North Carolina: Off-highway vehicle trails on Nantahala NF are out of control

The Tellico Off-Road Vehicle Area in North Carolina’s Nantahala
National Forest has over 40 miles of off-highway vehicle (OHV)
trails—twice as many as are legally allowed by the U.S Forest Service.
Poor management of the area combined with four-wheeler abuse has
resulted in thousands of tons of sediment being washed into the
Tellico River. “I’ve been working on Tellico for ten years and have
watched fish populations plummet,” says Michael Smith, coordinator of
the North Carolina chapter of Trout Unlimited.

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“The headwaters of the  Tellico is the largest habitat of native brook trout in North Carolina. The trout are all being pushed upstream above the
off-highway vehicle sediment. This is an issue about water quality and
the health of an entire ecosystem.” According to the U.S. Forest Service’s own calculations, nearly 26,000 tons of sediment have washed into the Tellico River and surrounding streams since the trail system was built. On average, each mile of Tellico trail sends 50 tons of sediment into the stream system every year.

When Trout Unlimited and a coalition of environmental
organizations threatened to sue the Forest Service for the blatant
violation of the Clean Water Act, the agency promptly closed Tellico
to vehicle traffic through the wettest months of the winter in order
to perform an environmental assessment. Last June, the Forest Service
released a proposal to reduce the amount of trails from 40 to 24
miles, prompting the Southern Four Wheel Drive Association to announce
its intent to sue the forest.

The lawsuit was retracted to give the Nantahala National Forest a chance to prepare a management plan proposal for the Tellico based on the environmental assessment. Similar legal battles are being played out across the country as federal agencies attempt to reign in rampant abuse of public resources by four-wheel-drive enthusiasts. Nationally, the Forest Service
manages 287,000 miles of roads and 32,000 miles of trails open to
off-road vehicles, all of which has gone essentially unmanaged for
decades. “Off-road use has always been a problem on public land,” says
Karen Schaumbach, a coordinator for PEER (Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility) who is dealing with rampant off-road use
on a national level. “But the numbers of off-roaders has grown
explosively in recent years.

There are tens of thousands of user-created ATV trails, and even the legal trail systems are causing erosion and water quality problems.” The illegal trail proliferation and poor management of legal systems even led to a Senate oversight committee hearing on the matter last summer, when New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Resources Committee, stated that unmanaged off-road use has resulted in
“significant consequences for the health of our public lands…It
appears questionable to me whether [the Forest Service is] able to
properly manage [off-road] use.”

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