Who Rules The Trail?

By Amanda Ripley

To hike up Red Creek Road, a nine-mile zigzag up the side of Red Table Mountain in Colorado's White River National Forest, is to experience what yoga classes aspire to visualize. You wind through canopies of blue spruce trees to emerge in soft meadows of swaying wildflowers. A gurgling stream escorts the trail, and silvery sagebrush perfumes the air.

To ride up the same trail on an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) is to gun a Harley Fat Boy through the yoga class, whooping a great big belly laugh as you send leotarded pixies running for cover. In an hour, you can cover more terrain than you can walk in half a day. Two hours of wrestling your machine up the mountain and you're at 11,000 ft.--in a hallowed piece of Rocky Mountain forest where the air is light and the trees fragile. And it's all yours. The only hikers up here tend to be hardcore backpackers who cut off their toothbrush handles to lighten their loads. You're not even winded. Charlie Cox, a carpet-store owner from Glenwood Springs who heads the local snowmobilers' club, stares at a sheer red cliff glowing in the distance. "This is something we don't tell people in New York about," he says. "Or Denver." Cox, 51, climbs back onto his red Polaris Xplorer 400, knowing that this might be one of his last rides up Red Creek.

Along with hundreds of other White River trails, Red Creek is endangered--or close to being saved, depending on how you look at it. The 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest is Colorado's biggest playground, encompassing everything from the popular resorts of Vail and Aspen to alpine meadows populated only by elk. This year 31 million people are expected to visit, up 10% from just four years ago, fed by Colorado's booming popularity. Every 15 years the U.S. Forest Service must create a new land-use plan for the region, and the draft released in 1999--six years in the works--has precipitated a contentious debate, of which Red Creek is just one breathtaking battleground.

When the service proposed banning vehicles from 47,000 more acres--adding to the 784,000 acres already closed off--a political firestorm ensued. Colorado Congress members and their snowmobiling constituents accused the service (an agency usually criticized as being a caddy for timber companies) of putting ferns before humans. The White River Conservation Project criticized the plan as too little too late and called for blocking off 300,000 additional acres. "Red Table is one of the finest undisturbed mixed forest stands in the Rocky Mountains, and making it a wilderness area would protect that," says the project's director, Richard Compton. And, he points out, the plan would still leave a yawning 1.5 million acres for snowmobile use. All told, the public fired off 14,000 impassioned responses to the proposal, with no consensus emerging.

The battle is stoked by divisions of class, real and perceived. Jack Welch, head of the 600,000-member Blue Ribbon Coalition of motorized recreationists, calls the greens "elitist." Many of his fellow drivers see their enemies either as rich ski folk defending their million-dollar chalets along the Volvo/Chardonnay line or as REI-outfitted granola eaters who want the backcountry to themselves. The greens in turn view the ATV crowd as an emission-spewing, beer-guzzling NASCAR subset that stops to smell the flowers only after running over them.

Early next year the Forest Service will release its final plan for White River--which many expect to foreshadow plans for other national forests. Prospects for banging a 4x4 up Red Creek look grim. Signs will probably go up banning anyone riding a machine, or even a bike. In winter, nature lovers ambitious enough to carve their own path up Red Creek will probably be able to bathe in the wild silence without the whine of snowmobile engines. Then again, off-roaders have never been known for slavishly obeying official signs.

--By Amanda Ripley. Reported by Rita Healy/Denver

With reporting by Rita Healy/Denver