shakran

That WAS sarcasm right?

K, I live in Minnesota, where every summer there's a huge fight about what to do with ATV's in the northern part of the state. If you want to read the bloody details, do a GIS for "Boundry Waters Canoe Area" + ATV

ATVs tear the crap out of the environment. They wouldn't do nearly as much damage if people would ride them responsibly, but few do. They see a mud hole, they immediately start racing through it over and over again. Puddle gets bigger and bigger. It's not uncommon for me to be hiking in northern MN and come across an area the size of a few football fields that's nothing but deep muddy ATV tracks.

Once the mud gets too whipped up by the ATV's, you can't get most ATVs through it anymore, so they start going around it. And tearing up the ground on the side of the giant mudhole. Whole sections of hiking trails have been wrecked by inconsiderate ATV drivers.

Then there's the noise pollution factor. ATVs are frikkin' loud when you hear 'em roaring by your tent out in the middle of nowhere where the loudest sound is usually a hoot owl. That not only wakes people up (for some reason the ATVers seem to like to get started at 6am) but all that noise drives away the wildlife that hikers came out to see. I can't tell you how many times I've been feet from a deer watching it do its thing when a fleet of ATVs roared by even as far as half a mile away and scared the animal off.

Minnesota has attempted to accomodate ATV riders by designating certain trails as ATV trails and others as hiking/X-country skiing ONLY trails. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. The ATV riders go on the hiking trails - or many times they just go off the trails wherever they feel like going. And of course, there aren't exactly a whole lot of security cameras out in nature, so it's difficult if not impossible to catch the assholes that are wrecking things for everyone else.

It's at the point now where the ATV riders and the hikers are about to come to blows. The hikers complain about what I talked abotu above, while the ATVers say the hikers don't have an ATV, don't understand ATVing, and don't understand that ATVers have just as much a right to be out in the state / national parks and forests as the hikers do.

My personal opinion is that merely buying an ATV does not automatically give you the right to ride it on any public land. One of the responsibilities of the government is not just to OWN the public land that makes up the parks, but to PRESERVE it. ATVs and environmental preservation are pretty much mutually exclusive due to the small, but significant, minority of inconsiderate riders. After all, there are about 150,000 privately registered ATVs in Minnesota. If only 1% of the ATV riders (a conservative estimate) break the rules on the trails, that means 1,500 ATVs are out destroying park land every year.

Sorry that this is probably not what you wanted to hear. It sounds like you'd probably be a responsible rider. Unfortunately, your fellow riders may not be so considerate, and as they say, once nature's gone, it's gone.