Updated:
April 9, 2016
The Sustainable Trails Coalition’s
History of Bicycles in Wilderness
And Their Other Arguments Debunked
With Documented Annotations by Doug Scott1
There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country.
A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo.
Even a bicycle goes too fast.
Paul Scott Mowrer, The House of Europe, 1945
How To Read this Fact Sheet
The words of the Sustainable Trails Coalition and their quoted materials
are in this font and color
Doug Scott’s annotations and his quoted materials are in this font
Neutral headings and indented excerpts of federal laws are in this font and color
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In one of America’s most historic conservation laws, on September 3, 1964 the
Wilderness Act initiated the program of protecting the wildest, most natural portions in our
national parks, national forests, and other federal conservation lands—as wilderness areas.

“Wilderness areas” are only designated by act of Congress.

This extra layer of protection makes these our most strongly protected natural
landscapes and ecosystem.

Through March 2016, our elected representatives in Congress have protected 765
wilderness areas in 44 states—more than 109,400,000 acres. This is nearly 5 percent of the
entire landmass of America.

These lands are used by the American people in many ways: hiking, picnicking,
canoeing and kayaking, scenic enjoyment from nearby vista points and roads, hunting and
fishing, nature photography, backpacking, nature study, and many more.
1 Doug invites questions and comments in the interest of assuring fact-based discussions of
issues about wilderness and the Wilderness Act: [email protected]
2

Now, we have this: The Sustainable Trails Coalition believes that the legislative history of the
Wilderness Act of 1964 shows that Congress would have wanted to allow bikes in wilderness if
mountain bikes had existed or they had thought about them.

In fact, in the 1964 Wilderness Act, Congress was clear: In wilderness areas there “shall
be … no other form of mechanical transport.”
FOREWORD
CONTEXT: AMERICA’S CONSERVATION HERITAGE
Over our history, Congress has established the National Park System, the National Forest
System, the National Wildlife Refuge System, and the public domain lands administered by
the Bureau of Land Management.
Fact: These four conservation systems protect 608.9 million acres 2
This vast heritage of landscapes and ecosystems is being protected for you and for future
generations and made available for appropriate forms of outdoor recreation.
WILDERNESS AREAS
Congress enacted the Wilderness Act of 1964 to more strictly protect the wildest, most
natural portions of these conservation lands as “wilderness areas.”
Wilderness is the gold standard of nature protection.
Fact: Once a portion of our federal conservation lands is embraced within the
boundaries of a wilderness area only Congress can alter those boundaries. The
Founders made it hard to pass a bill in Congress.
To become law, a bill must pass both the House and Senate in identical form and be
signed by the president. There are multiple ways for those opposed, if they have strong
backing, to block new laws. Those who championed the Wilderness Act took advantage
of this inherent character of how Congress works.
For a map of the country showing the congressionally designated wilderness areas,
visit http://www.wilderness.net/map. You can zoom in on your state or any region of
interest. You will see every wilderness area; they are in distinct colors according to
which federal agency administers them. Clicking on any wilderness area will bring up
detailed information about that area.
For example, go to http://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/wildView?WID=78 to see the
426,484-acre Bridger Wilderness Area in Wyoming.
PERSPECTIVE ON THE BIKES-IN-WILDERNESS CONTROVERSY
The mountain-biking-in-wilderness controversy focuses on a very small portion of
these federal conservation lands.
Fact: All this dust up is about just the 17 percent of your vast conservation
lands protected in wilderness areas
2 Carl Hardy Vincent, Laura A. Hanson, and Jerome P. Bjelopera, “Federal Land Ownership: Overview
and Data,” Congressional Research Service Report 7-5700, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf.
3
Fact: Most of the other 83 percent of these lands everywhere in the country is
open for their mountain biking adventures.
UNDERSTANDING THE BIKES-IN-WILDERNESS AREAS ISSUE
THE BIPARTISAN LEGACY OF WILDERNESS PROTECTION HISTORY
From the day the first wilderness protection bills were introduced in the House of
Representatives and Senate in 1956, the congressional support for what became the
Wilderness Act of 1964 was bipartisan.
Wilderness preservation is wildly popular among the American people—people who
live in urban areas and rural residents who live close to these wild treasures. A
majority of Americans want to see more wilderness areas preserved, including in their
own states.
On final passage, the Senate passed the legislation unanimously, the House with a
single dissenting vote. Over the five decades and counting in which Congress has been
protecting additional wilderness areas, the vast majority of the laws enjoyed bipartisan
support.
THE MOUNTAIN-BIKES-IN-WILDERNESS CONTROVERSY
A small faction of the large number of avid mountain biking enthusiasts styling itself the
“Sustainable Trails Coalition” is led by a handful of people who have long wanted to find a way
to worm the use of mountain bikes in America’s designated wilderness areas.
The leaders of the Sustainable Trails Coalition want bicycles in wilderness areas.
They offer readers of their webpage this summary of what will come from their dreamed-of
weakening of the Wilderness Act:

“Repair the Pacific Crest Trail and Continental Divide Trail so people can hike, bicycle,
or ride horses over a well-maintained route;

Give land managers the ability to use efficient tools so they can maintain our trails
systems at a lower cost;

Restore Congress's intent that human-powered travelers of diverse kinds be allowed to
explore our national wildlands;

Give hunters, anglers, and outfitters sustainable trails so they can safely and reliably
access our lands;

Give equestrians trails that minimize environmental impact and allow them to share
them safely with other users;

Give your children a future in which they can see the outdoors in person and under
their own power, whether on foot, a horse, on a bicycle, or in a pedal-powered kayak.

Increase interest and involvement in our trail network, and increase volunteerism to
help maintain our national trail networks.”3
The STC leaders tell us that since the Wilderness Act passed “the world has changed and with
some greater flexibility in the rules, land managers can properly maintain our trails, increase
3 Sustainable Trails Coalition, “The Solution,” http://www.sustainabletrailscoalition.org/the-solution/.
4
interest and involvement in our trail systems, and … enhance volunteerism to maintain the
thousands of miles of trails that are currently deteriorating.”
They cite a congressional research report—but fail to quote its conclusion that the Forest
Service should “take steps to enhance training on collaborating with and managing volunteers
who help maintain trails.”4
Fact: The backlog of national forest trail maintenance is rapidly being put behind us.
Forest Service leaders took the lead in calling a national meeting of trails and
wilderness groups where we founded the National Wilderness Stewardship Association
(I serve on the board of directors).
Fact: Today, eager groups of local volunteers and student interns are fully trained and
out doing trail work across the country to augment understaffed agency personnel of
not just the Forest Service, but the other three conservation agencies.
Fact: They don’t need chainsaws—wouldn’t coming across someone using one of those
ruin your wilderness vacation?
Thanks to the sweat equity of these volunteers, your family will have a better wilderness
experience as a result—and you will not encounter a mountain bike when you do.
They offer what they would have you believe is documented proof that Congress never
intended to bar bicycles and all “other forms of mechanical transport” from congressionally
designated wilderness areas on our wilderness areas.
When I met with them face to face about 15 years ago and laid out the fully-documented facts
you will read here, these leaders were unmoved. When I challenged them to take their case
before a federal judge, the cowered—knowing they would be laughed out of court.
These leaders have now launched this coalition—the STC—make their case for a new law
which would get to their objective indirectly. It would give the agencies that administer
America’s wilderness areas a degree of discretion to allow bikes within some wilderness areas.
This is a classic camel’s-nose-under-the-tent tactic.
They lay out their case in a new website. It includes their attempt to argue their case about the
“real”
intent
of
the
Wilderness
Act
from
historical
quotations:
http://www.sustainabletrailscoalition.org/history/
Fact: As these leaders ramp up their effort to breach the sanctity of the no-mechanicalequipment-allowed policy, the mandates of the 1964 Wilderness Act stand in the way.
Fact: Also standing resolutely in the way is America’s wilderness advocacy and
stewardship movement—thousands of wilderness advocates and their groups
everywhere in America. These groups and activists will not stand for any such
legislation.
In a March 23, 2016 joint letter to members of Congress, 116 environmental advocacy
organizations made this clear. Here is the report on this letter from Adventure Journal:
4 Congressional Research Service, “Forest Service Trails: Long- and Short-Term Improvements Could
Reduce Maintenance Backlog and Enhance System Sustainability,” GAO-13-618: Published: Jun 27,
2013. Publicly Released: Jun 27, 2013, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-618.
5
“For over a half century, the Wilderness Act has protected wilderness areas designated
by Congress from mechanization and mechanical transport, even if no motors were
involved with such activities. This has meant, as Congress intended, that Wildernesses
have been kept free from bicycles and other types of mechanization and mechanical
transport,” the groups wrote.…
The 116 undersigned organizations urge you to reject calls to amend the Wilderness Act
to allow for the use of mountain bikes in designated Wilderness.
As you may know, some mountain bikers and a mountain biking organization, the
Sustainable Trails Coalition, have announced its intention to have legislation
introduced in Congress to amend the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes in units
of the National Wilderness Preservation System. The undersigned organizations
strongly urge you to oppose this effort.
Should such a bill materialize in any form in Congress and should it gain any traction, it will
die a well-deserved legislative death upon the end of the second session of that Congress.
America’s conservation movement will accept nothing less.
Every member of Congress will be held accountable for any bill they sponsor, any speeches
they give, any press releases, and any votes they cast on this issue
Fact: Of the 10,637 bills and resolutions introduced during the two years of the 113th
(January 3, 2013 to January 2, 2015), just 296 were enacted—three percent. Just three
percent! And most of those did not have the overwhelming opposition any such bikesin-wilderness bills will confront.5
Not a Single Argument These Leaders Offer Stands
Up to Scrutiny
None of the things they cite is, in a legal sense, legislative history concerning the 1964
Wilderness Act. Instead, the offer a tissue pasted up from the musing of mid-level U.S. Forest
Service officials—as though the Forest Service were the only agency administering our
wilderness areas—and other out-of-context quotations. To this they add irrelevant quotations
from others and after-the-fact assertions about congressional intent. All are phony. All are
misleading.
This thing is dead on arrival.
Fact: Fully two thirds—66.5 percent—of our National Wilderness Preservation System
as of the end of March 2016 is on land administered by the National Park Service, the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management—not the Forest
Service.
Fact: None of these three other agencies ever had the confusion of policy that plagued
the Forest Service in earlier years after the Wilderness Act became law. T
Fact: These three agencies have always prohibited mountain bikes and all other forms
of mechanical transport from every acre of the wilderness areas they administer.
5 “Bills by Final Status,” govtrack.us, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics. This
highly reliable site is not affiliated with the government.
6
In an act of craven misrepresentation—aimed to mislead their own adherents, readers of the
website, members of Congress, and the media—these leaders simply exclude any inconvenient
fact that gets in their way.
In a word, they are lying to members of Congress—and to you.
THE WILDERNESS ACT
Here is the language of the Wilderness Act the leaders of the Sustainable Wilderness Coalition
so dislike:
PROHIBITION OF CERTAIN USES
(c) Except as specifically provided for in this Act, and subject to existing private
rights, there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any
wilderness area designated by this Act and, except as necessary to meet minimum
requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act (including
measures required in emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the
area), there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized
equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical
transport, and no structure or installation within any such area.6 (emphasis added)
In statutory language, the term “may” is permissive; it is a grant of discretion to officials of the
Executive Branch.
By contrast, the term “shall,” as used here, is a command. It is a mandatory. It is binding on
officials of the Executive Branch. It is enforceable by law in the federal courts
There is no way around these nine words. You needn’t be an attorney; the meaning is crystal
clear: “there shall be … no other form of mechanical transport.”
As documented below, this flat prohibition of any form of mechanical conveyance or
transport was in the first version of wilderness preservation legislation introduced in 1956 by
Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and cosponsors in the U.S. Senate and Representative John P.
Saylor in the U.S. House of Representatives—and every subsequent version of the legislation
right to its signing.
These words express exactly what Congress intended then—and now.
Fact: In enacting the more than 125 laws that have added areas to our National
Wilderness Preservati0n System since 1964, Congress has never waivered from this
strict prohibition on public use of all forms of mechanical transportation in wilderness
areas.
6 An Act to Establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the Permanent Good of
the Whole People, and for Other Purposes, Public Law 88-577, 16 U.S.C. 1121, subsection 4(c),
September 3, 1964, http://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/legisact#5, emphasis added. Note:
These prescriptions on these uses of wilderness areas are subject to the proviso “except as
necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose
of this Act (including measures required in emergencies involving the health and safety of
persons within the area).…” This gives leaders of the administrative agencies a narrowly
limited degree of discretion to carry out appropriate stewardship actions and to deal with
emergencies facing visitors.
7
Two exceptions prove how narrowly Congress views this issue—and both exceptions were
supported by wilderness advocates.
Exception: Disability impaired individuals may use non-motorized wheelchairs in
wilderness areas.
Americans with Disabilities Act
(1) Congress reaffirms that nothing in the Wilderness Act … is to be construed as
prohibiting the use of a wheelchair in a wilderness area by an individual whose
disability requires use of a wheelchair, and consistent with the Wilderness Act no
agency is required to provide any form of special treatment or accommodation, or to
construct any facilities or modify any conditions of lands within a wilderness area in
order to facilitate such use.
(2) “Wheelchair” defined For purposes of paragraph (1), the term "wheelchair" means a
device designed solely for use by a mobility-impaired person for locomotion, that is
suitable for use in an indoor pedestrian area.7
The wilderness movement supported this exception.
Exception: Some people are permitted to use some mechanical transport in Alaskan areas.
The wilderness areas in Alaska are enormous—most many millions of acres (one is 12.7
million acres) Therefore, Congress has allowed use of snowmachines, motorboats, and other
means of surface transportation by rural residents relying on hunting, fishing and trapping for
their subsistence lifestyle. [Landing of bush planes has long been permitted.] The wilderness
movement supported this exception:
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act
Rural residents engaged in subsistence uses
(a) Access to subsistence resources
The Secretary shall ensure that rural residents engaged in subsistence uses shall have
reasonable access to subsistence resources on the public lands.
(b) Use of snowmobiles, motorboats, or other means of surface transportation
Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or other law, the Secretary shall permit
on the public lands appropriate use for subsistence purposes of snowmobiles,
motorboats, and other means of surface transportation traditionally employed for such
purposes by local residents, subject to reasonable regulation.8
7 The limitation to wheelchairs suitable for indoor use means eclectic-powered only, no motorized
wheelchairs. Americans with Disabilities Act, Public Law 110-325, section 507, codified as 42 U.S.C.
12207, Federal Wilderness Areas, http://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm#12207.
8 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, Public Law 96, 487, Title 8, subchapter II, sec. 811,
16 U.S.C. 3121, Rural residents engaged in subsistence uses,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/pdf/uscode16/lii_usc_TI_16_CH_51_SC_II_SE_3121.pdf.
8
DEFINING “MECHANICAL” AND “MECHANIZE”
The key phrase used in this subsection of the Wilderness Act relevant here, “mechanical
transport,” embrace a broader category than “motor vehicles.” This is obvious, but also clear
from formal dictionary definitions.
In my Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Unabridged Edition,
published in 1966 (and thus close to contemporaneous with final congressional action on the
Wilderness Act, as the Supreme Court requires in interpreting statutes), these words are
defined as:
mech-an-i-cal … 1. having to do with machinery : a mechanical failure. 2. being a
machine, or including machinery : a mechanical toy.…
trans-port … 1. To carry, move, or convey from one place to another. … 6. a means
of transporting or conveying, as a truck, bus, etc.…9
Always careful about the precision of their writings, the pioneering philosophers and
protectors of wilderness whose work led to enactment of the Wilderness Act consistently
distinguished mechanization as a broader category than just those machines powered by
motors—and excluded both from their conception of wilderness areas. I document this in
detail in a later part of this factsheet.
WHAT IS A MACHINE?
The definitions of “machine” and “mechanized” are obviously very broad terms embracing all
man-made contrivances which uses a mechanism of any kind whatsoever—from a simple
pulley to a huge atom smasher, from supermarket cart to an aircraft carrier.
Machines used for transport range from roller skates to the most compact automobile to the
largest airplanes. And they include bicycles.
IS A BICYCLE A MACHINE?
We should not really have to delve into this question; it’s obvious.
A bicycle is, according to the same dictionary:
bi-cy-cle … 1. A vehicle with two wheels in tandem, usually propelled by peddles and
having handlebars for steering and a saddlelike seat.…10
A bicycle is indisputably a machine: a human-made mechanized contrivance of metal with
rubber tires, a chain and gears, a braking mechanism, and an adjustable seat propelled by
human energy (or a motor).
MOUNTAIN BICYCLES: DIFFERENT—BUT STILL MACHINES
Mountains bikes are a highly specialized variation on the kinds of bicycles long in use—
primarily on streets and sidewalks, paths and roads, whether paved or not.
9 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Unabridged Edition, editor in chief Jess
Stein (New York: Random House, 1966), 889 and 1506.
10 Ibid.
9
The addition of suspension forks for front suspension, more durable heavy-duty tires with a
deeper tread, more gears, and a derailleur for shifting gears while in motion resulted in a
mechanized vehicle with lower gear ratios needed for steep grades with poor traction.
The original mountain bikes were modified heavy cruiser bicycles used for freewheeling down
mountain trails. The sport became popular in the 1970s in Northern California, USA with
riders using older single speed balloon tire bicycles to ride down rugged hillsides. 11 Joe Breeze,
a bicycle frame builder, used this idea and developed what is considered the first mountain
bike.12 … However, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that road bicycle companies
started to manufacture mountain bicycles using high-tech lightweight materials, such as M4
aluminum. The first mass production mountain bike was the Specialized Stumpjumper, first
produced in 1981.13
Note that the first mass production mountain bike—and hence the beginning of the growing
use of these machines on our federal lands—came 17 years after Congress enacted the
Wilderness Act:
FACT: No one—no member of Congress and no federal official, and no bicyclist was
anticipating this important and popular new machine.
FACT: Except, that is, for Howard Zahniser and the congressional sponsors of the
Wilderness Act.
FACT: These founders of the law took exquisite care to write into its enduring words a
broad prohibition on the use of any “other form of mechanized transport” in wilderness
areas in their choice of the wording of subsection 4(c) of the law.”
Advocates for bikes-in-wilderness like to show historic pictures of people using bicycles in
wild landscapes. Indeed, the webpage I am analyzing here is toped with such a photograph, a
black-and-white image showing bicyclers on the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone
National Park. This sort of thing is irrelevant—at that time the park did not contain
designated or recommended wilderness areas.
While there is a history of bicycle travel on dirt since the bicycle came to the United States in
the late 1800's and some of it took place in what would become wilderness, in the 1960's and
70's, the numbers were small enough to be unnoticeable.
ANALYSIS OF THE SUSTAINABLE TRAILS COALITION’S ASSERTIONS
Now we turn to the arguments offered by the leaders of the Sustainable Trails Coalition, using
the distinctive fonts and colors to keep who-asserts-what clear.
The Sustainable Trails Coalition believes that the legislative history of the Wilderness Act of 1964
shows that Congress would have wanted to allow bikes in wilderness if mountain bikes had existed or
they had thought about them.
11 Jobst Brandt, “A Brief History of the Mountain Bike,” October 8, 1998, revised October 2005,
http://sheldonbrown.com/brandt/mtb-history.html
12 Frank J. Berto, The Birth of Dirt: Origins of Mountain Biking (San Francisco: Van der Plas/Cycle
Publishing, 2009).
13 Seb Rogers, “Interview: Specialized founder Mike Sinyard,” BikeRadar, October 23, 2010,
http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/interview-specialized-founder-mike-sinyard-28233/
10
Really? This sentence is just silly. Read these two clauses again, aloud:
“… Congress would have wanted to allow bikes in wilderness if mountain bikes had existed.…
Nonsense. Congress did not think about mountain bikes 17 years before the first ones were
manufactured … and, really, how could they have “wanted to allow bikes in wilderness if
mountain bikes had existed …?”
Everything points to Congress wanting human-powered travel generally.
No. Nothing these STC leaders offer points that way. Compared to my documented fact, not
one thing they offer is actual legislative history laid down at the time Congress was at work
on the legislation.
FACT: In all the many thousands of the words of sponsors of the legislation, in the
words of formal committee reports explaining the intent of the legislation, and in the
words of debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate,
there is not one word to support this STC argument.
Knowing they are skating on thin ice here—or, more accurately, on nothing more than the
thinnest veneer of ice-cold water, the Sustainable Trails Coalition leaders turn to trying to
make the case that the Forest Service is to blame for the prohibition of bikes—and all other
forms of mechanized transport—in designated wilderness areas. And that the Forest Service is
wrong.
But the Forest Service has gone back and forth on its understandings of what Congress intended.
Allowing bicycles, then banning them, then allowing them unless a local manager banned them, and
finally reaffirming a prior blanket ban shows that the question has been revisited numerous times.
We contend that federal land management agencies are interpreting the Wilderness Act inaccurately.
Yes, the Forest Service got it wrong in its first attempt at regulations to implement the new
law (see below). But note, again, that they say here “we contend the federal land management
agencies are interpreting the Wilderness Act inaccurately.”
“Agencies” plural.
Yet nowhere do these leaders produce a shred of evidence that the Bureau of Land
Management, or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or the National Park Service ever were
confused—ever allowed any form of mechanical transport in the wilderness areas they
administered.
Fact: These three conservation agencies have never allowed any form of mechanical
transport within the majority of the expanse of the National Wilderness Preservation
System that they administer.
This is the propaganda technique of the “Big Lie,” something any student of mid-20 th century
European history will fully understand.
1964
“In some areas, the use of this type of equipment has already become established. To exclude this type
of equipment, which to me is compatible with the wilderness concept, would in effect to 'tie' our own
hands in administering the areas”
George W. Tourtillot, Division of Legislative Reporting and Liason [sic]
11
In response to query by Gordon Hammon, Division of Recreation and Land Uses regarding bikes
I am sure that this fellow, working in the Forest Service office of legislative reporting and
offering his personal opinion to another mid-level Forest Service employee, was well
intentioned.
However, this is personal opinion.
Not legislative history.
Moreover, though the Sustainable Trails Coalition leaders cagily don’t document for us the
precise date of this memo, it is very likely that this statement of one mid-level employee’s
personal opinion was only sent internally in the fall of 1964—after the Wilderness Act became
law.
In any event, comments such as this are irrelevant to the question of the correct interpretation
of the Wilderness Act.
No federal judge would dignify this as useful help to understand that the plain words of the
statute. The words “… no other form of mechanical transport…” are clear and unambiguous.
And that is the sole test for interpreting the wording of U.S. statutes laid down in the 1880s by
the Supreme Court.
Duke Law School provides this definition:
“The ‘legislative history’ of a particular law consists of all the documents created by the
legislature during the process of the law’s passage. This material often becomes
valuable later, when disputes arise from vague or ambiguous statutory language. 14
“… all the documents created by the legislature …”
Not anything said by anyone else, however closely involved in working on the issue.
I can document in detail what Howard Zahniser, who drafted those words in the Wilderness
Act, intended by every one. Like legions of America’s wilderness activists and the many
thousands of federal conservation agency personnel who help give our wilderness areas the
best stewardship and protection, I feel very strongly about remaining true to Howard
Zahniser’s intent. But I would not for one moment pretend—as the leaders of the STC do with
this mid-level Forest Service fellow—that his words are formal legislative history.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
The key words of the Wilderness Act about “no other form of mechanical transport” offer not
the least chink of ambiguity. There is no room for intelligent argument here. These cannot be
read to mean anything other than what they clearly say.

“No” means, as we all learned quite early, “no.”

“Other form” is as categorical and sweeping and inclusionary a phrase a possible. “no other
form.”

And no rational person would argue that a bicycle is not a “form of mechanical transport.
14 Duke Law, “Federal Legislative History,” 2015,
https://law.duke.edu/lib/researchguides/fedleg/, emphasis added.
The Legal
Wording
Details
on
Interpreting
12
Statutory
The canons of statutory construction laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court require that
distinct meaning and effect be given to “every clause and word of a statute.” 15 They do not
permit the assumption that when Congress chooses to use two or more distinct words or
phrases in a list it intends any of these to have identical, redundant meaning.
Fact: Thus, distinct from the phrases prohibiting various forms of motor use, the
additional proscription that “there shall be no … other form of mechanical transport”
must mean other types of mechanical transport beyond those involving motors.
This broad and inclusive categorical exclusion was a deliberate choice by Zahniser, the
congressional authors of the Act, and Congress. As thoroughly documented below, it was their
consistent and oft-repeated intent to prohibit any form of mechanical transport. In this
carefully and deliberately broad and inclusive choice of words and phrases, they took pains to
preclude all forms of mechanical transport, including whatever might be invented in the
future.
Their intent was precisely to guard against the kind of later invention of new technology
represented by the mountain bicycle, first popularized on a large scale some 20 years after the
Act became law.
1965
“The forgotten outdoorsmen of today are those who like to walk, hike, ride horseback or bicycle. For
them we must have trails as well as highways. Nor should motor vehicles be permitted to tyrannize the
more leisurely human traffic.”
President Lyndon Johnson, Trails for America, Report on the Nationwide Trails Study
Here is the context from which this brief quotation was lifted—with no detail from the STC
leaders.
In April 1965 Secretary Udall requested the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation to take the lead in a
nationwide trails study. This assignment was made in response to President Johnson's
Natural Beauty Message of February 8, 1965, in which he called for development and
protection of a balanced system of trails. In his September 16, 1966 transmittal letter for the
resulting report, Edward C. Crafts, director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation—who I knew
—summarized for Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and Secretary of the Interior
Stewart Udall—who I knew and worked close with during his cabinet service and after—the
point of the report:
—in the Nation's metropolitan areas as well as in the countryside—in cooperation with State
and local governments and private interests. He called for such a trail system to help protect
15 “It is the ‘“cardinal principle of statutory construction” … [that] [i]t is our duty `to give effect, if
possible, to every clause and word of a statute' … rather than to emasculate an entire section.’ United
States v. Menasche, 348 U.S. 528, 538, 75 S.Ct. 513, 520, 99 L.Ed. 615 (1955) (quoting NLRB v. Jones
& Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 30, 57 S.Ct. 615, 621, 81 L.Ed. 893 (1937), and Montclair v.
Ramsdell, 107 U.S. 147, 152, 2 S.Ct. 391, 395, 27 L.Ed. 431 (1883)).” Cited in Bennett v. Spear, 520
U.S. 154, 137 L.Ed.2nd 281 (1997).
13
and enhance the total quality of the outdoor environment as well as to provide much needed
opportunities for healthful outdoor recreation. The President said:
The forgotten outdoorsmen of today are those who like to walk, hike, ride horseback, or
bicycle. For them we must have trails as well as highways. Nor should motor vehicles be
permitted to tyrannize the more leisurely human traffic.
Old and young alike can participate. Our doctors recommend and encourage such activity for
fitness and fun.
I am requesting, therefore, that the Secretary of the Interior work with his colleagues in the
Federal Government and with State and local leaders and recommend to me a co- operative
program to encourage a national system of trails, building up the more than hundred
thousand miles of trails in our national forests and parks.
There are many new and exciting trail projects underway across the land. In Arizona, a county
has arranged for miles of irrigation canal banks to be used by riders and hikers. In Illinois, an
abandoned railroad right-of-way is being developed as a "Prairie Path." In Mexico utility
rights-of-way are used as public trails.
As with so much of our quest for beauty and quality, each community has opportunities for
action. We can and should have an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback
riding, in and close to our cities. In the back country we need to copy the great Appalachian
Trail in all parts of America, and to make full use of rights-of-way and other public paths.
President Johnson was the most acute and gifted legislator who ever served in Congress. As
Senate majority leader and then as president, he was personally active in face-to-face working
with Zahniser congressional leaders who were completing the procedural steps and choosing
the final words for the new wilderness legislation. And he signed the new act.
President Johnson was also a friend of Howard Zahniser’s, who he knew drafted every word in
the legislation, including the words “no other form of mechanical transport.” They met often,
as Zahniser spent most days when he was in Washington visiting members of Congress to
explain and seek support for the wilderness preservation legislation. He understood that
Johnson stood out among members of Congress for his sheer legislative genius and power.
Evidencing their closeness, soon after Zahniser’s death on May 5, 1964, President Johnson
sent a personal letter of condolence to his widow, referring to Zahniser by his first name and
commending his work on the legislation. I knew Alice Zahniser very well and received a copy
of this letter from Zahnie’s youngest son, Ed:
It was with great shock that I learned today of “Zahnie’s’ death. I first became
acquainted with him when I served in the House and continued to have many
associations with him during my later service in the Senate. 16
President Johnson was a relentless campaigner for his legislative program. His biographer,
Robert A. Caro, tells us: “President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think;
President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.” 17
16 President Lyndon B. Johnson, undated White House letter to Alice Zahniser, sent about a month
after Zahniser died on May 5, 1963.
17 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path of Power (New York: Vintage, 1982),
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/722.Robert_A_Caro/
14
Johnson loved the land and made protection of federal lands and provision of new national
parks, seashores, wild and scenic rivers, and other recreation areas a hallmark of his
ambitious Great Society legislative agenda. Foremost in this was his work for the Wilderness
Act. Johnson relentlessly worked the phones and twisted the arms of members of Congress to
get the Wilderness Act to his desk. He demanded personal attention on Capitol Hill from his
top White House staff and from Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and Secretary of the
Interior Stewart Udall, a former House member ideally suited for his role as the
administration’s key lobbyist on the legislation.
The fragment from President Johnson quoted by the Sustainable Trails Coalition leaders was
delivered after the Wilderness Act was signed. Here, President Johnson was making a purely
general statement—one we can all agree with—about the wide range of recreational pursuits
that all people may choose to enjoy on our vast federal lands. He said nothing to the effect that
all uses should occur on every acre. His words are fine, but general.
Fact: As words from the president, not a member of Congress, and as words issued in
the year after the Wilderness Act came into effect, these are not legislative history.
FOREST SERVICE STUMBLING OVER WILDERNESS ACT REGULATIONS
So, now we enter the terrain of the initially confused regulatory language written by a small
committee of western Forest Service personnel who were brought to Washington by the
Department of Agriculture to draft those regulations.
1966
The United States Forest Service defines mechanical transport so as to allow human-powered travel in
Wilderness.
“Mechanical transport, as herein used, shall include any contrivance which travels over ground, snow,
or water, on wheels, tracks, skids, or by floatation and is propelled by a nonliving power source
contained or carried on or within the device.” 36 CFR § 293.6(a) (1973), formerly 36 CFR § 251.75
(1966)
Fact: This is what the Forest Service drafted and the Department of Agriculture issued
in the original 1966 regulations to implement the Wilderness Act But this
interpretation of the plain words of the law were—as the Sustainable Trail Coalition
leaders admit below—just plain wrong.
When the bikes-in-wilderness fanatics began their agitation I was the policy expert on the
Wilderness Act and its history for The Pew Charitable Trusts. I made it my business to visit
one of the Forest Service’s most experienced wilderness experts, Bill Worf, in his office in the
Washington Forest Service headquarters. Bill was then in charge of the wilderness program.
Prior to that he had administered wilderness areas in Montana and the Northern Rockies.
Because of his depth of on-the-ground experience with wilderness, Bill was one of the field
officers called to Washington in 1965 to draft what became the original Department of
Agriculture wilderness regulations and the related Forest Service Manual documents to guide
field personnel on the practical details of the new program.
I asked Bill how they could have failed to avid any room for misunderstanding when they
could have listed bicycles, wagons, wheeled game carriers, and other forms of mechanical
transport in these original regulations. “Doug,” he replied, with a laugh, “we were all from the
15
West. Our experience was with rugged, straight up-and-down wilderness areas. Given the
bicycles which existed at that time, long before the invention of the mountain bike, it simply
did not occur to us that anyone would want to ride a bike in wilderness areas like the Bob
Marshall.”18
It tells you the fierce loyalty that Bill Worf had to the correct interpretation and application of
the Wilderness Act that when he retired and move back to Missoula, Montana, he founded
Wilderness Watch—the reliable chief watchdog advocacy group on these issues and a frequent
litigator when the wilderness agencies appear wander astray from the law. 19
1977
Senator Frank Church (Democrat from Idaho) and Rep. Morris K. Udall (Democrat from Arizona), key
backers of the Wilderness Act of 1964, caution that the Forest Service is interpreting the Act too
strictly.
Rep. Udall
The latter concept of wilderness, the so-called ‘purity’ issue, has involved extensive debate.... that the
Forest Service has been unduly restrictive in setting wilderness evaluation criteria which relied solely
on the most stringent possible interpretation…” 95th Congress - Report No. 95-540
As one of the three top wilderness lobbyists for the Sierra Club at that time, I worked very
closely with Mo Udall during the entire period he served as chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Public Lands and then as chairman of the full Committee on Interior and
Insular Affairs. The committee was working on many wilderness bills at that time, so Mo and I
and his key staffer on public lands issues, Andy Wiessner, met often, sometimes daily to go
over draft wording and discuss legislative tactics.
The STC leaders are here misrepresenting Rep. Udall’s words. Of the vast number of things
Representative Udall said about wilderness, they lift these words out of context and assert that
they apply to this argument. This is a classic propaganda technique.
Fact: In this committee report, Rep. Udall was addressing something entirely
different: the then-held erroneous view of the leaders of the Forest Service as to what
lands qualify for designation by Congress as wilderness. He was addressing, as these
words clearly state “wilderness evaluation criteria.”
Fact: These words and the legislation they are describing had nothing whatsoever to
do with how wilderness areas are to be managed once designated by Congress, nor with
what uses would then be allowed or prohibited within them in compliance with the
Wilderness Act.
Fact: These words were solely about “purity” issue—the crazy idea that very few lower
elevation lands could qualify for designation under the definition in the Wilderness Act
because they had a history of prior human impacts.
The bill involved was the Endangered American Wilderness Act, of which Mo Udall was the
lead sponsor in the House of Representatives.
18 Doug Scott, personal recollection from conversation with William Worf, then Director of
Wilderness, U.S. Forest Service, Washington, DC in the early 1980s.
19 http://wildernesswatch.org
16
At the hearing on the legislation Udall made it clear to the chief of the Forest Service that the
agency’s position on the so-called “purity concept” of wilderness evaluation criteria was
inconsistent with the wording and intent of the Wilderness Act Udall himself had helped to
enact in 1964. I also testified at that hearing.
Fact: Mo was always proud to remember that he had stood behind President Johnson
in the Rose Garden when he signed the Wilderness Act.
Sen. Frank Church
“My final comments tonight concern the issue of wilderness purity. Time after time, when we discuss
Wilderness, questions are raised about how developed an area can be and still qualify as wilderness, or
what kinds of activities within a wilderness are consistent with the purposes of the Wilderness Act. I
believe, and many citizens agree with me, that the agencies are applying provisions of the Wilderness
Act too strictly and misconstruing the intent of Congress as to how these areas should be managed.”
Wilderness in a Balanced Land Use Framework
As with Mo Udall, Sen. Church and I were very good friends. The two of them were friends
and the leading wilderness designation advocates in Congress in that period. I worked closely
with Frank for many years on many wilderness issues in Congress. For good reason, he was
particularly alert to any misinterpretation of the law by the Forest Service or anyone else.
Fact: Church served as floor leader explaining and defending what became the
Wilderness Act as it was debated in the Senate, first in 1961 and then again in 1963.
Fact: Church was an expert on the law, which he revered—and which he proudly used
as he worked to protect millions of acres in Idaho.
It was my privilege to work with him then—not only in Washington, but also in Idaho. I
testified on the Endangered American Wilderness Act law at his hearing. I attended his
funeral and remained a good friend of his widow, Bethine—who was his closest legislative and
political advisor—for the rest of her life.
Fact: Having worked so hard for the law, Sen. Church proudly stood behind President
Johnson as he signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964.
The STC leaders are here offering an out-of-context excerpt is from a speech Senator Church
gave. I repeat here the same point made as about their false implication about Mo Udall’s
remark: these words were about something else.
In this statement, Frank was insisting on the correct interpretation and application of the
Wilderness Act relating to wilderness evaluation criteria—again, the purity concept. And he
was calling for balanced use of the federal conservation lands—the idea that there should be
ample places available for every kind of use in a world where some uses inherently conflict
with others.
Fact: Frank Church would welcome the idea of mountain bicycle users having broad
areas to enjoy. But he would be in the front of the line opposing bikes in any
wilderness area.
In this same time period, Congress was working on, and President Jimmy Carter soon signed,
the Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1978. The purpose of this legislation was, first
and foremost, to correct various policy errors then held by the leaders of the Forest Service. I
17
was closely involved in working on this law and helping draft its words for its sponsors. The
focus was on correct the Forest Service leadership’s “purity concept” and on the agency’s
deeply flawed evaluation of which roadless national forest lands qualified to be considered for
recommendation as wilderness through forest planning—a process then known as “unit
planning.”
Fact: Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, and
Representative Morris K. Udall, chairman of the House committee, were the lead
sponsors of the Endangered American Wilderness Act.
Fact: They had zero interest or intent in changing anything about the Wilderness Act.
Fact: The sole focus of their legislation was to correct Forest Service interpretative
errors of that era—errors having nothing to do with management or uses allowed or
prohibited within wilderness areas.
To confirm these facts, here is the complete policy statement in the Endangered American
Wilderness Act of 1978:
STATEMENT OF FINDINGS AND POLICY
SECTION 1. (a) The Congress finds that—
(1) many areas of undeveloped national forest land possess and exhibit outstanding
natural characteristics giving them high value as wilderness and will, if properly
preserved, contribute as an enduring resource of wilderness for the benefit of the
American people;
(2) certain of these undeveloped national forest lands meet all statutory criteria for
suitability as wilderness as established by subsection 2(c) of the Wilderness Act (78
Stat. 890), but are not adequately protected and lack statutory designation pursuant to
the Wilderness Act as units of the National Wilderness Preservation System;
(3) these and other undeveloped national forest lands exhibiting wilderness values are
immediately threatened by pressures of a growing and more mobile population, largescale industrial and economic growth, and development and uses inconsistent with the
protection, maintenance, restoration, and enhancement of their wilderness character;
and
(4) among such immediately threatened areas are lands not being adequately protected
or fully studied for wilderness suitability by the agency responsible for their
administration.
(b) Therefore, the Congress finds and declares that it is in the national interest that
certain of these endangered areas be promptly designated as wilderness within the
National Wilderness Preservation System, in order to preserve such areas as an
enduring resource of wilderness which shall be managed to promote and perpetuate
the wilderness character of the land and its specific multiple values for watershed
preservation, wildlife habitat protection, scenic and historic preservation, scientific
research and educational use, primitive recreation, solitude, physical and mental
18
challenge, and inspiration for the benefit of all of the American people of present and
future generations.20
Fact: It was my privilege to be one of three non-federal employees President Carter invited to
attend the ceremony when he signed this new wilderness-designation law. We stood behind
Mo Udall and Frank Church on the morning of August 24, 1978 as the president signed law we
worked together to pass.21
The U.S. Forest Service issues a new regulation that prohibits bicycles:
"The following are prohibited in a National Forest Wilderness:... (b) Possessing or using a hang glider
or bicycle." 36 CFR § 261.16 (1977), now numbered 36 CFR § 261.18.
Ah, one fact from the STC leaders! This was the point at which the agency leaders realized the
error they had made regarding the interpretation of “other form of mechanical transport” in
their 1966 regulations.
Fact: The STC leaders do not tell you, but it is important to point out here that when
the se regulations were issued as a draft for public comment in 1965, both The
Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club filed very detailed comments—comments which
specifically noted the error, naming bicycles and wagons and hang gliders as
mechanical contrivances that should have been prohibited in that draft.
Sadly, the agency leaders did not heed this correct input from the two leading national
wilderness organizations—and thus ensued years of misunderstanding, only corrected much
later in the revised regulations.
But this is not all. The Forest Service error was immediately spotlighted in the first
authoritative legal analysis of the new Wilderness Act and the regulations, published in the
June 1966 Oregon Law Review. Commenting on the wording as it appeared in the draft form
of the regulations published the previous year, attorney Michael McCloskey (who would later
serve as executive director of the Sierra Club) noted:
In its regulations to implement the act, the Forest Service has defined “mechanical
transport” as “any contrivance propelled by a nonliving power source.” As a nonliving
power source is the same as a motor, mechanical transport is thus defined as being the
same as “motorized transport,” and there is no exclusion [in the agency regulations] of
horse-drawn vehicles, bicycles, or cargo carriers. The wording of section 4(c) is that
there shall be “no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no
landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport”. In an effort to give meaning
to each item enumerated, the rules of statutory construction would suggest that
duplicate definitions should be avoided. For this reason, the Forest Service would
appear to be in error in saying that the phrase “mechanical transport” means no more
than the preceding phrase “motor vehicles.” The meaning of the sentence would appear
to be that the final phrase refers to modes of mechanical transport that are not motor
20 Public Law 98-237, February 24, 1978,
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/95/hr3454/text
21 A White House photograph of this ceremony shows the Udall and Church standing behind the
president as he signed the new law. I am peering out from behind Mo Udall—I did not want to miss
seeing the actual signing itself: see Doug Scott, The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural
Heritage Through the Wilderness Act (Fulcrum Books, 2004), 82.
19
vehicles, motorboats, or motor-driven aircraft. By a process of elimination, this
would seem to leave only items such as bicycles, wagons, and cargo
carriers as the referent for the phrase.22 (emphasis added)
1980
When Congress created the Rattlesnake Wilderness in Montana with the Rattlesnake National
Recreation Area and Wilderness Act of 1980, 16 USC 460ll, Congress found that cycling is considered
“primitive recreation” and would be allowed in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. Congress declared that the
Lolo National Forest, in which the Rattlesnake is situated,
“has long been used as a wilderness by Montanans and by people throughout the Nation who value it as
a source of solitude, wildlife, clean, free-flowing waters stored and used for municipal purposes for
over a century, and primitive recreation, to include such activities as hiking, camping, backpacking,
hunting, fishing, horse riding, and bicycling . . . .” Public Law 96-476
Including this—and quoting only part of this law—further promotes the STC leaders’ Big Lie,
their obviously intentional misrepresentation of the plain facts about this law. After all, one of
them is an attorney.
So here the key elements of the Rattlesnake law, including those deliberately left out by the
Sustainable Trails Coalition leaders:
STATEMENT OF FINDINGS AND POLICY
SECTION 1. (a) The Congress finds that—
(1) certain lands on the Lolo National Forest in Montana have high value for watershed,
water storage, wildlife habitat, primitive recreation, historical, scientific, ecological,
and educational purposes. This national forest area has long been used as a wilderness
by Montanans and by people throughout the Nation who value it as a source of
solitude, wildlife, clean, free-flowing waters stored and used for municipal purposes for
over a century, and primitive recreation, to include such activities as hiking, camping,
backpacking, hunting, fishing, horse riding, and bicycling; and
(2) certain other lands on the Lolo National Forest, while not predominantly of
wilderness quality, have high value for municipal watershed, recreation, wildlife
habitat, and ecological and educational purposes.23
The separation of this into two findings mirrors the separation of substantive provisions of the
law:
Fact: Section 2 of the law is titled “Designation and Management of Rattlesnake
Wilderness Area”
Fact: Section 3 is titled “Designation and Management of Rattlesnake National
Recreation Area”24
22 Michael McCloskey, “The Wilderness Act of 1964: Its Background and Meaning,” Oregon Law
Review, 45, no. 4, June, 1966, 288-321.
23 An Act to establish the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area and Wilderness in the State of
Montana, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/96/s3072/text
24 To establish the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area and Wilderness in the State of Montana,
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/96/s3072/text
20
The separation of these two subjects was purposeful on the part of the drafters of the bill and
is typical of these kinds of laws, then and now. The section designating the Rattlesnake
Wilderness Area is standard language—the boilerplate wilderness designation language
Congress used in the first law adding an area to the National Wilderness Preservation System
in 1968—and in every law since.
Fact: Bicycles are not permitted within the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. The lead
lobbyist and organizer for this fine wilderness area, Bill Cunningham, would not stand
for it.
There is nothing in the text of the Rattlesnake law that in the least degree supports the
argument of the Sustainable Trails Coalition.
Read the full text of the law at the federal site for all legislation and laws:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/96/s3072/text
Including a partial excerpt from this law is outrageous misrepresentation by leaders of the
Sustainable Trails Coalition. They are counting on the gullibility of the readers of their
website.
Transparent efforts to mislead members of Congress, such as this, are contemptible in a
democracy—and destined to backfire. In public debate, which ought to put a premium on the
truth, these propaganda shenanigans are contemptible.
Capitol Hill Code of Lobbyists: Tell the truth to members of Congress. Always.
Fact: Once lied to, members of Congress will forever disregard the further
importunings of advocates. On Capitol Hill, an advocate’s word and the truth of
everything he says or gives to legislators and their staffs is his bond.
1981
The United States Forest Service issues a third regulation. It is inconsistent with both the 1966
regulation (which permitted bikes) and the 1977 regulation (which prohibited bikes). This new
regulation provides for conditional allowance. Bicycles are allowed unless expressly prohibited:
"When provided by an order, the following are prohibited:... (h) possessing or using a bicycle, wagon,
cart or other vehicle." 36 CFR § 261.57(h)
Nothing surprising here.
Fact: Forest Service and Department of Agriculture leaders were working toward a more and
more accurate and detailed regulation as they learned more, as they received worried
feedback from their personnel in the field who were contending with public confusion and
growing bicycle conflicts with other users, and as they were shown the facts of the errors in
the earlier regulations by wilderness advocates—including me.
1982
In a March 1982 memorandum, the Forest Service calls the 1977 no-bicycles regulation an "editorial
error" and "an inconsistency" and says:
"36 CFR 261.16(b) states : 'Possessing or using a hang glider or bicycle.’ During the last CFR
Revisions we intended to remove ‘or bicycle’ but the change did not get effected."
21
"It was our intent to provide for the prohibition of bicycles only where their presence created a conflict
or problem and implement the prohibition by use of an order for a specific wilderness.” March 9, 1982
Memo from United States Department of Agriculture
In a June 1982 memorandum, the Forest Service States:
"Previously we have directed that mechanical transport conveyances such as bicycles, wagons,
wheelbarrows or deer carriers were not appropriate for wilderness. This may have been unduly
restrictive" June 11, 1982 Memo from United States Department of Agriculture
These are interesting explanations, but nothing more.
Fact: The only thing that matters is that the regulations were finally being brought into
compliance with the clear words of the Wilderness Act. That agency leaders were
struggling with all this and obviously embarrassed by their errors only confirms that
they were finding their way, finally, to the correct result.
1983
In a November memorandum, the Forest Service announces that it has changed its mind and will
enforce the 1977 bicycle prohibition.
"Previous discussions and direction on this were confusing because of the ambiguity between the
direction provided by the Wilderness Act, the definition of mechanical transport, and the prohibitions in
the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)." November 21, 1983 Memo from United States Department of
Agriculture
As I have stressed, the Forest Service leaders’ earlier regulations, memoranda and discussions
were confusing to everyone and, being at odds with the law, simply wrong..
1984
On June 21, 1984, the Forest Service announces that the 1977 bicycle prohibition "was supposed to be
retained." This final decision to exclude bicycles from Wilderness may have been made on the basis of
a single public comment. 36 CFR Parts 251 and 261
Here we need a quick review of the process and legal requirements for all federal rulemaking.
The Federal Register is the government periodical that publishes all proposed and final
federal rules before they are codified in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. It provides this
useful background:
Agencies get their authority to issue regulations from laws (statutes) enacted by
Congress. In some cases, the President may delegate existing Presidential authority to
an agency. Typically, when Congress passes a law to create an agency, it grants that
agency general authority to regulate certain activities within our society. Congress may
also pass a law that more specifically directs an agency to solve a particular problem or
accomplish a certain goal.
An agency must not take action that goes beyond its statutory authority or violates the
Constitution.
Agencies must follow an open public process when they issue
regulations, according to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). This includes
22
publishing a statement of rulemaking authority in the Federal Register for all proposed
and final rules.25
The formal record of public comment on which federal agencies and departments are bound
to consider includes the entire back trail of comments made on the entire family of previous
iteration. This is especially important in a case like this where the agency blundered and it
required a number of cycles of public comments to get them straightened out.
Fact: Whether an agency received one comment or many thousands is irrelevant. They
are to consider all comments received. And, in the case of the regulations concerning
the regulations implementing the Wilderness Act, they received a great many in 1966
and in every following iteration.
1986
On April 21, 1986, the Forest Service announces that the 1966 regulation, which allows for Wilderness
travel by living power sources, is to be read as prohibiting Wilderness travel by certain living power
sources, including bicycles. 51 FR 13835
Duh! A man-made contrivance made of metal and rubber is not a “… living power source …”
1989
On August 4, 1989, H.R.3172 was introduced in the House “To amend the Wilderness Act to allow the
use of bicycles in wilderness areas.” The bill was referred to the Subcommittee on National Parks and
Public Lands which held no hearing and gave it no further action.
There is nothing—nothing—quite so dead as the vast majority of bills introduced in each
session of Congress. With the adjournment sine die at the end of the second year, all those
bills end up on the ash heap of history. They are not legislative history.
To help readers—as the Sustainable Trails Coalition website does not—here is the full text of
this legislation:
H. R. 3172
To amend the Wilderness Act to allow the use of bicycles in wilderness areas.
August 4, 1989
A BILL
To amend the Wilderness Act to allow the use of bicycles in wilderness areas.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of
America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. BICYCLES IN WILDERNESS AREAS.
Section 4 (c) of the Wilderness Act (16 U.S.C. 1133(c)) is amended by striking
`mechanical transport,' and inserting `mechanical transport (except for nonmotorized
bicycles),'.26
25 “A Guide to the Rulemaking Process,” prepared by the Office of the Federal Register (with
materials from several academic law sources),
https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaking_process.pdf.
23
This bill, which the Sustainable Trails Coalition obviously wishes had become law, did not. No
hearing was held. No companion Senate bill was introduced. This history is interesting—but
meaningless for purposes of legislative history.
Fact: “As of March 31, 2016, there were 8,902 bills and resolutions before the United
States Congress, but of those only about 4% will become law.” 27
CONGRESS REPEATS THE KEY DISTINCTION IN OTHER LAWS
Like the post-1964 things quoted by the leaders of the STC, the following two examples are
not legislative history relevant to the formal argument about bikes-in-wilderness. However,
they offer added evidence that Congress has continued to understand and carefully apply the
distinction between use of “motors” and other ”mechanical” contrivances.
1972 – In the Context of Regulating Mining: Congress enacted the Sawtooth National
Recreation Area Act, establishing both the recreation area and, within it, the Sawtooth
Wilderness Area. Section 11 of that act instructs the Secretary of Agriculture to promulgate
regulations to protect the area I relation to the impacts of mining:
The Congress hereby recognizes and declares the need to take action to regulate the use
of, and protect the surface values of, the Federal lands in the recreation area, and
directs that rules and regulations necessary to carry out this section shall be
promulgated and issued by the Secretary of Agriculture after consultation with the
Secretary of the Interior. Such regulations shall include, when deemed necessary,
provisions for control of the use of motorized and mechanical equipment for
transportation over, or alteration of, the surface of such Federal land in connection
with any authorized activities on such land, including but not limited to mineral
prospecting, exploration, or development operations. 28
1975 – In Designating Additional Wilderness Areas: In its formal report on the statute
designating the Weminuche Wilderness Area in Colorado, the Mission Mountains Wilderness
Area in Montana, and others, the House committee noted that “The designation of these
fifteen areas as wilderness will preserve them from the encroachment of our modern
mechanized and motorized society.”29
2015
The Sustainable Trails Coalition forms to try and fix this situation.
26 A Bill to amend the Wilderness Act to allow the use of bicycles in wilderness areas,
https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/3172/text
27 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/#find, accessed March 31, 2016.
28 An Act to establish the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in the State of Idaho, to temporarily
withdraw certain national forest lands in the State of Idaho from the operation of the United States
mining laws, and for other purposes, Public Law 92-400, Sec. 11, Aug. 22, 1972, emphasis added.
29 Designating Certain Lands as Wilderness, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. House of
Representatives, House Report 93-989, 93rd Congress, 2d Session, April 11, 1974, page 2, emphasis
added.
24
BEYOND BEING ILLEGAL, BICYCLES DAMAGE OUR WILDERNESS AREAS
The objection of wilderness advocates to bikes-in-wilderness is a legal one. They are
prohibited, have been prohibited for fifty-one years, will continue to be prohibited, the
inaccurate arguments of the Sustainable Trails Coalition not withstanding.
It is also true that mountain biking and the legally-allowed uses of our wilderness areas do not
mix. There is plenty of room for mountain bike enthusiasts to ride in large, wild areas
elsewhere.
Beyond that user conflict, in many places—not just in designated wilderness areas—mountain
biking is doing serious damage to wilderness landscapes and wildlife habitats. A geared-up
bike running through a stream crossing and up and down trails is a cause of serious erosion,
with damage to water quality and fishery values. Bicycles increase trail erosion. And they are a
starting intrusion of mechanized sounds and sights on all sorts of wildlife, including species
who require large, quiet refuges free from this kind of disturbance in order to survive and
thrive.
These impacts will be documented in a supplemental factsheet in this series.
THERE IS A BETTER OPTION
Let’s all do our part to encourage mountain biking enthusiasts, of which there are so many, to
meet with local wilderness advocacy and stewardship folks, of which there are also so many,
in their local areas.
Local wilderness advocacy leaders will be happy to get acquainted and sit down with maps to
see what can be worked out. The combined group can get out together on field trips to check
out options on the ground. They can work together with the local federal agency
administrators of the lands involved.
This legislative gambit of the leaders of the Sustainable Trails Coalition is a rabbit hole leading
to no bikes-in-wilderness wonderland.
Chances are very good that that this way a better path ahead can be found by this alternative
approach, that these local leaders and together come up with a win-win outcome. This is not
some do-gooder theory; such win-win outcomes have happened and are happening currently.
They led, in one case, to:

Areas designated as wilderness areas by Congress.

And, in the same law, areas specifically established as “scenic areas”—prohibiting those
uses any new roads and any public use of motor vehicles of any kind, but open to mountain
bikes.
Fact: This is exactly what local wilderness leaders and bicycling groups did in Virginia in the
early 2000s. The result was the establishment of both new wilderness areas and several scenic
areas—areas designated by law, devoted to recreational use, prohibiting any roads and use of
motor vehicles, but allowing bicycles. Check it out:
PUBLIC LAW 111–11, MAR. 30, 2009 123 STAT. 1005
SEC. 1104. SENG MOUNTAIN AND BEAR CREEK SCENIC AREAS, JEFFERSON
NATIONAL FOREST, VIRGINIA …
25
(e) ROADS.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), after the date of enactment of
this Act, no roads shall be established or constructed within the scenic areas.…
(i) MOTORIZED VEHICLES.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), motorized vehicles shall not
be allowed within the scenic areas.30
Of course, the collaborative ideas you may work out will then have to earn the approval of
Congress and the president, as this one easily did. But this works. It has worked elsewhere.
Bicycle enthusiasts will find local wilderness advocates happy to try to work something out. I
can help make those connections—and I’d be glad to come and help get things rolling or work
through any rough spots.
Doug Scott
[email protected]
CONCLUSION
In a letter to Congress dated March 14, 2016 the Sustainable Trails Coalition leaders assert:
With regard to the legal and historical background, years or research and investigation have
established that Congress did not intend to bar human-powered travel from Wilderness. The
Wilderness Act forbids ‘mechanical transport’31 By this, however, Congress meant people being
moved around by machines, not people moving themselves around with mechanical assistance.
The legislative history makes this clear.32
This is a fine summary of the fundamental error of the Sustainable Trails Coalition. It is
incorrect in every way—as a matter of interpretation of statutory words and as a matter of
legislative history. And it flies in the face of the determined view of major figures in the history
of America’s wilderness preservation movement.
GARLAND, LEOPOLD, AND MARSHALL WEIGH IN
Writing in a popular magazine of the day in 1899, Hamlin Garland, a prolific American writer
of stories and books about farmland and western adventures, gave us one of the loveliest
evocations of a wild trail:
“The trail has a language of its own because it has a life of its own. As distinct as the
sailor’s lingo, it is more picturesque and less technical in its metaphors. It is less bound
by tradition and more humorous. To ‘hit the trail’ is a phrase worth considering, for it
suggests a long train of related pictures, signs, and symbols. A man is said to ‘hit the
trail’ when he pulls out of town or the highway or the camp with pack-train and
30 Virginia Ridge and Valley Wilderness, 123 Stat. 1005, sec. 1104, Subtitle B, Omnibus Public Land
Management Act of 2009, Public Law 111-11, March 30, 2009,
http://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/documents/publiclaws/PDF/111-11.pdf.
31 16 USC 1133(c)(1964).
32 Ted Stroll, President, Sustainable Trails Coalition to Members of Congress and The Wilderness
Society, March 14, 2016, 1. Though he is a retired attorney, Stroll has proven himself incapable of
reading the statute and legislative history accurately.
26
saddle-horse, and entering the narrow path leading to the wild country where
no wheel has ever rolled, leaves the world of business behind him.”33 (emphasis
added)
In every case where these leaders and key members of Congress and wilderness advocates
might have simply referred to “motor” and “motorized,” they took care to use the broader
terms “mechanical” and “mechanization.”
Every time.
In a short essay found among his papers by his brother George Marshall and published
posthumously as the editorial in the Summer 1954 issue of The Living Wilderness, Bob
Marshall wrote:
The wilderness furnishes the best environment which remains in the country for
physical adventure. It is difficult to overestimate the importance adventure assumes in
the longings of innumerable vigorous people. Lack of opportunity to satisfy such
longings undoubtedly is responsible for much unhappiness, for a considerable portion
of the crime which is so often committed as a means of self expression, and, if we are to
believe William James and Bertrand Russell, even for war.
A wilderness journey provides the ideal conditions for developing physical hardiness.
In the wilderness a person cannot buy transportation or services. He must provide
them for himself. He cannot find machinery to relieve him of the need for expending
his own strength and energy. If he gets into trouble he must get himself out of it or face
the consequences.34
APPENDIX I
Bicycles, Wilderness, and History
A few highly relevant observations should be added—key points made by historic leaders of
the wilderness movement and by the most central players in Congress working for the
wilderness legislation while it was being conceived, drafted, and debated in Congress.
Howard Zahniser
Howard Zahniser was the draftsman and chief lobbyist for the legislation. He was deeply read
in the history of wilderness preservation and nature literature, from which he drew the ideas
he distilled in the draft of the first draft Wilderness Act in 1956.
33 Hamlin Garland, “Hitting the Trail,” McClure’s Magazine 7, no. 4, February 1899, 298-299.
34 Bob Marshall, essay, The Living Wilderness, summer 1954, quoted in Mark Harvey, The Wilderness
Writings of Howard Zahniser (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 128. Harvey is a
professor of history at North Dakota State University specializing in the history of wilderness
preservation, public land, and western water.
27
Zahniser was the executive director of The Wilderness Society, based in Washington, DC. In a
nationwide radio broadcast in 1949—at a time when, at the direction of the organization’s
governing council, he had begun carefully formulating the concepts for a wilderness
protection law—he emphasized that “wilderness will not survive where there is mechanical
transportation.”35
In one of his most important statements, Zahniser explained the crucial need to bar all forms
of mechanization from wilderness areas:
I believe that at least in the present phase of our civilization we have a profound, a
fundamental need for areas of wilderness—a need that is not only recreational and
spiritual but also educational and scientific, and withal essential to a true
understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own natures, and our place in all nature.
This need is for areas of the earth within which we stand without our
mechanisms that make us immediate masters over our environment—
areas of wild nature in which we sense ourselves to be, what in fact I believe we are,
dependent members of an interdependent community of living creatures that together
derive their existence from the Sun.…
Deeper and broader than the recreational value of wilderness, although indeed
encompassing it, is the importance that relates it to our essential being, indicating that
the understandings which come in its surroundings are those of true reality. Our lives
seem so derivative from the wilderness, we ourselves seem so dependent on a renewal
of our inspiration from these wild sources, that I wonder sometimes if we could long
survive a final destruction of all wilderness. Are we not truly and in reality human,
essentially, as spiritual creatures nurtured and sustained—directly or indirectly—by a
wildness that must always be renewed from a living wilderness? 36
DID THE SPONSORS OF THE WILDERNESS ACT WANT TO ALLOW BICYCLES?
Then there are the voices of the sponsors of the Wilderness Act who were responsible for the
words of the legislation and assuring that the final law said exactly what they intended. They
gave speeches explaining their intent when they introduced and re-introduced the legislation.
They testified at hearings and helped write committee reports. They led and participated in
the debates in the House and Senate.
In rank of their importance these were:

Representative John P. Saylor, Republican of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the lead
House sponsor from start to finish and a fierce advocate of correct agency interpretation of
the new law.

Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, chairman of the subcommittee which
produced the legislation and floor leader (taking the usual role of Senator Anderson) for
the Senate debates, both in 1961 and 1963.
35 Howard Zahniser, script of radio broadcast, January 13, 1949, “Newsreel Digest” program, Mutual
Broadcasting Company, page 1.
36 Howard Zahniser, “The Need for Wilderness Areas,” The Living Wilderness, summer 1956-57, no.
59,
28

Senator Clinton Anderson, Democrat of New Mexico. Friend of Aldo Leopold, former
Secretary of Agriculture with authority over the Forest Service, chairman of the committee
which produced the wilderness legislation, and lead sponsor of the bill in the final sessions
of Congress.

Senator James Murray, Democrat of Montana who preceded Senator Anderson as
committee chairman and as lead sponsor of the legislation.

Representative Wayne N. Aspinall, Democrat of western Colorado, the chairman of
the House committee, who held up the bill to insist on certain mining language—which, it
turned out, led to no new mining.

Senator Lee Metcalf, Democrat of Montana, an original cosponsor of the legislation and
active supporter in the committee hearings, first as a House member then a senator.

Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Democrat of Minnesota, original Senate lead sponsor
who then deferred to Murray, as he as not a member of the committee. Humphrey was also
a fierce protector of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area wilderness which pre-dated
the Wilderness Act.
Most of these leaders served on the House-Senate conference committee which produced the
final language.
The words of these leaders are prime legislative history. I knew and worked all but Senator
Murray in the years immediately after the Wilderness Act became law. From then I got a first
hand education in their intent and the history of their work—the education that led me to
become an expert on the history and policy of American wilderness preservation.
Fact: The objective of every one of these leaders, shared with conservation group
leaders, was to bar any “other forms of mechanical transport.”
Consider the words of some of these leaders
Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
The first legislation that ultimately led to the Wilderness Act eight years later was introduced
in the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1956 by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey.
Fact: This bill provided that “there shall be no … use of motor vehicles, nor any
airplane landing field, or other provision for mechanized transportation.” 37
Reintroducing his bill at the outset of the next Congress in 1957, Senator Humphrey
explained:
“Mr. President, here is a measure designed to make sure that some parts of America
may always remain unspoiled and beautiful in their own natural way, untrammeled by
man and unmarred by machinery.”38
Representative John P. Saylor
Introducing the identical House bill in July 1956, the lead sponsor, Representative John P.
Saylor, explained to his colleagues:
37 S. 4013, 84th Congress, 2nd session, page 15, emphasis added.
38 Congressional Record, February 11, 1957, page 1893.
29
The stress and strain of our crowded, fast-moving, highly-mechanized and raucously
noisy civilization create another great need for wilderness—a deep need for areas of
solitude and quiet, for areas of wilderness where life has not yet given way to
machinery.39
As noted, there is a clear distinction between the broad category of mechanization and the
more limited subcategory of that type of mechanization that involves motors. As seen in these
fundamental explanations of their purpose, the original congressional authors of the
Wilderness Act in both the House and Senate took care to use the broader, more inclusive
term to prohibit both.
DID PIONEERING WILDERNESS LEADERS WANT TO ALLOW BICYCLES?
The appreciation and insistence that bicycles and wilderness are fundamentally incompatible
goes back into the 19th century.
Benton MacKaye
Few were more centrally involved in the history of the wilderness preservation idea and the
work for the Wilderness Act than Benton MacKaye. He was the father of the idea for the
Appalachian Trail in 1921, one of the founders of The Wilderness Society in 1935, and its
president during the final years as the Wilderness Act moved through Congress. During that
period he was often in Washington and stayed at the home of Howard Zahniser.
In 1897, MacKaye and several other Harvard students rode their bicycles for ten days from
eastern Massachusetts into New Hampshire where they set off on a long backpack ramble in
the White Mountains. The night before they began their hike, MacKaye wrote in his journal:
“We have said ‘good-bye’ to the bicycles and civilization and will now pursue our way on foot
through the White Mountains.” It would thus be, he wrote, his first encounter with ‘true
wilderness.’”40
Later he flatly insisted: “Primeval influence is the opposite of machine influence.” 41
Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold was the first to propose the idea of preserving wilderness areas. In 1924 his
efforts persuading his boss, the regional forester in Albuquerque, to set apart the world’s first
wilderness areas—the Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico. He wrote:
Recreation is valuable in proportion to the intensity of its experiences, and to the
degree to which it differs from and contrasts with workaday life. By these criteria,
mechanized outings are at best a milk-and-water affair. 42
Leopold also observed that:
39 Congressional Record, July 12, 1956, page 12583.
40 MacKaye’s journal from that trip is quoted in Larry Anderson, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist,
Planner and Creator of the Appalachian Trail,” (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 3435.
41 MacKaye, “The Appalachian Trail: A Guide to the Study of Nature,” The Scientific Monthly, 34
(April 1932), 330.
42 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1949), page 194, emphasis in original.
30
… public wilderness areas are, first of all, a means of perpetuating, in sport form, the
more virile and primitive skills in pioneering travel and subsistence…. We who seek
wilderness for sport are foiled when we are forced to compete with mechanized
substitutes.43
Bob Marshall
Then there was Bob Marshall, by common acclamation the greatest wilderness advocate of all
time.
For a time Marshall ran the wilderness program in the office of the chief of the Forest Service.
When he died suddenly in 1939 at the age of 38, Forest Service leaders who knew and revered
him that the huge Bob Marshall Wilderness Area was amalgamated from earlier separate
fragments and named in his honor.
Bob, as everyone called him, was a wilderness purist. Marshall wrote the first detailed article
in a scholarly journal, The Scientific Monthly (which became Scientific American) promoting
preservation of wilderness areas. There he defined wilderness “to denote a region which …
possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means.” 44
Bob, like his fellow Wilderness Society founders Benton MacKaye and Aldo Leopold, usually
chose the broader and more inclusive words “mechanization” and “machine” to define the
very antithesis of wilderness.
Writing in The New York Times Sunday magazine section in 1937, Marshall emphasized how
recent machinery have been part of our very long connection with the natural world, arguing
that this meant a need to preserve areas where machinery is not allowed—before it is too late:
In the background of man’s history the years of the mechanical are insignificant
compared with the years before machinery was known. Men are not yet adjusted to a
world exclusively made of machinery. …
Our fast dwindling wilderness remnant requires that the burden of proof should be
reversed, and only those roadless areas should be invaded where the urgency of
developing transportation systems is unquestionable and the particular [unprotected]
wilderness to be invaded can reasonably be spared.45
FOUNDING OF THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY
In 1935, MacKaye, Leopold, Marshall and five colleagues founded The Wilderness Society,
issuing a platform focused on mechanization in all its forms as the broadest, most
fundamental threat to wilderness. Their platform characterized wilderness as “a natural
mental resource,” “a serious human need rather than a luxury and plaything.”
They concluded: “this need is being sacrificed to the mechanical invasion in its various
killing forms.” Expressing concern about any manmade intrusions that bring “into the
wilderness a feature of the mechanical Twentieth Century world,” the Society’s
founders defined their premier category of wilderness, extensive wilderness areas, as
“regions which possess no means of mechanical conveyance.”
43 Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, pages 192-193.
44 S. 4013, 84th Congress, 2nd session, xx
45 Robert Marshall, “A Plea for the Old Wilderness,” New York Times Magazine, April 25, 1937.
31
The dominant attributes of such areas are: first, that visitors to them must depend largely on
their own efforts and their own competence for survival; and second, that they be free from all
mechanical disturbances.”46
Appendix II
THE POPULARITY OF PRESERVING WILDERNESS AREAS
The federal government has been conducting periodic surveys of public opinion about outdoor
recreational preferences and use patterns since the 1960s. This work is now carried out by
U.S. Forest Service Ph.D. public opinion survey specialists based at the Forest and Range
Experiment Station in Athens, Georgia.47 They have the state-of-the-art results on American’s
attitudes by protecting wilderness areas as part of the National Survey on Recreation and the
Environment (NSRE).48
What Do American’s Value Most About Wilderness Area?

Fact: 93.0 percent of Americans value wilderness areas for protecting air quality; 90.3
percent for protecting water quality; 87.7 protecting wildlife habitat. 85.6 percent of
Americans value “knowing future generations will have wilderness areas.” 49
For activists, this is the biggest motivation of all—in a world much noisier and more
crowded and troubled by rising seas than our own, our descendants will treasure these
wild places far more than we can imagine.

Fact: “Since urban residents make up about 80 percent of the U.S. population, one
would expect that the importance urbanites assign to Wilderness would closely parallel
the importance the overall U.S. population assigns. But the question arises about the
46 Reasons for a Wilderness Society, 4-page pamphlet, January 21, 1935, emphasis added.
47 National Survey on Recreation and the Environment (NSRE): 2000-2002, Interagency National
Survey Consortium, Coordinated by the USDA Forest Service, Recreation, Wilderness, and
Demographics Trends Research Group, Athens, GA and the Human Dimensions Research Laboratory,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/trends/nsre-directory/index.html.
The NSRE is a general population, random-digit-dialed household telephone survey designed primarily
to measure outdoor recreation and environmental attitudes of Americans by surveying a random, crosssectional sample of non- institutionalized residents of the United States, 16 years of age and older. The
Human Dimensions Research Laboratory at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, an on-going NSRE
cooperator, conducts the survey almost daily.
48 The most recent rounds of the NSRE were conducted between late fall of 2006 and October 2007.
Included in these rounds were questions about what Americans see as the values derived from
protection of federal wildlands as Wilderness. All data used in this report were weighted to assure the
demographic profiles of survey respondents match those of the U. S. population 16 years old or older.
They have been statistically analyzed using widely accepted statistical approaches. Confidence
intervals at the 95-percent confidence level were computed for each percentage shown in the tables that
follow. Any two percentages in any of the tables can be compared. To assure consistence in the public
thinking probed in the survey, before reading the questionnaire, each respondent was given a brief,
factual explanation of federally designated wilderness areas.
49 NSRE, Table 1--Wilderness Values: Percent of U.S. residents age 16 and older who said extremely
or very important with 95% confidence interval, by year of NSRE interview, 4.
32
importance rural residents assign. A comparison was set up to see if rural residents
differed from urban residents, and thus differed from the majority of Americans. The
results are shown in Table 2. The answer is unequivocally ‘no’".

Fact: “Rural residents put the list of 13 Wilderness values in much the same order and
assigned very similar importance to them. From the highest percentages indicating
very to extremely important (protecting air and water quality, both over 90%) to lower
percentages (e.g., recreation opportunities and natural areas for science), there are no
statistical differences between urban and rural residents.”50
Do Citizens Want More Wilderness Areas?
Fact: “NSRE respondents were asked their opinions about whether they saw the
amount of federal land now designated as Wilderness as too little, about right, or too
much. Over half in 2006-2007 (almost 51%) indicated there is not enough Wilderness,
and 35 percent indicated the amount is about right.…
Fact: Only 4 percent expressed the opinion that there is already too much. The
percentage indicating the amount of designated Wilderness is "about right" increased
slightly between 1999 and 2007. This upward shift resulted in smaller percentages in
2007 indicating ‘too much or don't know.’ The percentage of people who said ‘not
enough’ changed very little ending at almost 51 percent in 2007.” 51
Do Citizens Want More Wilderness Designated in Their Own States?
Fact: “Asked how they felt about designating more of the federal lands as Wilderness
in their home state, more than two-thirds of respondents (67%) indicated they
somewhat or strongly favor more.… About 13 percent opposed more Wilderness in
their state. There were no statistical differences between response percentages in 19992000 and 2006-2007 to the question about adding more designated Wilderness in the
respondents' home state.”52
Confirmation: Year after year since 1964, the elected representatives of the people—
the best reflection of public opinion in a democracy—vote to protect more wilderness
areas. To see a bar graph illustrating this pattern, go to the federal website which
houses the definitive database and other information about every wilderness area,
www.wilderness.net; specifically to http://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/chartResults.
Doug Scott spent more than 40 years lobbying for The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, and
The Pew Charitable Trusts, working with local wilderness advocates to help with their
campaigns to persuade Congress to protect more national parks, national wildlife refuges, and
wilderness areas. His specialty is the history and policy of American wilderness preservation.
Doug travels often to speak on wilderness history and policy at training sessions of the four
federal agencies which administer units of the National Wilderness Preservation System.
50 NSRE, 5-6.
51 NSRE, 9, reference to table omitted.
52 NSRE, 9, reference to table omitted.
33
Doug is the author of The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage Through
the Wilderness Act (Fulcrum 2004) and Wilderness: America’s Common Ground (Fulcrum
2009). His anthology, Wild Thoughts: Short Selections by Great Writers about Nature,
Wilderness and the People Who Protect Them, will be published in late spring/early summer
2016.
Doug invites questions and comments in the interest of assuring fact-based discussions of
issues about wilderness and the Wilderness Act: [email protected]