Bikes Don’t Belong in Wilderness, Full Stop

On one luminous sunny day in February, a gondola car was rising between Mammoth Mountain’s mid-station and its summit at 11,053 feet, but none of the five men inside were taking in the view. Instead, they were deep in discussion about children, specifically, about whether and when to have them and what their impact might be on one’s recreational life. In the car were two dads, two expecting or hoping to be expecting, and one younger, single guy who happened to be in the car when we clambered aboard and was clearly in no hurry to be a father.

It’s natural, after you’ve spent years being single, to wonder how marriage will affect your me time, and it’s understandable, after you’ve spent most of your life not being a parent, to speculate how it’s going to change if you become one. When my son was a toddler, I spent three weeks working in Greenland, and when I returned home he’d developed and changed so much I felt I was looking at a different kid. Guilt and a profoundly deep sense of missing out kicked me in the gut, and I decided right then and there that while my job required me to travel, I would restrict my trips to a week, ten days at the most. This meant passing up lots of opportunities, but standing here now, my son less than a year from finishing college and my daughter about to start, it’s impossible to imagine having done it any other way.

I never stopped feeling selfish. I never stopped wanting to go on expeditions. But what happened, as every parent knows, is that you fall in love with those little pumpkins and are completely transformed. Selfish you makes room for parent you, and from that moment on you never stop thinking about your kids and their needs and whether you’re doing right by them. It’s not that you don’t want to spend an entire Saturday fun-hogging with your friends, or that you won’t, but that your responsibility to other lives is revealed as a higher purpose, putting everything into perspective and informing your decisions going forward.

Commitment to a greater good has been much on my mind as we’ve put together this issue, which includes a story about friends considering giving up their annual dive for abalone, voluntarily ending a rite that’s bonded them for decades, and a report on the fractious, sometimes acidic debate over whether bikes should be allowed in wilderness. The first conveys a bigger picture through the experience of a small group, but the latter is cleaving outdoor culture itself. On one side of the wilderness conflict are mountain bikers, sure in their belief that their human-powered devices are as worthy as horses and hikers. On the other, wilderness purists who argue that the speed, noise, and mechanics of a bike make them inappropriate. They’re both dug in, convinced of their righteousness: Wilderness advocates say their version is a purer interpretation of the wilderness law’s intent, while cyclists accuse them of being just another selfish user group. They’re both right, of course, and sometimes I find myself wanting a wilderness designation that blocks humans entirely, partly for the benefit of nature but mostly to stop the bickering.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 was a political construct created in an imperfect world, but it was a beautiful effort aiming for a higher ideal. Homo sapiens spent thousands of years beating back and domesticating nature, only to discover that despite our books and machines and fair trade chocolate, we desperately need the spiritual and emotional rejuvenation that comes only from communion with a wild landscape. Even as they made compromises to get the bill into law, the writers of the act knew this, knew that the less there was of man and his contraptions, the better our chances for rebirth and re-creation. Whatever the specific wording of the act, motorized or mechanized, trammeled or untrammeled, the idea, ideal, and ethos of it were clear.

Now, I really, really, really like to ride my bike. I like to ride it in remote places, and I’m frustrated by the loss of access through the designation of new wilderness. But I also see a world where escape is harder to find, where cellular signals follow us into the backcountry and the always-on economy lives inside our heads. I see a world where conveniences are mistaken for necessities and activities conflated with identity. I see all this, and I think, do bikes belong in wilderness? And I conclude: no. Of course not. Wilderness is larger than any of us, and it belongs to all of us, and we owe it to the ideal, to our children, and even to ourselves to stand committed to the values that were articulated a half-century ago: to preserve this splendid ferocity and have the humility and discipline to meet it on its terms, not ours.