is it's an American phenomenon and I think it says an awful lot about who we are. When I was rangering for the BLM, I did an awful lot of my patrolling by bicycle and other human-powered means. In my later years I was in my 60’s. It wasn't too uncommon for somebody in an ATV to come up alongside me and express that they wished that they could do that. Of course I would think to myself - but wisely not say - that if you got your fat ass off of your ATV and put it on a bicycle, you WOULD be able to do this. It’s not rocket science. My least favorite thing to see was parents who had supplied their little kid with a mini dirt bike or their own ATV. Yup...raise your kids to be a new generation of lazy fat asses. What a great idea.
Sorry for being rude and kinda ranting. But holy cow...frustrating!
That was very well stated Matt! I couldn’t agree with you more.
Thanks for a very informative post. The battle to preserve wild, Western lands never stops!
Petromasculinity. Hate to use that cute word but it's true. Trump and the oil companies have made merika great by promoting the manliness of fossil fuels. I see it every day as people, mostly men drive their OHV's to the desert that is Tonto National forest and create more trails. The forest service has allotted a giant swath of desert to the powerful OHV lobby and leaves little land for anything else. I see it every day as much of the housing around me has been sold to people with OHV's and giant pickup trucks. The ads on my weather channel sight constantly hammer home the need to own one of these vehicles. And the forest service and other fed agencies are pretty much run by men that either agree to this land usage or are afraid to disagree. The desert will not recover in our lifetimes because men have nothing better to do than drive their nasty vehicles on it.
Until the OHVs started getting souped up, culminating in the Razor, it seemed like a bit of a long-term truce between quiet and noisy backcountry recreation around here. Now any area where they congregate is a sacrifice zone. Marble and the Lead King Loop being in my local area.
Interesting about the helium plant in the middle of Dolores Canyon Solar. I had thought that thing was one of the CO2 compressor stations. I guess that was the case for the proposed solar SW of there in Montezuma County. The powerlines and substations already at these things make for a inexpensive connection for solar w/o the need for some new tall "gen-tie" line. Looks like the vegetation is taking nicely under the solar. Despite the exclusion of big mammals, with the right reseeding, biodiversity sometimes goes up under solar when perennials replace row crops and annual plowing and the critters return after a few years, and the raptors then find them.
Few ever hear of it, but there is nifty group called Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute. I just watched a webinar with a biologist who had tracked desert foxes in and around some Mojave solar projects, and another who had followed box turtles in and out of a solar farms in Arkansas. https://rewi.org/webinars/wildlife-solar-movement/
trump is a destructive and useless ahole, as is everyone even remotely associated with Interior