LINES IN THE DIRT

PART TWO THE BATTLE FOR TRAIL ACCESS

THE LIGHTNING ROD

HOW ONE CONVERSATION CHANGED THE COURSE OF MONTANA MOUNTAIN BIKING

“ACCESS IS NOT A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT,”

ERIC MELSON DECLARES. “IT’S OURS TO GO AND GET.”

“You can’t wait until the end to throw your hands up and call bullshit,” says Eric Melson. “You have to be there from the beginning as a productive member in the conversation, with reasonable solutions. You can’t expect everything is going to go your way.”

Melson, the 30-year-old former advocacy manager of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, is standing next to a bike-legal trail surrounded by Wilderness 4 miles north of Missoula, Montana, where he lives. It’s a toasty mid-August morning in the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area, not to be confused with the adjacent Rattlesnake Wilderness, which encompasses 33,000 acres to the north. Congress designated both areas with one act in 1980, and 37 years later, the national rec area remains a rare companion designation to Wilderness—basically an inholding where the ban on activities including mountain biking doesn’t apply.

Savvy bike advocates will highlight the wording Congress used in the Rattlesnake act, which identifies bicycling as a form of “primitive recreation” akin to “hiking, camping, backpacking, hunting, fishing, and horseback riding.” All of those activities are permitted in Wilderness, of course, except for biking, which was banned four years after the Rattlesnake bill passed.

As Melson points out, it is significant that Congress provided a way for mountain bikers and wilderness to coexist here. Missoula is where the Wilderness movement was born. The Wilderness Institute is based here. So is Wilderness Watch and the U.S. Forest Service’s Region One headquarters, by many accounts the most pro-Wilderness region in America (and the launching pad for the last three Forest Service chiefs).

Thanks to a spate of recent forest plan revisions and lawsuits brought by the environmental community, as well as a groundbreaking lawsuit from the bike community, Montana remains the controversial epicenter of mountain-bike access on federal land. Depending on whom you ask, mountain bikers in Montana have lost access to between 700 and 1,000 miles of trail in the past decade. Much of that has been high-alpine singletrack in recommended wilderness areas, or RWAs, where the future is as fuzzy as the Forest Service’s management doctrine.

Melson understands the equation better than almost anyone. Prior to