Off-roaders hope to curb outlaws

By Bill Harlan, Journal staff | Monday, March 26, 2007

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Helmet laws, loud-pipe restrictions and environmental activists don’t worry off-roaders like Troy Hall and Ross Brown.

Hall and Brown wear helmets, prefer quiet “stealth riding” and consider themselves environmentalists.

What worries them are the few off-roaders -- called “rogues,” “outlaws,” “yahoos” and other names -- who ride recklessly and carve permanent scars on the Black Hills.

“If you create ruts, you’re not doing the right thing,” Hall said Thursday morning during a short all-terrain vehicle expedition into the Black Hills. He worries that the "yahoos" will ruin the sport for everyone.

Hall is a weapons trainer at Ellsworth Air Force Base by day, but he’s also a dirt-bike enthusiast and vice president of the Off-Road Riders Association.

Brown, a salesman at Rice Honda in Rapid City, is president of the Off-Road Riders.

They’re working with hundreds of other off-roaders and half a dozen organizations to stop the depredations by “outlaws,” like the latest mud bog in the Hills high above Piedmont.

Brown reported the bog to the U.S. Forest Service last week.

“Unfortunately, this has been here for years,” he said, standing next to a long, wide ditch filled with muddy water a couple feet deep in spots. The bog was dry until recently, but late-winter snow and rain attracted full-size four-wheel-drive vehicles.

“Outlaw” rider zones

Outlaw off-roaders are particularly active in the northeastern Black Hills, west of Black Hawk and Piedmont. They’ve cut new trails on steep hillsides, torn through delicate wetlands and carved trails around barriers meant to enforce seasonal trail closures.

A Forest Service gate near Black Hawk was rammed open several weeks ago, and there are bullet marks in the new, sturdier lock on the repaired gate.

The Forest Service has responded, in part by raising fines for “resource damage” from $100 to $250.

In the Northern Hills during the past two weekends, Forest Service law officers issued nearly a dozen citations, in part by focusing on a similar “mud bog” near the Big Hill Cross Country Ski area.

Unfortunately, only seven Forest Service law enforcement officers cover most of South Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska and part of northern Colorado. With too few officers for too much land, for the most part, they can only respond to complaints.

Off-roading damage, however, isn’t always caused by outlaw riders.

ATVs are more affordable, more popular and easier to ride than ever, and the Black Hills National Forest has more roads and trails per square mile than almost any other national forest.

More traffic means more impact on trails. New riders -- or riders new to the area -- sometimes don’t realize their errors.

Education, Hall and Ross said, is the most important goal of the Off-Riders Association. (See the box.)

Two task forces

All of those factors are combining to put pressure on public lands, and the result will be stricter regulations. Riding in the Black Hills National Forest, for example, soon will be restricted to designated trails.

Creating that trail system, however, is no simple task.

In Custer, a Forest Service “travel management” team is working on the trail system itself, using thousands of comments from forest users and dozens of maps submitted by off-roaders and conservationists alike.

In Pierre, Gov. Mike Rounds’ 13-member off-roading task force is working on another part of the puzzle: money.

The state Game, Fish & Parks Department, for example, could manage the trail system in the Black Hills in cooperation with the Forest Service, just like the state manages the snowmobile trails on the national forest.

Money to build, maintain and sign the trails could come from registration fees for the state’s 60,000 or so off-road vehicles, which raises thorny questions.

Should the fee be $15 (which earns $900,000)?

Should it be $20 (which earns $1.2 million)?

Then there are the questions of whether to exempt farm ATVs from registration, whether to use part of the fuel tax for off-roading and whether to set aside an excise tax from off-road vehicle sales.

The governor’s task force also will recommend how or whether to license off-highway vehicles for highway use. “It’s a huge safety issue,” state Sen. Mac McCracken, R-Rapid City, who serves on the task force, said.

All those questions portend long legislative hearings next year.

A key trailhead

Designing the trail system in the Black Hills will be the responsibility of the Forest Service.

Hall, Brown and many other riders have also submitted dozens of trail suggestions to the Forest Service in the form of maps and precise coordinates with global positioning systems.

Though the Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., is demanding the designated trail system, headquarters is not offering money. “It’s a totally unfunded mandate,” Hall said. So he and other off-roaders stand ready to volunteer their own labor.

They also hope to have a say in where the trails are built.

The old Piedmont fire trail, which climbs west up the steep ridge behind Piedmont, is especially important to off-roaders. It’s one of the few access points to the Black Hills between Rapid City and Sturgis.

The trail is an old road -- rocky, hard-surfaced and quick drying n that’s ideal for off-roading.

“This is a trail we don’t want to lose,” Brown said. “I have no doubt this will be a trailhead.”

Other trails and trailheads will be harder to sell -- to the Forest Service and to local residents.

Becci Rowe, for example, lives in High Meadows, south of Piedmont atop the ridge west of the new town of Summerset.

Rowe is a trail runner, a hiker, a conservationist and an activist for what the Forest Service calls “non-motorized users.”

Rowe was originally motivated by the fight, eventually successful, to ban four-wheelers from nearby Botany Canyon. But she also has a personal stake, because four-wheelers race by her house every day during summer.

“It’s Grand Central Station,” she said. “They’re going at 6 in the morning and coming back at midnight.” Sometimes even later. “They’re hootin’ and hollerin’ and having a good time,” she said.

Hard compromises

Hall and Brown sympathize with Rowe. They say they’ll support noise restrictions at trailheads.

But as the Forest Service narrows its choices for designated trails, the debates will be sharp. Some four-wheelers already have suggested a designated “mud bog” area, an idea the Forest Service so far has not welcomed.

State officials also will have to make hard decisions, beginning with regulations for riding in the ditches that parallel roads.

At crossroads, the ditches form natural jumps that are attractive to younger riders. Adjacent landowners often resent the off-road traffic, which also can conflict dangerously with highway traffic.

Pennington County already has banned ditch riding in the Nemo area, but Jason Glodt, an aide to Rounds, told the task force, “There’s no clear law regulating the use of ATVs in ditches.”

Then, there’s the odd problem created by drought-shrunk lakes, especially in eastern South Dakota. These lakes now have wider shorelines, which, according to state law, are “public highways.” This little-known fact has led to disputes between shoreline off-roaders and lakeside residents.

“There are some very upset landowners,” Glodt told the governor’s task force last week.

Technological marvels

The governor’s task force next meets in Pierre on May 7, and when it does, it will tackle the issue of how to define off-highway vehicles.

The definition will have to take into account dirt bikes, ATVs, mid-sized four-wheelers and big-tire “rock crawling” four-wheelers -- not to mention the odd Escalade that thinks it’s a trail vehicle.

Further complicating the question are “utility vehicles” (a slower, wider work-horse version of the ATV) and exotic species such as the new Quadski -- an ATV that converts into a personal watercraft in five seconds -- and the Hovertechnics hover craft, which glides over water or land.

“Defining ATVs, OHVs and UTVs is not going to be an easy task,” state GF&P trail specialist Scott Carbonneau warned the task force.

Creating a trail system in the Black Hills won’t be easy, either, nor will figuring out how to pay for it.

The deadlines

The governor’s task force hopes to have bills ready in time for the 2008 Legislature, which meets in January and February.

The Forest Service hopes to have a designated trail system in the Black Hills by 2009.

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com