Letter: Off-road minority

Tom Wharton's "Thanks to Moab land managers" ( Tribune , Oct. 23) highlights an important figure from a recent Bureau of Land Management survey of public land users: Only 12 percent of visitors to lands managed by BLM's Moab field office recreate with off-road vehicles.

Unfortunately, Wharton omitted one important statistic: BLM's new travel plan makes 81 percent of these beautiful public lands near Moab available to ORV use via a dense web of "designated routes." The result is that it is nearly impossible for other recreationists to escape the sight and sound of motorized vehicles, even though the vast majority of visitors do not ride ORVs.

Remote canyons such as Ten Mile in Labyrinth Canyon, with its ancient archaeological sites and year-round stream critical for wildlife, are being destroyed by ORV use. Yet BLM's travel plan designates an ORV route in the streambed. Just one example where BLM allowed ORV routes to be haphazardly pioneered and then subsequently legitimized when the agency "designated" the unplanned maze of routes.

Although Moab's BLM planners have developed new campgrounds, as Wharton noted, BLM has failed to manage Moab's remarkable public lands in a balanced way for the majority of the users.

Mike Binyon

Moab

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Source: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_13670044

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