Oregon's national forests and those in other states will see limits to where ATVs can ride

LA GRANDE -- Next time you go to hike or camp in your favorite national forest, you're likely to hear fewer ATVs revving up.

And if you like to ride your dirt bikes or four-wheeler in the woods, you will soon have fewer places you're allowed to do it.

Forest by forest across the country, land managers are drawing up maps to show where off-road vehicles should be allowed and where they should not. In places such as the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest that have road systems rivaling the state highway network in length, that could mean thousands fewer miles of trails to ride on.

In the past, ATV riders and other off-roaders could go anywhere in most national forests so long as there wasn't a sign telling them they couldn't. Now they can't go anywhere except where the new maps tell them they can.

That change is the result of a 2005 U.S. Forest Service rule meant to manage increasingly popular motorized recreation that can harm sensitive habitat and annoy forest users seeking solitude. Forests are supposed to have their off-highway vehicle, or OHV, trails plotted by the end of the year.

But forests in Oregon and across the West are approaching the project at varying paces and with different strategies. Some, such as the Malheur National Forest around John Day, are considering simply allowing ATVs on all roads where they already can go but banning cross-country, or off-road, travel. Others are closing thousands of miles of previously open roads.

But ATV groups say there is one commonality among the many forests: diminished access.

"There is not one forest travel plan that increases trail mileage. Across the board, there are less roads and trails open to motorized vehicles," said Brian Hawthorne, public lands policy director for the recreation access group BlueRibbon Coalition.

In Oregon and Washington only one forest, the Colville, has completed its plan. Closer to Portland, The Mount Hood National Forest is scheduled to release its draft plan next month.

Oregon's Wallowa-Whitman National Forest released its draft last month, detailing changes that probably will result in thousands fewer miles where ATV riders are free to ramble.

Not that they'll be shut out of their public lands. Much of the Wallowa-Whitman's more than 2 million acres of piney woods and grassy meadows were criss-crossed with roads in the last century to enable access to the wealth of timber within. The forest has more miles of roads -- about 9,000 -- than the Oregon Department of Transportation maintains. Like many other forests in the West, the Wallowa-Whitman has far more roads than it can afford or wants to maintain.

"The Wallowa-Whitman is getting national attention in part because it is so roaded and in part because we have a serious motorized recreation issue here," said Greg Dyson, executive director of the Hells Canyon Preservation Council, which advocates for limiting ATV areas.

Until now, it's been legal to drive ATVs on all Wallowa-Whitman's roads and even off of them wherever your vehicle could carry you, so long as you weren't causing serious resource damage. That has led to a proliferation of unofficial trails created by users.

One such track winds through the woods and down into a streambed in the Spring Creek area west of La Grande, where Dyson and his colleague at the council, David Mildrexler, went last month to look at how ATV use had affected the forest during a recent stretch of wet weather.

A network of double-track trails branched off the main roads, heading into the forest. And one open meadow was honeycombed with shin-deep tire tracks through mud drying to a cracked brown in the summer sun.

"This is just the sort of thing we're worried about," said Dyson, surveying where tire tracks had run ruts through a delicate streambed well away from any established road.

Last month, after years of meetings and back and forth with interest groups, the forest released six alternatives for the public to consider. They would leave between 2,293 and 6,768 miles of roads open on the forest for ATVs, four-wheelers and motorbikes.

Anyone caught riding off designated trails could be issued a ticket, though making it clear to the public where it's legal to ride and then enforcing those rules would be difficult given the size of the area and the agency's limited budget.

The Forest Service will hold a series of public meetings around northeast Oregon this month and next on the six options, and the agency plans to announce a decision by the end of the year.

"No matter what we choose, it's of such a big magnitude that it represents a big social change," said Ken Anderson, district ranger for the forest's Whitman Ranger District.

That's because there are far more off-road vehicle users in Oregon and elsewhere than there used to be.

The number of ATV and off-road motorcycles sold in the U.S. more than tripled from 1995 to 2003, from about 368,000 to more than 1.1 million, according to a 2008 Forest Service study. But sales slowed from 2003 to 2006.

That same study estimated that between a fifth and a fourth of Oregon's population participates in off-road recreation.

"This travel management plan is going to have a big impact on our business here," said Randy James, who sells ATVs and dirt bikes at the shop in Enterprise, Outlaw Motor Sports, he owns with his wife, Barb. "People say, 'If they are going to close everything up, why would we want to buy?'"

by Matthew Preusch, The Oregonian
Sunday July 12, 2009, 8:09 PM
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/oregons_national_forests_and_t.html