The Bureau of Land Management is struggling to come up with a new plan for the regulation of All Terrain Vehicles in the million-acre White Mountains Recreation Area north of Fairbanks, Alaska -- and Fairbanks News-Miner Outdoors Editor Tim Mowry thinks it's going to be a very difficult job. Future of ATVs in Alaska remains up for debate is the title of today's article in which he discusses the dilemma.
Mowry enumerates the advantages of ATVs as being great for dragging a dead moose out of the bush, training sled dogs in the fall, and "a blast to bomb around on if you're a kid, or even an adult who likes to act like a kid." But then, in an amazing performance for an Alaskan outdoors editor, he writes, "four-wheelers are a menace that threaten to rip out the very heart of Alaska--its unspoiled wilderness. They allow us to go places and do things that we normally shouldn't be doing. They tear up trails. They make too much noise. They kill people."
Personally, I don't think they are all that great even for training sleddogs. Few mushers are able to use them in such a way that the dogs don't wind up relying on help from the engine on hills, or "floating" on the fast straightaways. I've heard more than one person with insufficient dog-driving experience tell hair-raising tales of the ATV run that went badly wrong. Generally speaking, when you train sleddogs in the fall, you want to put the emphasis on doing things RIGHT, right from the get-go, which means you should accent control and hard pulling. Hooking 12 or 16 excited animals to a 500cc bombing-around buggy and taking off down the trail at top speed is not the way to accomplish that goal.
So now even the Alaskans are realising that big knobby tires and 500cc engines don't go hand in glove with the unspoiled wilderness. Well, while there's life, there's hope -- lets see what the BLM comes up with.
Posted by jjeffrey at September 9, 2005 07:04 PM