When Wayne Allard saw the new U.S. Forest Service guidebook for managing off-highway vehicle trails, he was astounded. As the American Motorcyclist Association’s lobbyist, he seethed over its derogatory and unfitting remarks, like “Managing trails for OHVs (off-highway vehicles) can be a lot like herding dragons.” And as a former U.S. senator from Colorado, he saw political danger in the report’s lame OHV humor — “They’re big, they can cause a lot of damage, and they sure can heat things up.”
The 316-page document with the unwieldy title — “A Comprehensive Framework for Off-Highway Vehicle Trail Management” — concluded with a similarly flip comment by author Kevin G. Meyer, a National Park Service trail specialist: this document, he wrote, had been developed “to help trail managers corral the OHV management dragon,” and “to help keep the beast at bay. Happy herding and happy trails!”
These jolly insults from an agency employee annoyed AMA’s Allard, but substantive problems in the Framework were truly chilling to the OHV community and stirred a scandal. The Forest Service pulled the document from its website, with no explanation of why, or of what will happen to it.
Two weeks ago, in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — whose department oversees the Forest Service — Allard and six OHV colleagues complained bitterly about the scandal, saying that the document’s author inexplicably adopts the entire environmental analysis of a radical Montana group called Wildlands CPR.
On its website, Wildlands CPR brags of its clout: “As a result of our on-going efforts…the Forest Service has removed 7,890 miles of roads and motorized trails.”
In the 1990s, a substantial anti-road movement emerged in America. A 1994 “Road Ripping Conference” in California spawned a network of small outfits. A little investigating revealed that the Wildlands group of today’s brouhaha was incorporated in Montana on August 5, 1996 — as the Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads.
The name changed to Wildlands CPR in 2006, according to its Internal Revenue Service Form 990. The group’s newsletter is called The Road RIPort. And their “road-ripping” recommendations are now in a federal document for trail managers.
Allard and the OHV groups asked Vilsak, “Why does the U.S. Forest Service cite such a radical and extreme group for an official federal report that should be fact based and neutral?”
Kevin Meyer, the author of the tract, is not surprised by all the controversy. “To begin with, the Framework is not a regulatory document, it’s a management aid,” he said. “I used a published Wildlands CPR document, ‘Best Management Practices for Off-Road Vehicle Use on Forestlands,’ which I found in a web search. I thought it useful for managers in planning, implementing and monitoring OHV trails.”
But what will the Forest Service do with the road-ripping advice? And what about that “herding dragons” remark? Meyer didn’t address the road-ripping query, but said, “It’s the disagreement surrounding OHV trails that’s like herding dragons, not the users.”
Friends say that Meyer is a boots-on-trail builder prone to “poetic” language, a nationally recognized trail specialist, and — ironically — a passionate advocate for sustainable OHV trails in Alaska’s permafrost, where OHV use is important for a subsistence culture.
What about the document and the Forest Service website? Meyer said that the Forest Service will review the Framework and post the result in the future.
Don Amador, a highly respected OHV advocate, said, “It’s clear that picking Meyer to write this Framework was gross incompetence by the Forest Service, not malice aforethought. They shouldn’t have wasted taxpayer money hiring a Park Service scientist in Alaska to write a Forest Service management manual almost completely for the ‘Lower 48.’ And certainly not one who gives credibility to road ripping. Let’s do it over and let’s do it right.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
