Allowing off-highway vehicles in Utah’s national parks is a mistake

More mechanized traffic in already crowded parks is another Trump administration gift to industry and Utah politicians.

Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah receives more than 1.2 million visitors per year, but only a tiny fraction make it down to the park’s south end along the spectacular Waterpocket Fold. This section is more austere than the busy area along Highway 24, and it’s far quieter as a result. Even during peak season, you can linger by the dirt road here for hours without seeing another vehicle.

That’s likely to change Nov. 1, when the National Park Service is slated to begin allowing off-highway vehicles, or OHVs, to use roads in national park service units in Utah. The nation’s other national parks will remain off-limits to the vehicles.

Palmer “Chip” Jenkins, the agency’s acting intermountain regional director (yes, another “acting” official in the Trump Interior Department) ordered the change in late September without seeking public comment. The order was not illegal — it’s an administrative decision — but it is unusual. The OHV plan for Glen Canyon Recreation Area, for example, took the Park Service nine years to craft. Jenkins’ recent order is purportedly intended to “align” the parks with Utah law, which allows “street-legal” OHVs on many public roads. But it appears to be another instance of the Trump administration bending to industry and Utah’s conservative politicians at the expense of some of the last OHV-free places in the West.

To understand how this might change the parks, just look at San Juan County, Colorado, its rugged mountains crisscrossed with hundreds of miles of roads left from over a century of mining.

In the early 2000s, San Juan County’s leaders moved to open virtually all county roads to OHVs, relying on arguments similar to those bandied about by advocates today: Those roads were already traveled by thousands of vehicles each summer; OHV riders would be subject to the same traffic laws as other cars; they wouldn’t be allowed to go off-road; and “quiet users” could escape the uptick in traffic, noise, dust, and other impacts by simply getting a half-mile or so away from the road.

Read the rest of this opinion piece here: https://www.hcn.org/articles/national-park-service-allowing-off-highway-vehicles-in-utahs-national-parks-is-a-mistake