Mountain Bikers and Grizzly Bears

[AngryScientist]

Originally Posted by Lionel

What shocked me was how fast he was moving. Amazing and quite scary.

there is a reason the prevailing warning is to NOT run from bears. they're fast!

listened to this recently; an interesting listen...

https://www.outsideonline.com/240292...ff-bear-attack

[Tickdoc]

My favorite quote from the article...."Dr. Servheen also believes that the sensational news of a grizzly bear killing a bike rider works against the bear from a public relations standpoint."

Any grizzly bear killing of a human is sensational news, is it not?

That bear may need to hire a public relations specialist.

I don't live or ride in bear country, but I have hiked Yellowstone and encountered a Grizzly. Fortunately he was more scared of us than we were of him and hightailed it up and over a ridge knocking rocks for most of his 20 minute climb to get away. It is a good thing, too, because we would never have been able to get away otherwise.

I always think back to Ambrose' book on Lewis and Clark when they encountered their first Griz that was shot in the head with a .50 cal musket and still charged them almost taking them out.

Such fearsome predators when they want to be.

Don't poke the bear.

[HenryA]

The part I found bothersome is the look of an underlying opinion that indeed people using the resource are the problem and in this particular case MTB riders. It feels like an argument to close off certain areas to recreation. Sometimes that is a good idea for man and beast alike, but not as the first knee jerk reaction to a perceived problem. It appears that the underlying message or agenda of the article is to provide evidence to support more restriction.

IMO, a resource that goes unused often goes unloved. People who use these places care about them in a personal way lots more than those who don’t. So there is a balancing act between use and preservation. Lots of that balancing act occurs in siloed decision making trains that seem to not acknowledge each other’s validity.

A bear attack is sensational news, but its not a reason to close use of an area, whether as an immediate reaction or a long term policy. “Bad cases make bad laws” seems to fit here. If the energy spent in all the hand wringing and fighting was spent educating the people who use or might use the resources we’d be better off.

[Blue Jays]

Originally Posted by HenryA

"...The part I found bothersome is the look of an underlying opinion that indeed people using the resource are the problem and in this particular case MTB riders...IMO, a resource that goes unused often goes unloved..."

Concur. This entire post is absolutely spot-on correct.
Many of us have seen MTB restrictions in multi-use places result in less maintenance to the point of total land mismanagement.

[unterhausen]

Originally Posted by HenryA

IMO, a resource that goes unused often goes unloved. People who use these places care about them in a personal way lots more than those who don’t. So there is a balancing act between use and preservation.

This is why I support hunting. Nobody listens to mountain bikers and hikers, but they do listen to hunters. If people can't hunt, they'll support paving over the woods.
Penndot was looking into bringing a 4 lane highway into State College from the east and the main proposal had the road destroying a wildlife area and a lot of local hiking and some really great mountain bike trails. If those things still existed, there would be the sound of the Detroit river to enjoy, whereas now it's silent back there. It would have been a travesty. It was crazy even though I see the logic of the route from a simply geographic perspective.

[Tandem Rider]

Originally Posted by unterhausen

This is why I support hunting. Nobody listens to mountain bikers and hikers, but they do listen to hunters. If people can't hunt, they'll support paving over the woods.
Penndot was looking into bringing a 4 lane highway into State College from the east and the main proposal had the road destroying a wildlife area and a lot of local hiking and some really great mountain bike trails. If those things still existed, there would be the sound of the Detroit river to enjoy, whereas now it's silent back there. It would have been a travesty. It was crazy even though I see the logic of the route from a simply geographic perspective.

This is why we all need to respect others in the woods. Here, mountain bikers have built, and maintain, literally hundreds of miles of trails and trailheads. They are to be shared with other users, hikers, runners, dog walkers, horses, hunters, etc. I see all of these folks out there, and that's a good thing. Every year there are a few complaints about other users and almost always it's someone not respecting the rights of others to use it too. There are rules about trail use and sometimes people ignore them. A smile and a greeting goes a long ways, we are all out there for the same reason.

[joosttx]

Originally Posted by AngryScientist

there is a reason the prevailing warning is to NOT run from bears. they're fast!

listened to this recently; an interesting listen...

https://www.outsideonline.com/240292...ff-bear-attack

Hey man, you know what they say, “ you don’t need to be faster than the bear, you just need to be faster than the person you are with”.

[Kirk007]

Originally Posted by Blue Jays

Concur. This entire post is absolutely spot-on correct.
Many of us have seen MTB restrictions in multi-use places result in less maintenance to the point of total land mismanagement.

Sure there are mountain bike haters that want closure, and some hikers want areas closed to horses and on and on - easy to point to the other user group and say that they are the problem. But its not a black and white - open and used or closed and abandoned issue.

For starters, nature did just fine before human "management" for eons. Our management of nature typically screws things up. These areas aren't "wasting" if not put to "wise use" for humans, they serve critical functions for the rest of the biotic community on earth; we are but one of millions upon millions of species.

And yeah, some places should be closed to at least mechanized use with temporal restrictions. A good example: the shrinking habitat that provides winter denning conditions for wolverines should be closed to both mechanized (snowmobile) and human powered (backcountry skiing) recreation during the denning period. It is a modest restriction to protect an endangered species (despite USFW's political decision not to list it).

I imagine most folks are sympathetic to the plight of deer in winter who are chased by folks' dogs - a big no no in the hunting and dog community. Why? Because of the stress it puts on the animal at a time when it is already severely stressed by temperature and decreased food availability. Well guess what -- studies over the past decade show that even cross country skiiers can pose similar threats.

And there's valid ecological reasons to continue to keep mechanized recreation out of wilderness areas (indeed there are good reasons to clamp down on all recreation in these areas). There are simply too many people in many of these areas yet the recreation community chafes at permitting and use restrictions - the irony of not agreeing to limit access then going to a wilderness area seeking solace and being pissed off cause there's too many people everywhere you go.

Should you be able to go mountain biking in grizzly country? In general, in nonwilderness areas I think so, and if you're mountain biking in Montana or Idaho and parts of Wyoming you probably are all ready. I forget the citation to the study but there was one in the Glacier-Waterton area that compared GIS data for some hikers/researchers with GIS data for collared bears. Over a rather extended period of time the hikers were in very close proximity to a bear on a regular basis, yet never saw the bears. One takeaway is that despite very frequent proximity, actual encounters, let alone lethal ones are rare. Bears aren't out looking for a fight with humans, quite the contrary, but encounters happen.

A good friend of mine was on an early morning mountain bike ride on a forest service road in Alaska when he came around a corner and there was a griz about 30 yards away. He stopped. The bear bluff charged twice before turning around. He was lucky; he could have been the feature of this article.

Bears, and cougars, are out there; be prepared, make noise, carry bear spray, exercise common sense, consider staying out of grizzly territory at key time periods, like in June when bears are coming out of their dens after hibernation, hungry and cranky. And if you surprise a bear and it turns on you, don't blame the bear - your in its backyard.

[GregL]

Originally Posted by tctyres

There's this, too:
https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/09/mou...ying-over-bear

Is anyone else disgusted by the absolute idiocy depicted in the linked story? Deliberately jumping a bear with a downhill mountain bike? It's one thing to accidently startle a wild animal during a trail encounter. It's a whole different level of stupid to pull a stunt like this. Definitely a Darwin Award nominee...

Greg

[GregL]

Originally Posted by Kirk007

Bears, and cougars, are out there; be prepared, make noise, carry bear spray, exercise common sense, consider staying out of grizzly territory at key time periods, like in June when bears are coming out of their dens after hibernation, hungry and cranky. And if you surprise a bear and it turns on you, don't blame the bear - your in its backyard.

It's not just off-road riding. My closest bear encounter came on a road bike. I came around a corner at the end of a long, steep climb to find a black bear slowly ambling across the road. He looked at the skinny bike rider and decided there wasn't sufficient food to attract his attention. He just kept on going into the woods at a leisurely pace. On the other hand, I was so filled with adrenaline that my fatigue vanished and I was ready for the sprint of a lifetime...

Greg

[Kirk007]

Originally Posted by GregL

Is anyone else disgusted by the absolute idiocy depicted in the linked story? Deliberately jumping a bear with a downhill mountain bike? It's one thing to accidently startle a wild animal during a trail encounter. It's a whole different level of stupid to pull a stunt like this. Definitely a Darwin Award nominee...

Greg

The situation at Whistler bike part is a disaster waiting to happen. I haven't been up there for awhile, but used to go every summer with my son and his friends. There were black bears everywhere - in the Village, between the trails (countless spottings while riding a lift to the upper trails), encounter on trails. I'm surprised no one has been seriously hurt.

And yeah, the guy jumping the bear.... Although not much stupider than what historically occurred at Yellowstone NP with bears - in the 70s it was completely out of hand - and what still occurs today with encounters with bison and elk. A lack of familiarity and simple ignorance leads to back decisions - "wild"life is an apt description.

[benb]

I usually am a big fan of the NYT and am not on the "fake news" bandwagon at all but this article just smacks of typical anti-MTB/anti-cycling nonsense. They're just inserting grizzly bears as a new reason. You could go through the article and substitute trail damage in for grizzly bears and the whole article would still make sense.

If they are actually serious they will talk about restricting hiking too. But they're not, they're trying to target bikes.

Bear accidents/deaths are a drop in the bucket. Such a low priority. There are probably more cyclists/pedestrians killed in NYC in a week than cyclists/hikers killed by all kinds of wildlife in 10 years. A guy hitting a bear on a descent is a one in a zillion occurrence. He'd be more likely to be killed by a lightning strike. They pull the "he's a ranger/authority figure too so if it happened to him it's really bad!" card too.

It just smacks of anti-cycling agenda/NIMBY/whatever. Besides.. problems occurring out in the west do not need the New York Times to solve them. I'm sure those who actually live out West are more than capable of figuring out their own solutions. It sounds like the author lives in Montana but what is his agenda? Why did this need to go through the NYT?

As for a place like Whistler.. that's overdevelopment... if it was a free running parkour course taking over the mountain it'd probably be the same thing. I bet that crowd spills food all over the place and generally behaves in bad ways which attract bears, as if the mountain hadn't already been bear habitat.

[GregL]

Originally Posted by Kirk007

And yeah, the guy jumping the bear.... Although not much stupider than what historically occurred at Yellowstone NP with bears - in the 70s it was completely out of hand - and what still occurs today with encounters with bison and elk. A lack of familiarity and simple ignorance leads to back decisions - "wild"life is an apt description.

Sadly, Yellowstone is still filled with non-sensible humans...

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/09/yel...nto-hot-spring.
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/news/072319.htm

When I visited Yellowstone, I couldn't believe how close people got to bison and moose. Don't anger the horned animal that weighs over a ton!

Greg

[Kirk007]

Originally Posted by benb

They're just inserting grizzly bears as a new reason. You could go through the article and substitute trail damage in for grizzly bears and the whole article would still make sense.

It sounds like the author lives in Montana but what is his agenda? Why did this need to go through the NYT?

The writer is from Montana, well known in the conservation community where the discussion is much broader than bikes -- it is all human recreation/use of backcountry in particular. I think its important to understand that the same folks having this discussion in Montana are bikers, hikers, skiers, rafters, hunters, anglers, climbers.... human users of the resource, trying to figure out how to balance human recreation with protecting the very thing that they all love - wild country.

It's easy to pass this off as hkers vs IMBA or whatever, but to do so sells the issue short.

Why the NYT? Because a critical component of this is issue is public awareness, even spawning discussion in nontraditional venues, like here for instance.

I'm not dismissing the reflexive anti-bike crowd; they are certainly out there - I've had spirited discussions too often to count trying to get them to see beyond their own bias.

[benb]

The increasing popularity of trail biking has brought to the fore some of the inherent conflicts in the uses of public land — natural regions or playgrounds. And while the growth of tourism may help local businesses, the forays into deeper parts of the forests by more and more people are encroaching on wildlife.

Mechanized mountain bikes and e-bikes, especially at higher speeds, are incompatible with hiking, hunting, and bird and wildlife watching, some argue. Safety is also a concern. Some mountain bikers revel at bombing down trails at 20 or 30 miles per hour on single-track trails that hikers also frequent

I am sorry but Mike Vandemann himself could have written this.

I see putting it in the NYT, a newspaper from an elite east coast city thousands of miles away as a way to escalate and get people from far away to dictate a solution when you can't convince the locals of your agenda. Get the Feds to come in with a heavy hand and ban the MTBs.

It's not like hundreds of mountain bikers are getting eaten by wildlife. The guy clearly didn't want the MTBs there in the first place cause they disturb people in his preferred activities.

The MTB riders probably live there too after all.

This is 100% classic anti-MTB agenda. You can't argue "playground vs nature preserve" and say Hikers are totally fine. If it's a nature preserve and you gotta ban some users other users don't get a pass.

As for eBikes... he probably has a point. If motor vehicles are not allowed maybe eBikes shouldn't be either. eBikes are motor vehicles IMO.. Motor vehicle = machine power assist to allow people to cover more ground with less effort. Seems like in this context eBikes are motor vehicles.