RVers and OHVers are True Environmentalists

RVers and OHVers are true environmentalists. You've got to be kidding! At least that is what a lot of our critics will say and I'm sure I will take a lot of heat from some people for even suggesting the idea. Many self-styled "environmental" groups strongly oppose any type of RV or OHV activity and often frown on ANY kind of human presence in wilderness areas.  "Environmentalists" tend to believe theirs is the only valid position on the use (or more acurately, non-use) of public lands.  The famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Sierra Club in California had a written manifesto in the late 1900s calling for the TOTAL elimination of ALL off road activity by the year 2000.   Fortunately, they did not succeed but they did manage to alienate their own Explorer 4WD group.  They depict OHV folks as criminals, insensitive to the environment, seeking only to defile it.  In reality, most of the people I've met while RVing and OHVing are very much concerned with the environment and strive to take good care of it. Virtually every group I've ridden dirt bikes with for nearly 40 years makes sure they leave a camp site cleaner than it was when they arrived and strives diligently to comply with local rules and regulations. We are off-road USERS, not off-road ABUSERS. Admittedly and unfortunately there are abusers out there, just as there are those among the general public who abuse alcohol and their on-road driving privileges. Our group once observed a rider showing off and doing donuts in the middle of the main street of one of the small towns we sometimes visited on our dirt bikes.  The offender got away before we could counsel him, but one of my buddies did approach the riders he had arrived with and warned them if he kept it up he'd end up with a shovel handle in his spokes one of these days.  The other riders quickly disavowed any association with the offender and agreed that some kind of disciplinary action was needed.  People like that can spoil things for everyone else.   Most RVers and OHVers have a real appreciation of and love for our natural resources. They're actually out there enjoying them, not sitting behind some desk 500 miles away filing frivolous lawsuits like many of our opponents. Yes, I admit I am a bit cynical about arm-chair environmentalists. When I lived in southern California we had a 100-year old road closed in a popular OHV area by legal action from a group in Arizona who had never even seen the location. The road should have been protected by federal law under RS 2477, which protects existing right of ways on public lands. But that didn't stop the self-styled do-gooders and their liberal judge in Arizona from issuing an injunction against the Bureau of Land Management who had legitimately designated the road as open to off highway vehicles.  The road had been a popular off-road route for more than 40 years and in existence for mining and ranching activities for more than 100 years!  The closure was not based on any actual (or even imagined) concern about erosion, noise, traffic, or threat to wildlife. It was purely a paper and political attack based on a alleged minor procedural error by the BLM, inflicted by people who had never visited the area and had no legitimate business challenging the BLM ruling in another state. It was clearly an issue of pure harassment and an unabashed attack on the OHV lifestyle. To add insult to injury, the filers of these environmental lawsuits have their legal costs reimbursed by the Federal government so our own taxes are being used to sue us! Yet off-road organizations and even government agencies are prevented by law from recouping costs of defending against these frivolous suits. Seems more than a bit one-sided to me since I'm on the OHV side of the battle!  Here in Utah there is a vocal environmental group whose CEO lives in Switzerland and has never been to Utah.  More than half the members of their board of directors are convicted felons.  Can you blame me for being very skeptical of their alleged concerns for the environment in Utah?  On the other hand, my associates in the OHV community are all upstanding local residents who are frequently actively engaged in service projects to clean and maintain BLM and Forest Services facilities, not all of which are open to OHVs.

Speaking of service projects. Many RV and OHV groups sponsor service projects to perform cleanup and maintenance of camp sites and trail systems. The Good Sam Club, the oldest and largest RV club in the world, sponsors may service projects every year.   In 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013 I had the privilege of coordinating a clean-up day for the Utah Trail Machine Association at File Mile Pass, a popular OHV area about 20 miles west of Lehi, Utah. Our volunteers (about 100 each year) scoured acres and acres of BLM land, picking up trash -- including discarded appliances and automobile chassis, overfilling a big dumpster. The mantra of the UTMA, the oldest and largest dirt bike association in Utah, is "Conservation, Courtesy, and Safety". Very little of the trash collected came from RV or OHV use of the area. Most was household waste illegally dumped by residents of nearby communities: sofas, TVs, plumbing fixtures, refrigerators, automobile engines, transmissions, and entire cars. I've worked on similar projects in the BLM managed lands in the Mojave Desert and on trail maintenance projects with the U.S. Forest Service in the Sequoia National Forest. In every case I found all volunteers very appreciative of and eager to protect and preserve natural resources. In one case, we spent days rerouting an OHV trail to skirt around a designated equestrian campsite.  And in each and every case, very little of the trash collected could be attributed to RV or OHV use. One of my California OHV service projects included members of a student environmental group from a nearby college so I KNOW environmentalists and OHV activists can work together, but most of our invitations to environmental groups to participate in service projects have been flatly ignored. I guess they're too busy filing their next frivolous law suit. They'd rather lock up an area and throw away the key than help take care of it for legitimate recreational use. It never ceases to amaze me how self-styled environmentalists will twist or ignore facts to achieve their goals. When an OHV dealer here in Utah proposed using remote land recently purchased by the city to create an OHV park for residents, he was met by strong opposition claiming dirt bikers were responsible for huge amounts of household trash, such as couches and appliances, that had been dumped on the property. I can honestly say I've NEVER seen anyone carrying couch, a TV, a toilet, or a kitchen appliance on a dirt bike or ATV but there are sure a lot of them cluttering up our designated riding areas!  Many times I've talked with both land mangers and organizers of service projects and in virtually every case, the huge amounts of trash collected was due to illegal dumping, NOT to OHV users.

Off roaders often get a bad rap in movies, on TV, and in the media in general. It is somehow "OK" to bash them in ways that would invite large scale protests if other non-mainstream groups were equally "profiled" while totally ignoring reality. They are typically portrayed as mean, nasty, lawless creatures with no regard for anyone or anything but their own perverse pleasure. If a movie wants to portray an individual or group as bad, they often put them on dirt bikes.  I must admit that, due largely to misrepresentation in the "lame stream media", even I had a distorted and untrusting view of off-roaders when I first started riding, but that changed quickly. During one of our first outings I was watching from a hill top as my boys rode in a "playground" below. My younger son (about 8 years old at the time)  accidentally rode off into a gulley as deep as his bike. At least a half-dozen other riders -- all strangers -- were there to help him before I could reach him from only a short distance away. Our Desert Rat group included people from a variety of walks of life:  a banker, a chiropractor, a nurse, an IT executive, and a whole bunch of rocket scientists -- really:  they were guys who built things like the space shuttle, the B-2 stealth bomber,  and the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.  Another riding buddy is a high level manager at NASA.  All law-abiding, respected citizens and all a far cry from the stereotypical outlaw dirt bikers the media are so fond of portraying.

Off-road activities are a great source of family recreation, a fact that is largely ignored by the media as they label and depict off-roaders as loners, renegades, and outlaws. In reality, you'll find a lot of families riding ATVs and dirt bikes.  A few years ago the BLM fought vigorously and rather futilely to combat depiction of riding areas in the Mojave Desert as having huge tracts being devastated by off-roaders. The photos, which were published and re-published over and over by local media, were presented as representative of large scale damage when in fact the photos were only applicable to less than 1% of the riding areas and were restricted to areas where environmentalist sponsored closures had concentrated heavy activity unnaturally into small areas near legal staging areas -- a fact the BLM sought diligently but in vain to get the media to report. In another area we had over 600 miles of dirt bike trails in the Sequoia National Forest for more than 40 years without any environmental problems. Then a large portion of the trails were closed by a new wilderness designation. The very first year it was legal wilderness, a card-carrying Sierra Club member (the organization that had campaigned hard for the wilderness designation) burning her toilet paper (why the heck was she doing that?), set the place on fire and burned 55,000 of brand their new wilderness acres to a crisp. Over the next 15 years or so, backpackers set it on fire at least 4 more times while we were camping and legally riding in the vicinity still open to us. On several occasions the rangers came to our dirt bike camp and asked us to ride our OHVs up into their precious wilderness and help rescue hikers from the fires they had caused. We never turned them down.  Despite our differences, we value all human life, a sentiment not necessarily shared by environmental groups who overtly sabotage OHV trails and spike trees, often maiming or killing people!  A second casualty to the wilderness designation was the pristine condition of hundreds of miles of single track trails that soon became whooped out and widened into double-tracks the size of fire roads due to forced two-way traffic resulting from the wilderness designation deliberately cutting off trail loops and forcing riders to back track. Wise resource management, not indiscriminate wholesale closure is the key to protecting the environment. I greatly admired the local U S Forest Rangers in Sequoia who petitioned for an allocation of California's "Green Sticker" money (from OHV license fees) to build new connecting trails to re-establish some of the loops lost to the new wilderness area.  If you looked at a map of the wilderness area you would see perfectly straight borders that took unexpected detours in order to cut off looping trails to interfere with legitimate use.

Most OHV riders I know readily admit there are certain areas that deserve wilderness status and that those who prefer hiking, backpacking or horseback riding are entitled to quiet trails that are free from motorized traffic. I have yet to meet anyone of the anti-OHV groups who is willing to acknowledge that OHV enthusiasts have any rights at all. Most irrationally seek a total ban of OHV access to public lands. As mentioned before, the "Sierra Club" of California had a written mandate demanding the elimination of ALL off-road activity by the year 2000 and caused their own 4-wheel drive division to separate themselves from the Sierra Club.  BTW, a wilderness designation even prohibits wheel chair access, a likely conflict with federal ADA laws.

Since 1976, the BLM has been charged under Federal Law with managing lands for multiple-use public access and for the most part they strive diligently to live up to their responsibilities. However, self-style environmental groups and power-hungry politicians continually seek ways to force their own selfish goals on everyone else. Strong opposition from Congress in 2011 thwarted a "Wild Lands" mandate from Interior Secretary Salazar that sought to designate million of acres of public land as defacto wilderness without the Congressional approval required by law. Even today the current Obama Administration is threatening to designate new protected areas without Congressional review or approval and without input from the people who live there. Imagine the uproar that would erupt if someone attempted to designate OHV areas in a similar way!

Go Green! (Maybe that's why my family favors Kawasaki dirt bikes!)