Which Wheels Are Wildest?

By Hillary Rosner, 10-23-05

I've been meaning for a while now to call attention to an interesting op-ed piece that ran in the Christian Science Monitor earlier this month. It was written by Erik Schultz, a "paraplegic wilderness advocate" and director of the ABS Foundation, which supports both wildlands conservation and mobility for the disabled—as well as the intersection of those two issues, wilderness access for the disabled. Schultz, who lost the use of his legs in a backcountry skiing accident, wrote about the bill that would designate a wilderness area in Idaho's Boulder-White Clouds mountains; the bill contains a provision to construct two primitive-access trails to accommodate wheelchairs.

Schultz wrote: "Wilderness is sometimes incorrectly perceived as a place not open to persons with disabilities, a myth perpetuated by opponents of wilderness preservation. For decades, special interest groups whose real goals are logging, drilling, and mechanizing our roadless public lands have dredged up tired rhetoric claiming that preserving wilderness discriminates against the disabled and elderly. For me, building roads into pristine country only means I have to go that much farther to get away."

Whether wheelchairs should be allowed in wilderness is something most of us lucky enough to have unimpaired use of our limbs likely never consider. But as Schultz points out, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, contains a section explicitly exempting wheelchairs from the prohibition on "mechanical transport" in the Wilderness Act of 1964. "The agencies that look after America's wilderness treasures are not required to make accommodation for wheelchairs on their trails," wrote Schultz, "but neither are they prohibited from doing so."

The ADA provision sparked a mini-controversy when the bill was passed, particularly among mountain bikers, who argued that wheelchairs, which require double-track trails, would do more damage to the fragile wilderness environment than mountain bikes on narrower single-track trails. They also took issue with the interpretation of "mechanical transport," on the grounds that if wheelchairs were okay then surely bicycles must be too. Back in 1991, a story in Trilogy magazine by Gary Sprung raised those objections.

"Any bicyclists feel they are unfairly excluded from wilderness areas, that the reasons for the prohibition are not rational, but simply political," Sprung wrote. "They suspect that the bicycle prohibition was spurred by environmental groups like Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society who traditionally represent hiking and equestrian oriented trail users. The new wheelchair law may renew that suspicion. Where were the environmentalists when the Congress was proposing to allow this new mechanical transport in wilderness areas? An organizer for a national Wilderness organization told me that many wilderness advocates in Washington, D.C. did not favor the amendment, but felt politically impotent on the issue. After all, who wants to appear to be 'against' the handicapped?"

Exactly what humans should and shouldn't be allowed to do in legislatively designated wilderness areas in this country is a touchy subject; on this blog, there was a heated exchange back in June on the question of mountain bikes. Some people argue that inclusiveness is key to wilderness support, and that prohibiting various activities (depending on who's making the case, it could be mountain biking, BASE jumping, ATV-riding, whatever) only narrows the already tenuous support for wilderness designation. The flip side of the argument is, essentially, that if you're going to allow every form of recreation and transportation, you might as well not even bother with the designation, as the whole place is going to go to pot.

Proponents of the Boulder-White Clouds bill, officially called the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act of 2005, praise it for its ability to be inclusive without excessively watering down the concept of wilderness—though of course the bill, introduced by Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, has its critics. (The main criticism is that too much has been compromised.) In addition to the wheelchair-access trails, the bill—which designates 300,000 acres of wilderness in the Boulder-White Clouds mountains near the headwaters of the Salmon River--sets aside specific areas for off-road vehicles and dirt bikes, bans snowmobiles and even cross-country skiing in crucial mountain goat habitat, and includes economic incentives for the neighboring communities.

Currently awaiting debate by the House Resources Committee, the bill appears to have fairly broad bipartisan support among Idahoans. A survey of Idaho voters last month, commissioned by the Idaho Conservation League and the Campaign for America's Wilderness, found that 59% of voters supported it—including 63% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats (and 51% of Independents). The survey didn't poll disabled voters, but if Schulz is any indication, they'd likely favor it: The bill calls for two mile-long, gently graded, compacted dirt trails, three feet wide and with large obstacles removed. "Perhaps most important," Schultz wrote, "these trails will allow a wheelchair user to roll along a gently graded trail alone and unassisted, experiencing the solitude of wilderness. I dream of the day I can roll up a wilderness trail along the East Fork of the Salmon River and cast a fly for wild trout, with no else around."

As far as I can tell from the bill, some trails in the proposed Boulder-White Clouds will be open to mountain biking—perhaps setting aside objections to the wheelchair trails? It remains to be seen whether the bill will pass, and what type of precedent it will set for access, and compromise, in future wilderness designations.
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