Stop The ORV Madness

You can stop an illegal off-road vehicle assault on wilderness study land with just one click

This Saturday, between 500 and 1,000 ATVs, Jeeps, and other off-road vehicles plan to illegally drive up the riverbed of the Paria Canyon in a BLM wilderness study area near Kanab, Utah. They're doing it to protest BLM plans to actually enforce keeping ORVs out of this wilderness area near Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

But you can stop it with a simple mouse click and a bit of typing: The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance set up an automated form which will send a fax to the acting director of the BLM urging him to enforce the law and stop the protesters from trashing the desert landscape.

For years, the Utah BLM looked the other way when ORV users used the Paria Canyon to access the ghost town of Paria, but the expectation is that it could change under the new administration. This is your chance to take a second to show your support for protecting Utah wilderness.

—Ted Alvarez

Stop the Illegal Paria Canyon ORV Ride (Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance)

Via The Adventure Life

PRINT THIS PAGE EMAIL THIS PAGE RSS FEED

Digg Delicious Yahoo Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon Google Newsvine Facebook Twitter

READERS COMMENTS

There are U.S. Forest Svc wilderness areas in New Mexico that used to contain roads, bridges, and generating stations that lead to now-defunct mines. Make for a nice trail bed when they haven't been used for 100 years or so.
Posted: May 22, 2009 Hk

Let me shed a little light on the subject, they are both correct.� But what both forgot to mention is what most people don't seem to know� that it is NOT illegal to ride in a WSA, if there was a road in the WSA before it became a WSA.� The reality is that because the road was there, the area should NOT have qualified as a WSA in the first place!� Now they are trying to close roads to bring the area up to the standards needed to qualify as a wilderness.� That is what the fight is about.� If you read the Wilderness Study Act of 1977 it states that an existing road in a WSA CAN'T be closed just because it is in a WSA!� They have to show that because the use of that road causes other negitive effects to the area, the use of the road itself should be permited as it was before it became a WSA!� If you would look back, the BLM disputed the WSA status,and in 1990 the BLM went so far as to promote motorized use in the Paria, they had signs stating exactly that, at least through the 1990's, well after it became a Monument. I don't understand why some people are so willing to give up their rights so easily, I guess they can't see where this will lead to.� Good luck!
Posted: May 11, 2009 Ray Wells

Well, in case the bad spelling in the previous comment doesn't tip people off, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Certainly not all of the Paria River is in a WSA; no one has claimed that. But the portion of the river that these off-road vehicle nut jobs drove into was in a WSA.

One thing that is not technically correct--the portion of the road that leads to the Paria ghost town is legally open, and no one is trying to close it. It's continuing past the ghost town and driving north up the riverbed that is illegal. Of course, that's exactly what these guys did, and the BLM chose not to stop them.
Posted: May 10, 2009 from southern Utah

I think it is about time that we took back our country from the Federal Gov. States should have control of all the land in the state not just what the Gov. says they have control over. If you would get your faxs correct you would know that there is only a small peice of the Paria River that is even in a WSA.

Posted: May 10, 2009 Tony Wright