An Open Letter To The BLM

Editors Note Before I ever heard of the San Rafael Swell... Hell, before I even started riding dirtbikes... Victor Johnson was out in Utah, riding, mapping, and enjoying these vast public lands. He has remained amazingly committed in the face of continued frustration with the BLM.

He has at great personal expense and time, mapped and published maps of existing trails and roads throughout the San Rafael Swell, and submitted this data to the BLM countless times - only to find employees of the BLM, both excited by this "new" data, and totally ignorant of the existence of this data from prior submissions. There is no explanation as to where his data was filed - apparently it has been absorbed by a quantum singularity within the confines of this federal bureaucracy. Despite the known situation with under-resourced staff at the BLM to acquire data, to this date, none of Victor's vast data has apparently been used in consideration of this travel plan.

Let it suffice that this letter to the Price Utah office is atypical of both Victor, and public commentaries concerning OHV use in general. It is not... politically correct... and should not be considered a model on which to base pro OHV comments.

Bureau of Land Management Price Field Office 125 South, 600 West Price, Utah 84501

Well, here I am doing something I told myself that I would not do again, submitting comments and data on a proposed travel plan like I have done time and time before. I haven't seen one iota of evidence that these previous flagellations have had any positive effect and I don't expect that this time will be much different. I guess its one of those masochistic things that just feels so good when you stop doing it .

I've been dirt bike riding the Swell for years and, unlike those vicarious armchair adventurers prompted by the million-dollar SUWA money machine to send in comments from the same left and right coast states hosting those carpetbagger politicians cosponsoring their Redrocks Wilderness bill, I personally know something about the place. Moreover, I have been trying to get your office to get with the program for just about all those years and getting zilch for it. When I found out that the original existing route inventory was conducted by riding around in a 4x4 truck and occasionally sticking a wet finger to the wind, I decided to personally do something about it. I bought a handheld GPS, found fledgling software that would superimpose the recorded data onto digitized maps and spent hundreds of dollars buying USGS DRG maps on CD. I recorded the single-track routes I rode, obtained hand-drawn maps from pioneers like Dick Brass and mapped out the whole works, North, South, East and West. It took me a summer to collect the data and a winter to make the maps and I sent them in to your office along with my comments on the 1997 Travel Plan Proposal.

Did it do any good? Sure didn't seem to. Only God and Gnojeck know what happened to all the stuff I sent in. I've spoken with both field and office personnel that have marveled at the detail of my maps only to give me a dumbfounded look when I tell them that I've sent the same maps to the head office more than once and they should have already seen them. You'll have to ask Tom where he buried them because I can't tell you. Given this experience, your claims of wanting and using citizen-supplied data have a credibility problem with me (unless it comes from the UWC/SUWA crowd - then you plaster it all over your documents!). So, here are the maps again along with copies of the historical hand-drawn maps to help out with the historical perspective. Check 'em out and knock yourselves out seeing if you can find "existing" routes like the Pastures Road, a mechanically created route bulldozed through the dirt and rock from Hidden Splendor to Tomsich Butte that appears to have eluded you for these last twenty-five years or so .

So much for the past, let's get down to business on the present and I'm giving it to you with both barrels. Here we have the San Rafael Route Designation Plan published January 31, 2002 that had its genesis in the Final Resource Management Plan published in May of 1991. Eleven years in the making. Wow. Being a software engineer in the computer industry where paradigms change in a short six months, it absolutely boggles my mind that you can take over a decade to complete a work and still collect a paycheck. Simply astounding!

Adding insult to injury, not only is this an example of glacial progress and near negligible productivity in the interim, the quality of the work is poor and riddled with embedded and systematic bias against OHVs. The San Rafael Swell is a land that has been sculpted by geologic time and forces with magnitudes that are difficult to grasp even in this age of nuclear bombs and Daisy-Cutters explosives. When the washes fill with rain and snow runoff, the water exerts tons of pressure per square foot per second and rearranges everything below the high water mark. However, these same wash bottoms need "protection" from the presumed ravages of passage by my 260 lb. dirt bike. Rain, snow, wind and ice have created canyons in the rock, cliff faces soaring hundreds of feet and slopes of shale rubble and clay but they all need to be "preserved" from the tracks and marks made by 4 inch wide 17 psi knobby tires. These millennia of entropy are celebrated and admired but a simple trail made by a tire is eschewed because, gasp!, there may be some erosion occurring there. Ludicrous.

Indigenous fauna that have evolved to be fleet footed plains animals whose young can run with the herd to evade predators in mere minutes after being birthed are employed as a feeble pretext for prior restraint and wholesale area closures by speculation that they could be "run over by OHVs." Non-native introduced species (but don't bring in non-native seeds!) that appear to be thriving despite the claimed onslaught of mechanized invasion serve as a justification for route closures based on a singular biologist opinion. Here in Colorado, we have a herd of Bighorn sheep that feed on the grass growing on the shoulder of I-70 as the semis and cars swoosh by not more than 20 ft. away. No concern at all, however, is expressed by the effects of lingering biped presence that more closely fits an animal's predator profile and shown to be disruptive. Those same sheep take flight when some tourist pulls over and creates a traffic hazard trying to take a picture. Hell, some folks even get to chase them down, shoot and kill them, but heaven forbid you might spook one with a dirt bike!

Then there are the good and bad trails. Horses make trails, cows make trails and hikers make trails and these are not a problem. An OHV makes a trail and this is a problem? Cows smash down stream banks and defecate all over riparian areas, kayakers abrade stream banks dragging their boats in and out of the water and dynamite rocks in the wash channel and this is not a problem. A dirt bike rearranges a bit of sand bank below the high water line and causes "localized siltation" (pretty damn hard to tell, its named the Muddy for a reason) and this is a problem?

Of all the public recreationists and users of the Swell who you fine public servants serve, the OHV community is singled out for specialized scrutiny and micro-management on lands that may posses some ephemeral wilderness quality as defined by a non-government special interest group that seemingly can find wilderness quality in anything not paved. That monitoring microscope has attached a continuous implied threat of closure if in the monitor's eye things aren't the way they like it. Those folks that hang out in the Swell being paid to take pictures of every track and boot print that strays a few inches off the trails are really going to go into overtime mode on this one .

Then, there is the whole "conflict" aspect. Here's a telling passage from the Sierra Club's manual on how to shut down motorized trails:

The CFRs give citizens the right to "monitor" and their input can and will "indicate that considerable adverse effects are occurring." Remember, one adverse effect is "user conflict." We are advising a wonderful, legal tactic. Next time you're on a hike and a dirt bike roars by, get 40 friends to all call or write to the Forest Supervisor and say, "We demand immediate closure of the trail to dirt bikes because user conflicts indicate that considerable adverse effects are occurring." The effect is to publicize the "user conflict" aspect of ORMV use on public lands, which the regulations stipulate shall trigger action from the managing agency.

Isn't that peachy! So some SUWA hiker gets their knickers in a twist because I rode by them on the Behind The Reef trail while they commute from one slot canyon to the next, they are allowed yell "Conflict! Conflict! I' m suffering conflict here!" with the remedy demanded being closure of the route to motorized traffic. What about the converse? When I'm enjoying the scenery of the opening of Chute Canyon and come upon some snotty hiker with one finger in their ear and the other in the air giving me the universal single digit salute, is that "conflict?" May I make a claim that my enjoyment of the day was cut short by some bigot I happened to meet on the trail? Is there ever a remedy that will keep the trail open to riders but close it to pedestrians? How the hell do I compete with that?

Throughout the plan, it is stated that all recreation activities in the Swell are increasing, particularly OHV use. What is the proscription to deal with this increase and the attendant impact? Reducing route mileage by some 40% in the proposed alternative! This is a novel way to deal with increasing demand, particularly when it is stated right in the plan itself that part of that increase in demand is from the recreating public that have had other areas closed to them. Now, more and more riders are being funneled into fewer and fewer trails while the BLM and SUWA are looking over our shoulder with more intense scrutiny than ever before. How will future increase in demand be dealt with given this precedent? You ever wonder why you don't find grass in a corral? In the vernacular of my children, "Duh!"

Further, the trails that already exist are classified as "unauthorized," "illegal cross-country use," "user created and maintained trails" and the like. Well, for crying out loud, how else are they going to get there? Magic? Has the BLM ever created any trails to satisfy the increasing demand by the taxpaying public of what is supposed to be an acceptable form of recreation in our public lands? The only business you seem to be in is closing routes down in anyplace remotely scenic or that isn't some forsaken sand/alkali flat and then wondering why the OHV public isn't exactly thrilled with what they are left with. Citizen input from OHVers doesn't go very far but other "citizen" input that only enjoys the status of mere proposed legislation with zero support from the own state's congressional delegation shows up in this proposal as guidelines for management? The whole damn thing is a stacked deck with marked cards and you're the dealer.

So what does the future hold for OHVers? The trends of sales are up and to the right with no end in sight. Today's kids are being weaned on X Games, extreme sports, supercross and snowcross. The wilderweenie organizations are all in a tizzy because they are seeing an alarming aging of their ranks as are the industries that make all that good backpacking stuff to sell them wondering how they are going to stay in business in ten to twenty years. That's why they get this entire Pew Charitable Trust, Tides Foundation, etc. multi-million dollar largess because they know they've got to lock it up quick because they are losing momentum. Mountain bike and motorcycle technology is converging and its only a matter of time before the advent of the fuel-celled electric assisted titanium carbon-fiber pedaled wonder is upon us. Where are they all going to ride? Are wheeled recreationists going to continue to be today's "niggers" (yeah, pretty outrageous word but it fits a pretty outrageous situation) in our public lands that are shoved to the back of the bus on access and trail issues? Do my kids have to be the new Rosa Parks to get their fair share of what they are coughing up all those taxes for?

As far as I'm concerned, this Travel Plan is a non-starter. Even the non-preferred Alternative #1 perpetuates the flaws and errors that have existed since the inception of the first Wilderness Study Areas and all of the other alternatives go downhill from there. I can not and will not support it and urge you to go back to the drawing board and come up with a workable proposal that is inclusive of all of the recreating taxpaying public, not just the well-funded noisy elite bigots that feel uniquely anointed to drive and mold BLM policy for everyone else. I'm fed up with it all.

Poor Victor Johnson. The BLM personnel are excited because they see the neat places they can go on dirt bikes. But the maps get round-filed because they don't want the public using those trails too.

I was just in the area two weeks ago. Was one of the last people (Other than the contractors) to be in an abandoned uranium mine before it was sealed up with concrete over at Temple Mountain.

And, it may have been YOUR bike tracks I saw in the slickrock creekbed that runs parallel to the road to Goblin, but can't be seen from that road.

Absolutely lovely rock shapes and forms!

(I don't see how 'your tracks' are visually upsetting, but the 4 foot tall, 3" wide, brown fiberglass 'Wilderness Study Area' markers aren't!!!)

But the maps get round-filed because they don't want the public using those trails too.

Hey Vic!

Do you have enough bandwidth to post those 'maps' of yours here in FRland???

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