Tell Congress to Keep Bikes Out of Wilderness! 
 

For over 50 years, the Wilderness Act has protected Wilderness areas designated by Congress from machines of all types. This has meant, as Congress intended, that Wilderness areas have been kept free from cars, trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, bicycles, and all other types of motorized and mechanized transport.

Unfortunately, a loud contingent of mountain bikers and an off-shoot mountain biking organization, the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), have just convinced a notoriously anti-Wilderness member of the U.S. Senate – Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) - to introduce S. 2877, a bill to weaken the Wilderness Act and blast open every Wilderness in the nation to mountain bikes and other human-powered machines.

The Senate bill introduced in May follows an equally bad House bill introduced earlier by another notoriously anti-Wilderness member of Congress, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA).  His bill, H.R. 1349, would amend the Wilderness Act to allow bikes, strollers, wheelbarrows, game carts, survey wheels and measuring wheels in every unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System.  The Senate and House bills are not identical, but would have the same damaging effects.

In an especially cynical and disingenuous move, the mountain bikers seem to hide behind people with disabilities in their effort to make America’s wildest places merely a playground for cycling! In the House bill, the mountain bikers list “motorized wheelchairs” and “non-motorized wheelchairs” as the first uses to be authorized in Wilderness under their bill (even prior to the listing of “bicycles”), though the 1990 amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have clearly allowed wheelchairs in designated Wilderness for more than a quarter-century.

For more information regarding “Fake News” being spread by some mountain bikers, see Five Lies Being Used to Get Mountain Bikes into Wilderness.

Wilderness Watch has spearheaded a sign-on letter to Congress in opposition to opening up the National Wilderness Preservation System to bikes. So far it has resulted in a total of 150 wilderness-supporting organizations from around the nation signing on, clearly showing that the conservation community is united in its opposition to the mountain bikers’ efforts.

Now we need your help! Please take a few minutes to urge your senators and representative to oppose S. 2877 and H.R. 1349 and all attempts to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes in Wilderness.

At a time when Wilderness and wildlife are under increasing pressures from increasing populations, growing mechanization, and a rapidly changing climate, the last thing Wilderness needs is to be invaded by mountain bikes and other machines!