Trails and roads are good and very bad.
How do we protect wildlife and wildlife habitat while providing recreation to millions of outdoor enthusiasts?
In Colorado, surveys show that having wildlife to observe is second on peoples list of outdoor priorities. Their number one item is having roads and trails to access the wilds of Colorado. And these two priorities are creating a big problem.
Colorado has the largest elk herd in the nation, numbering 300,000, and people love seeing them, hearing them, harvesting them.
Elk, like all wildlife, need food, water, resting areas, calving areas and the ability to move unmolested to these areas as needed. Elk movement patterns are generational. The calves learn these paths by following their mothers and the herds throughout the year.
A study in Colorado found that if elk had to evade people seven times during the calving period, 30 percent of the calves died because of that disturbance. Increase that disturbance to 10 times and all the calves died. Unfortunately, calving time is springtime and this is also when all the hikers, bikers, and the rest of us are anxious to hit the woods and the trails after the doldrums of winter.
The study found that elk move 0.3 miles from hikers, 0.4 miles from mountain bikers and 0.5 miles from ATVs. It is this distance and the time away from their calves that is deadly.
The Colorado elk population is declining in some areas due to these disturbances.
Government land managers can use the latest science and knowledge of habitat and wildlife to create trails that avoid critical wildlife areas or close road access areas during calving and fawning periods like they do on Anderson Mesa to help antelope fawning success. The problem is so many hikers and bikers and ATV users in Arizona make their own trails without any regard to habitat damage or wildlife disturbance impacts.
We need people to stop making their own trails. We need the USFS to manage our trail system, and this includes enforcement and the closure of illegal user-created trails.
A new trail being opened in the Dry Lake Hills, the Big Bang Trail, was recently celebrated by outdoor enthusiasts and the USFS in this paper. Sadly, the dozens of user-created trails in the same area are disturbing wildlife and causing severe soil erosion issues that are being ignored. There are hundreds of illegal trails and roads on the Coconino National Forest.
Along with having trails and roads located based on human recreation needs and wildlife needs, can we agree that for every legal trail opened or improved that we should close 10 illegal ones?
