An Axle to Grind

High in an alpine meadow, John Gatchell, investigative hiker, spots the tracks. Fat tires have carved deep gashes in a mountain stream bed, leaving a muddy morass and puddles tainted with the telltale iridescence of gasoline. Gatchell pulls out his tape measure and wades knee-deep into the muck. He announces with an edge to his voice the width of the damaged area: 15 feet across.

This meadow, just east of the Continental Divide, cradles the headwaters of a creek that flows into the Yellowstone, the West’s longest free-flowing river. Grizzly bears roam the slopes and dine on meadow greenery. Rare Yellowstone cutthroat trout dart through the creek.

But now the prints of bear and moose are intermingled with the tire tracks of all-terrain vehicles, a telling mosaic of the latest public land-use battle in the rural West. The syndrome of ATV enthusiasm and environmental backlash, already playing out in California and the Utah desert, has spread to one of the most remote areas in one of the nation’s most remote states.

More people are enjoying the freedom of riding four-wheeled machines with names like Grizzly, Raptor and Trail Blazer. They venture where hikers, bikers and horses cannot--straight up steep dunes, canyons and mountainsides.

Rock Creek Trail in the Gallatin National Forest leads to green meadows tinted with the blues of lupine and columbine, 8,700 feet above sea level. Gatchell hiked for three hours to reach this spot; a motorized driver can get here in less than an hour.

Some users describe discovering old mines and cabins abandoned and forgotten for decades. Others boast of bagging deer and elk that might elude hunters on foot.

“The feeling of freedom of being out there, it’s almost indescribable,” said Matt Krsul, 46, a Butte native who heads out with his dirt bike any chance he gets.

Hikers like Gatchell grumble that careless ATV drivers are damaging trails, eroding soil, frightening wildlife, spreading alien weeds and destroying solitude. Tensions peak during hunting season, which opened this week, with traditional hunters on foot and horseback complaining of piercing motor noise that shatters the autumn quiet and drives away game.

“You mix gasoline and testosterone, and you get an ATV out of it,” grouses Gatchell, conservation director of the Montana Wilderness Assn. and a leading critic of cross-country motorized travel on public lands.

Critics blame the U.S. Forest Service for granting ATVs the freedom to slice and dice the wild lands, blazing their own trails and transforming foot trails into “troads” wide enough for a lumber truck. They accuse some forest managers of having too cozy a relationship with local ATV clubs and the ATV industry, pointing to efforts where ATV clubs maintain and even build trails in national forests.

All-terrain drivers say they feel under attack, too. They accuse hikers of trying to bar public lands to all but liberal, bird-watching “enviros” from New York and California.

Many riders are native Montanans who grew up on farms, and they appreciate a trail vehicle that requires no water and no hay. “You come home, put it in the garage, and you’re done,” said Earle Williams, 65, of Butte, a retired Forest Service engineer and president of an ATV users’ club.

Public land managers were caught by surprise as the number of state-registered ATVs and motorcycles in Montana more than doubled to 18,953 between 1990 and 1998. Environmental groups responded with lawsuits accusing federal agencies of failing to keep machines out of important grizzly habitat and fragile wilderness study areas.

In July, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the state’s two largest federal landowners, enacted a three-state plan that is supposed to ban off-trail incursions by ATVs. But many environmentalists call the plan too weak, and some are appealing to have it strengthened.

Many four-wheel enthusiasts, by contrast, fear the plan is the first step toward closing popular routes to ATVs on millions of acres of public lands. They equate it with the controversial Yellowstone National Park snowmobile ban: Once again, they contend, regulators and environmentalists are locking up the forests and throwing away the key.

Adding to the tension is the ambiguity of the new rules. Recurring use is OK. Burrowing through new land is not. Were those 15 feet of tire tracks Gatchell found in that stream bed illegal? Unclear, a forest service official said. “There is no legal way to cross a stream. I can’t even say there’s a protocol.”

In a state that was the last in the union to impose daytime speed limits on its highways, anger is pronounced. When a horse outfitter named Chris R. McNeill spoke publicly in favor of a lawsuit to limit off-road ATV use, vandals slashed the tires of his haying equipment, broke trailer windows and damaged an engine.

Both sides say they feel cramped by the other--by regulations, or by the whine of dirt bikes in once-desolate meadows.

Matt Krsul and Chris McNeill, both Montanans, both 46, love the land. Like their fathers before them, they run businesses that allow people to enjoy the freedom that comes from roaming the open countryside.

But when it comes to ATVs, the parallels end.

Krsul still remembers the day in 1961 that the first crate of Honda motorcycles arrived in Butte. His father was the first Honda motorcycle dealer in town, and the cycling craze had penetrated even this faded copper-belt mining city on the Continental Divide.

Today, Krsul owns Redline Sports, selling motorcycles, ATVs and snowmobiles in the same Harrison Avenue building where his father sold cycles. ATVs in gleaming crimson and emerald crowd his storefront showroom. Prices start at $4,300 and run up to $7,200. He sold 234 new ATVs in the first seven months of this year.

All this talk of trail closings and lawsuits is making him wary. Yes, a few “bad apples” among the motorized crowd may go tearing out into fields and, yes, some lands are too fragile for ATV and motorcycle tires. “But if all of a sudden they’re closing down big parts of trails-- then, they’ve gone too far.”

Krsul says his business would suffer seriously if ATVs were banned from huge chunks of national forest. “God forbid, it ever goes that far.”

Horse outfitter McNeill has a different nightmare: that ATVs will gain even more freedom on Forest Service lands, driving him and other horse outfitters out of business.

His is a time-honored way to see the West, from atop a horse, moving single file along a tree-shaded trail. In the old days, he’d meet up with a few hikers, or maybe another outfitter. Today, he never feels entirely free of the specter of ATVs.

“It’s annoying, and it makes it hard to advertise a wilderness-type trip, because if you run into [ATVs], it’ll turn some folks off,” said McNeill, whose father started Dillon-based Diamond Hitch Outfitters 29 years ago.

McNeill says he has stopped using the scenic Lacey Creek Trail in the West Pioneer mountains because of burgeoning ATV traffic and safety concerns. His worst-case scenario: leading a group up a rocky trail when a four-wheeler barrels downhill, causing a horse to bolt and throw its rider. He’s lost that sense of relaxation he once enjoyed on horseback. Now, he’s dreading that faraway, motorized whine.

The future of ATV use casts even wider ripples with mining and timber harvesting on the wane, making tourism ever more important. At the rustic restaurant and bar called the Wise River Club, south of Butte, owner Chester Pearce says that closing trails to ATVs would kill his business. Pearce hangs a sardonic wooden sign inside: “Environmentalists, Welcome to Montana. Please Park at Border and Walk In.”

*

ATV foe John Gatchell did arrive on foot. He hitchhiked west from his native Detroit when he was 19, walking from Alberta into Montana by Waterton Lakes near the Continental Divide.

Today, Gatchell, 48, ever-armed with tape measure, maps and camera, patrols the back country in search of man-made scars. His passion has earned him a heroic reputation among conservationists across the West.

He came to the Montana Wilderness Assn. after years of construction work, timber work and carpentry, angered by the damage caused by logging roads the forest service was building.

He moves from mountains to town meetings to courtrooms, preaching that the Forest Service has betrayed its mission. He takes the story back a quarter-century, to 1977, when Congress passed the Montana Wilderness Study Act, making nine areas totaling 973,000 acres candidates for wilderness status--the strongest federal protection for wild lands.

The bill, authored by then-U.S. Sen. Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.), a conservation champion, stated that until Congress decided whether to grant the lands wilderness status, they were to be managed “so as to maintain their presently existing wilderness character and potential.”

Twenty-four years later, Congress has yet to act.

Meanwhile, burgeoning numbers of ATVs have carved hundreds of new routes through the nine areas. Gatchell’s group went to court in 1996 to protect the land from further damage. A federal judge ruled in May that the Forest Service violated the 1977 law by failing to maintain wilderness character. He ordered the agency “to take reasonable steps to restore the wilderness character of any Montana Wilderness Study area as it existed in 1977.” Federal attorneys are appealing the ruling.

Rolling back the clock would be a formidable task, biologically and economically. The areas are rife with hundreds of new, unmapped trails, and former footpaths have become bona fide roads. The Forest Service in 1990 quietly deleted a rule barring vehicles wider than 40 inches from national forest trails. That meant the new, wider ATVs could move throughout the forests on former foot trails.

A number of Forest Service employees opposed the rule change, according to documents Gatchell’s group went to court to obtain. One comment: “Just because somebody produced it, and somebody else bought it doesn’t mean that the public has to provide the land to run it on.”

Gatchell remains convinced the Forest Service will be forced to close user-created roads and restore areas such as the delicate meadows surrounding Rock Creek.

Others wonder where the government would find money for restoration and enforcement, especially with a White House that favors free markets and has repeatedly sided with motorized recreation on federal lands. With only 28 law-enforcement officers patrolling 16.8 million acres of national forest in Montana, a few ATVs spinning wheels in a mountain stream bed would rarely be noticed, let alone investigated.

Even ranchers, often seen as hostile to environmentalists, are growing tense over off-road activity. Rancher Norman Tebay keeps his cattle on land his family has leased for half a century near property that riders call the “Whitetail-Pipestone” area east of Butte. It is so popular with ATV riders that conservationists began to write it off as a “sacrifice zone.”

Tebay’s wife has taken hundreds of photographs documenting ATV damage. Then Tebay joined a special panel of motorized users, ranchers and conservationists to come up with solutions. He reports that ATV riders on his land now seem more courteous. Members of a Butte-based ATV club volunteered to build cattle guards on the pasture lands so that if riders left gates open, cattle would not disappear. When one of Tebay’s cows caught its leg in a cattle guard and died, club members remodeled the guard design to make sure that cow hooves could not slip through.

Some hope to bring motorized users and hikers together in a massive inventory of trails that the Forest Service is mandated to complete.

Vaughn Stokes, director of engineering for the service, asked both sides to help in the effort. The Blue Ribbon Coalition, a high-profile motorized advocacy group, offered to help.

Several prominent conservation groups declined, dubious that ATV groups should be asked to determine what is--and isn’t--a trail when their constituents presumably want forests with more ATV access.

*

Gatchell was walking downhill along Rock Creek one evening after a 13-hour hike when he stopped short, listening.

“Do you hear it? There, that bird. It’s a hermit thrush. We call it the Montana nightingale.”

With that, he told the tale of an emperor who grew enchanted with the song of a nightingale. He brought the bird to court. Then the emperor received the gift of an artificial nightingale encrusted with diamonds, rubies and sapphires which, when wound up, could sing and move its tail.

The real nightingale fled to the woods while the artificial bird sang to the court. Months later, a spring snapped, silencing the contraption forever. Eventually, the real nightingale returned to comfort an ailing emperor.

The moral of the story, Gatchell said, strolling home in the dusk, is that the most beautiful song comes from nature--and only in stillness can you hear it.