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Ah, wilderness, where nature reigns supreme and we humans are merely visitors. That's one way to look at it. Another way, increasingly popular in this era of extreme sports, is to treat a wilderness area like a big roofless gymnasium.
Sometimes it's just harmless fun. Take Great Sand Dunes National Monument, where a fellow named Andy Bielecki got cited last summer by the National Park Service.
For several years, Bielecki had organized the Tobasco Extreme Heat Race at the Sand Dunes -- participants race up and down the dunes on snowshoes.
The event inspired some criticism that the event
violated the wilderness character
of the Dunes. For
one thing, the participants were having fun and making
noise, which disturbs the quiet and solitude that
wilderness is supposed to offer. For another, they left
trails in the sand -- human imprints.
Neither objection makes much sense at the Sand Dunes.
It's a noisy place anyway on a busy summer weekend, and as soon as the wind comes up -- which never takes more than 10 minutes in the San Luis Valley -- all tracks vanish.
Park Superintendent Steve Chaney explained that Bielecki
should have applied for an event permit this year, since it
was a group activity. Another reason for the citation is
that Park Service policy generally prohibits competitive
events
in wilderness zones.
At about the same time as Bielecki had trouble with the
Park Service, there were a couple of events -- events that
certainly appear competitive
-- occurring in other
wilderness areas.
On Sept. 11, Andrew Hamilton of Boulder jogged into somebody's record book. He had just climbed all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks in record time: 13 days, 22 hours, 48 minutes, beating the old record by an hour and 28 minutes.
Such climbing sure sounds like a competitive event. Colorado 14ers come in many varieties -- several have roads to their summits and a couple are in private hands -- but many are in wilderness areas.
Bielecki got a citation for a harmless snowshoe race. Hamilton got admiring publicity for setting a new record in his wilderness competition -- running up peaks that already suffer from overuse.
About a month before Hamilton's speedy climbs, another Boulder athlete -- Buzz Burrell -- set a different outdoor record. He completed the Colorado Trail, 470 mountainous miles from Denver to Durango, in just 11 days. He had sponsors, he was raising money for the Colorado Trail Foundation, and he ran through six wilderness areas along the way.
Was it a competitive event, and thus something that shouldn't have happened in a wilderness?
Forest Service wilderness regulations suggest that
Burrell was breaking the rules: Do not permit
competitive events, including competition involving
physical or mental endurance of a person or animal
...
But on the ground, It's a tough call,
said John
Buehler, recreation ranger for the Leadville District, home
to Colorado's two tallest peaks -- Mt. Massive in formal
wilderness, Mt. Elbert just roadless -- as well as a few
wilderness miles of Colorado Trail.
If there had been a group of runners, then the Forest
Service wouldn't allow that kind of competition in
wilderness areas,
Buehler said. But with just one
or two people, even they are competing for some kind of
record -- well, it's different.
It is. But the notion of wilderness speed records doesn't fit well with the concept of wilderness as a place of solitude and reflection.
That's why the Colorado Trail Foundation is going to quit keeping such records. Although Burrell's feat raised money for the foundation and its work of maintaining and improving the trail, foundation directors soon asked themselves whether an extreme running event fit with the trail's stated purposes of education and family recreation.
Board chairman George Miller said a new policy will be
in force. We don't control who uses the trail,
he
said, but we can control what the foundation sponsors or
affiliates with, and in the future, we will not have
anything to do with speed records on the Colorado
Trail.
The Colorado Trail is there to savor, not to rush through at 40 miles a day. It wasn't designed as a racetrack. The 14ers ought to be more than big rocky Stepmasters.
By federal law, wilderness is supposed to be a place of renewal, not the Nike version of the Daytona 500. There are a lot of things that belong in a backpack, but a stopwatch isn't one of them.
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