Gabe McDowell, 27, soaked in the view from atop Mount Lola: nearby Castle Peak to the south, the Coastal Range on the western horizon and distant Mount Lassen to the north.

If legislation now before Congress is passed to protect this area as wilderness, McDowell won’t be able to make the grueling ride up the 2,500-foot peak north of Truckee.

Supporters of wilderness areas say those tight regulations keep natural areas pristine, providing habitat for plants and animals and providing a retreat for humans. Opponents of the wilderness designation say the rules are unnecessarily restrictive.

In barring mountain bikers, “they’re alienating a group that’s one of the most active when it comes to trailbuilding,” McDowell said of the advocates of the California Wild Heritage Act of 2003, a bill in Congress proposing more than 2.5 million acres of wilderness in 138 places in California.

McDowell, of Truckee, is one of many mountain bikers with conflicting feelings about wilderness areas. Wilderness areas federal lands with strict rules against development, mining, logging and the use of motorized and mechanized transportation.

On one hand, McDowell wants to see lands protected. On the other, he wants to be able to ride up one of the few high peaks still open to mountain bikes in the northern Sierra.

Mount Lola, elevation 9,143 feet, belongs to a tract proposed for wilderness in the Castle Peak area. Other popular Reno-Tahoe riding spots that could become wilderness areas include the Grouse Lakes basin, the Caples Creek area and the Meiss Meadows trail.

McDowell wondered if the authors of the Wilderness Act of 1964, which created wilderness areas, foresaw mountain bikes. He reckoned they were trying to keep motors out of wilderness areas, not human-powered forms of recreation like bicycles.

According to an article by historian Douglas W. Scott that appeared in the spring 2003 journal of the Wildlands Project, a national wilderness advocacy group, early proponents of the Wilderness Act did indeed want to exclude bicycles. John Moore, a 69-year-old hiker from Sacramento, was on Mount Lola the same day as McDowell. He referred to one of those early proponents, the author of “A Sand County Almanac” and an icon of the environmental movement in America, when he rebuffed McDowell’s notion.

“Aldo Leopold said wilderness should be a refuge for primitive methods of travel, and I don’t think mountain bikes are primitive methods of travel,” he said.

The land of politics

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., introduced the California Wild Heritage Act last year, but the bill languished in committee. Observers say Boxer’s huge wilderness bill probably won’t go anywhere this year, either, in a Republican-controlled Congress.

Tom Bohigian, Boxer’s state deputy director, said that compared with off-road recreation advocates and the timber and mining lobby, mountain bikers are not the worst of wilderness proponents’ headaches. Many mountain bikers support wilderness and are willing to engage in give and take. Other special interest groups oppose wilderness.

“There are folks — and they are not mountain bikers — who want to make it an us-versus-them thing,” Bohigian said.

For compromise, he said, “The door is open.”

Gearing up for fight

The International Mountain Bicycling Association has entered that door. The association has made the preservation of existing mountain bike trails in California its No. 2 issue behind creating and maintaining trails near the nation’s urban areas, said Tim Blumenthal, the group’s executive director. The organization was founded in California in 1988, and 20 percent of its members live there.

The negotiations in California could set a precedent for the rest of the nation, he said. Mountain biking’s growing popularity forces more bikers to share trails. Although new trails are being built, access to old trails is being denied in many cases, such as on legendary Marin County, Calif., trails.

“We need to be clear and proactive and up front about areas where we can’t support new wilderness areas,” he said.

Paid staffers have been working on the issue, lobbying Congress and encouraging members to write to their senators.

California’s mountain-biking association prepared position statements for all the proposed wilderness areas in Boxer’s bill. The document supports over 60 percent of the proposals and lists concerns and suggested compromises for the others.

The position statement notes, for example, that the popular Hole in the Ground trail isn’t included in the Castle Peak wilderness proposal. It also suggests a boundary adjustment that would exclude the Mount Lola trail, which begins near California 89 north of Truckee and ends near the Pacific Crest Trail, on the other side of the mountain.

“I don’t think it’s asking too much,” said Jim Haagen-Smit, one of the California group's volunteers who worked extensively on the position statement.

Fragmenting land lovers

Haagen-Smit, who pedaled to the top of Mount Lola on a tandem mountain bike with his wife, would like to see a trans-Sierra trail from Sacramento to Mount Lola open to mountain bikers.

Part of that route could include a trail that crosses the Grouse Lakes basin. That area would be closed to mountain bikers under a wilderness designation. The Grouse Lakes basin features so many popular trails that Haagen-Smit would prefer to see it protected as a national conservation area.

In national conservation areas, rules can be written to protect special interests. One example is the Black Rock-High Rock Canyon-Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area in northern Nevada. The creation of that national conservation area gave the unusual and historic region extra environmental protection while preserving the interests of groups such as ranchers and off-road vehicle users.

Haagen-Smit said a national conservation area would be more palatable for many people in Nevada County, home of Grouse Lakes.

“If you fragment the people that might be supportive of this, there’s less of a chance of some kind of protection being passed,” he said.

How much is enough?

Wilderness advocates in California feel like they have compromised on the issue already.

“We really don’t have that much time before these areas are degraded to the point where they won’t be eligible for wilderness anymore,” said Dan Smuts, an assistant regional director in California and Nevada for the Wilderness Society.

Smuts worked on a project that inventoried 7.5 million acres of land that could be eligible for wilderness in California. Those areas had few or no roads and a primitive, untouched character. Boxer’s bill proposes only 2.5 million acres.

“The mountain biking community has really failed to accept a single trail closure,” said Smuts, a mountain biker himself.

He worries that the flexibility that makes national conservation areas appealing can thwart the reasons environmentalists want to protect an area in the first place.

“In some of these areas, alternative designation is not enough to protect these lands in perpetuity,” he said.

At Caples Creek, for example, the mountain bicycling association’s request for a national conservation area designation could allow off-road vehicle riders into sensitive meadows and streamside habitats, said Tina Andolina with the California Wilderness Coalition.

“That leaves them open to motor bikes and off-road vehicles that can go through there and do doughnuts that take decades to heal,” she said.

Tricky negotiations

Smuts and Andolina said they would sit down at the table with the bicycling association on the Castle Peak, Grouse Lakes, Caples Creek and Meiss Meadows areas.

Becky Bell of the Tahoe Area Mountain Bicycling Association also welcomes more face time with wilderness advocates and Boxer’s office.

She’s not opposed to wilderness per se, but she points out the five wilderness areas already existing in her neck of the woods — Mount Rose, Granite Chief, Desolation, Mokelumne and Carson-Iceberg). She also notes the two major trails that restrict or don’t allow mountain bikes — Tahoe Rim Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail — and the California state parks that don’t allow mountain bikes.

Wilderness advocates are quick to point out the bounty of trails for mountain bikers, including the Flume Trail, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and Hole in the Ground.

It’s a tough spot for the 42-year-old marketing consultant from South Lake Tahoe, who considers herself an environmentalist.

“Do I go with the logger or do I go with the hiker? In my heart, I want to go with the hikers, but they’ve totally splintered the environmental audience,” she said.

Nevada trails

Dale Beesmer, Northern Nevada’s International Mountain Bicycling Association representative, doesn’t expect tension between mountain bikers and wilderness advocates to surface in Nevada anytime soon.

“We talked with (the Nevada Wilderness Project officials) about keeping things from getting as ugly as they are in California,” Beesmer said.

When Northern Nevada mountain bike advocates said that riders enjoyed the Ophir Grade Trail and the trails east of the Mount Rose Wilderness Area, the wilderness proponents dropped plans to expand wilderness into those spots.

Some rural towns stand to lose a potential source of revenue in mountain bike tourism if adjacent lands become wilderness areas, he said.

Erika Pollard, the Nevada Wilderness Project’s conservation director, said she mountain bikes herself and supports the efforts of towns like Austin, in central Nevada, to attract mountain bike tourists.

Her group has no plans to suggest wilderness in the land surrounding that town, she said.

Both Beesmer and Pollard blamed the California controversy on the state’s large, dense population and its multitude of existing trails. Both said most of the Nevada’s mountain bikers live in Las Vegas and the Reno-Tahoe area and don’t mountain bike at the remote places being proposed for wilderness by the Nevada Wilderness Project.

That’s a good thing for the Nevada Wilderness Project, which is working on wilderness proposals for Eastern Nevada right now, Pollard said. She doesn’t foresee any skirmishes with mountain bikers over those proposals.

“That’s not really a battle we want to get into right now,” she said. “It’s not worth it for us.”