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The Wilderness Act forces us to choose between protecting open space and riding our bikes. In the name of environmental protection, it forces us to lump mountain biking with the evils of mining, oil drilling and logging. Wilderness forces us to see justice in allowing 1500 pound horses to chew through Wilderness trails while our waffle prints are regarded as a scourge of the Wilderness world.

Wilderness is not only renewing our age-old hostilities with the hiking groups, but is pitting biker against biker in a high stakes inter-nacine argument about the future of our passion. In the meantime, the Wilderness juggernaut rolls on across the country.

Did they really mean bikes?

There's still debate about whether the 1964 Congress really intended bicycles to be prohibited in Wilderness when they banned "other modes of mechanized transport" from Wilderness areas.

IMBA's Gary Sprung and Jim Hasenauer argue that it wasn't Congress's intention to prohibit bicycles in the original 1964 Wilderness Act. Sprung and Hasenauer believe that the Act was intended to prevent future non-human powered modes of transport that might come after combustible and electric engines. Bicycles, they argue, weren't included until two decades later.

This is difficult to confirm because of the absence of a documented legislative history about the Act, but it wasn't until 1984 under the Reagan administration that the U.S. Forest Service explicitly listed bicycles in the prohibition. Some bicycle advocates believe that this decision was made behind closed doors under pressure from traditional hiking organizations like the Sierra Club.

In a simple world, bikes could be exempted from the interpretation of "mechanized transport" and cyclists would have little to worry about with any existing or future Wilderness area. However, it's unlikely that the politicians are going to be willing to revisit this, especially with the increasing political clout of the Wilderness Coalitions. Hang gliders and climbers who use anchor hooks are also out of luck.

The only game in town

Wilderness is a powerful legislative tool to protect open space forever. It's congressionally sanctioned, widely understood by politicians and can be simply plug-and-played. All that's needed is 5,000 acres of federal land and some local political support. Sure, there are other ways to protect large tracts of open space, but the time and energy needed to craft a new policy that would cater to a few mountain bikers, hangliders and climbers makes it unlikely.

Even though other models of open space protection have been bandied about that are more recreationally friendly, no one has made much effort to get congressional recognition of an alternative to Wilderness. Most Senators have probably never heard of "National Conservation Areas," or of a "tiered approach" to Wilderness that could allow for mechanized recreation on some Wilderness lands.

For now, you either play the Wilderness game or fight it tooth and nail, and given how fundamentally flawed Wilderness is, it's tempting to just cry foul.

But politics is as much about pragmatism as it is about idealism-and usually pragmatism has the upper hand. The importance of being at the table-even if you don't like the meal-is key. The fight over Wilderness in California is raging, and even after IMBA held numerous meetings with the bill's sponsor, Senator Barbara Boxer, over half the 2.5 million acres of proposed Wilderness still includes popular mountain bike trails.

Did Senator Boxer stiff IMBA? Would the bill be even worse without IMBA's negotiation? Tough to say.

But some California mountain bike advocates, such as the Warrior's Society, are displeased with what they see as IMBA's strategy of appeasement with the Wilderness folk. Draped in a mix of Native American political rhetoric, the Warrior's Society doesn't want any sort of "treaty" and urges a mass mountain bike rebellion against Boxer's bill. The Wilderness folk speak with forked tongues, and the Warrior's Society urges mountain bikers to take a Last Stand.

But while high on the idealism scale, last stands didn't produce many positive results for Native Americans, and it's not hard to imagine a B-rate movie sequel, Last of the Mountain Bikers, resulting from this zero-sum gambit.

Not surprisingly, IMBA's recent announcement that they have signed on to a new age of cooperation with Wilderness organizations has received a mixed reaction from mountain bikers. The pragmatists see it as an opening to positively affect Wilderness boundaries, engage in dialogue and salvage important mountain bike trails. Others think IMBA is being duped by environmental extremists who would just as soon see mountain bikes banished from the planet.

Arizona advocate, Mark Flint, is one such critic who's opposed to negotiation. According to Flint, "mountain bicyclists continually have access threatened by Wilderness and people who call themselves environmentalists. To join forces with them seems to me an exercise in futility; we have nothing to gain and a lot of trails to lose. While IMBA sits at the table making nice with Wilderness organizations, mountain bicyclists in Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon and Nevada are watching proposals that would kill their access to trails."

Out of the fog of Wilderness, one thing is clear. The Wilderness paradox is driving a wedge through the mountain bike community, pitting advocate against advocate, and making it more difficult than ever to stand up to Wilderness with any unified resolve. Conspiracy theorists might see this as part of a Wilderness strategy to divide and conquer. However, it's more likely that we are simply doing this to ourselves because of the difficulties we have in getting our heads around Wilderness itself. It's time for someone-IMBA?-to get all the different mountain bike viewpoints around a table, work out our differences and find ways to develop a single plan and a single front...before it's too late.

Glide would like to thank the staff of Dirt Rag Magazine for their assistance with this piece.

For more information on The Wilderness Act, please visit the National Wilderness Preservation Act site.