This piece was originally published in 2016 in Cranked magazine. Cranked was a mountain bike magazine which, like others covering the outdoors, defied the 'print is dead' narrative by focusing on quality in every aspect, from paper and printing to photography and writing. And it paid its contributors a decent rate.
For me it gave a rare opportunity to explore a topic in the sort of depth that only longform pieces allow. I was privileged to see five of my features published in its pages. This is the one I think most likely to be of interest to non-mountain bikers, being at least as much about the intrinsic value of wild places as well as what we can gain from wilderness experience. With a couple of exceptions (noted in the captions), the images included are the same ones Cranked’s founder and editor, Seb Rogers, chose to run alongside the article. I had supplied images with bikes in too, but it’s typical of Seb’s boldness as an editor that the ones he used were all empty of people (he did the same with his own images on the cover throughout the magazine’s run).
I haven’t changed anything in the original text, but a few notes and updates appear as footnotes.
“Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.”
Gandalf in JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
Perhaps fun isn’t the first word you might associate with wilderness – or perhaps it just depends what you mean by fun. It wasn’t the first word that came to mind when, with three companions, I crossed the 5000-metre Hispar Pass in the Pakistan Karakoram and spent six days trekking on and alongside the Hispar Glacier. Too poor to pay porters for the whole trek, we had rucksacks weighing 30 kilos or more and our only map was a tattered photocopy from an expedition book, which showed mountain peaks as little black triangles (GPS was still the exclusive property of the US armed forces). Over the Edge of the Wild indeed. An indelible, even formative, experience.
What does this have to do with bikes? Directly: nothing. I can’t even imagine taking a bike over that terrain. But when I think about wilderness and what it means, memories of the Hispar come rushing back: great glaciers, cloud-piercing peaks, tottering heaps of rubble, the sinister slit of a crevasse, the utter joy of finding an easy, flower-strewn terrace up on the valley side. But it doesn’t always look like this. It can be a hot, sandy emptiness, a misty rain-forest, a bare tundra. Wilderness is a multi-faceted concept.
And wilderness is a hot issue right now, at least in the USA, where many mountain bikers are up in arms. Official rules ban bikes from designated wilderness areas and new designations are putting some much-loved trails off-limits. I’ll return to this wrangle in due course, but first I want to consider at what the word means and why it matters. In particular I want to explore what it means to us as mountain bikers – and why some people might think that bikes don’t belong in the wild.
What is wilderness?
...this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.
Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places
My Hispar experience, and other encounters with the wild, gave me a personal sense of what wilderness is: a place that doesn’t even notice me. In his brilliant book The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane implies something similar: ‘Wildness ... is an expression of independence from human direction, and wild land is self-willed land.’
Oxford Dictionaries’ primary definition is ‘An uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region’. Collins has ‘A wild, uninhabited, and uncultivated region; any desolate tract or area’. Merriam-Webster adds an American slant: ‘A tract or region uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings: an area essentially undisturbed by human activity together with its naturally developed life community’. The origin of the word is traced to Old English wildēornes: 'land inhabited only by wild animals'.
Now you could argue that the global reach of pollution and climate change means that nowhere on Earth remains ‘essentially undisturbed by human activity’. That’s another argument, but it does highlight the overwhelming human domination of the planet. Wilderness, almost however you define it, is shrinking – but, of course, like many things, scarcity increases its value.
Wilderness is hardly a new concept. It’s in the Bible – isn’t it? The word first infiltrated into my childhood consciousness as I sat half-listening in a vast cold church – but if they’d used a different translation, it might not have done. There’s a famous line (in Matthew Chapter 3) about ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness’. At least, that’s how it goes in the King James Bible (1611). The Good News Bible (1966) has ‘Someone is shouting in the desert’. This could be directly relevant to the American experience; remember how many politicians, and others, in the US still reach for the Bible to inform their thinking and colour their rhetoric.
It also underscores that there are radical differences in what different people understand by wilderness. I met one such example recently: riding the Cross Border Trail from Newcastleton to Kielder, I mentioned to a fellow rider and local volunteer trailbuilder that I was working on an article about wilderness. With a sweep of his arm, he said “here you are”. At the time, we were surrounded by spruce plantations. Vast and empty, perhaps, but hardly ‘essentially undisturbed by human activity’.
One of the simplest and most resonant definitions I’ve seen was given by Brett Stevenson of Wood River Valley Bicycle Coalition, an active voice in the current US debates: “I like to think of wilderness more simply as wildlands in which we as humans are subordinate to the natural world.”
Working definitions
... wilderness begins where the road ends; and if the roads never end, there never will be any wilderness.
Frank Church
In America, wilderness is defined in law. Though often branded as the great polluter, the leading villain in the saga of climate change, the USA was the first nation in the world to establish National Parks. It has also sequestered large areas to receive an even higher level of protection. The Wilderness Act of 1964, originally drafted by Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society, gives this definition:
‘A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’
This definition isn’t just something for philosophers or literary critics or riders in the pub to argue over; it has a real, practical impact. However, the 1964 Act does not mention bikes; the mountain bike as we know it was still a decade away. The problem for mountain bikers is not the original Act, but later interpretation by several federal bodies, which are the crux of current arguments (see below).
I haven’t found another country which has such a clear legal definition of wilderness, but Scotland is edging towards it. Scottish Natural Heritage (partly building on extensive work by the John Muir Trust) has produced maps of Wild Land Areas. While not a statutory designation, it does carry considerable weight in planning policy.1
This measure of wildness uses four attributes:
‘The perceived naturalness of the land cover;
‘The ruggedness of the terrain which is therefore challenging to cross;
‘Remoteness from public roads, ferries or railway stations;
‘The visible lack of buildings, roads, pylons and other modern artefacts.’
Unsurprisingly, the Scottish Wild Land Map looks very similar to a relief map, though there are extensive areas of low altitude but high wildness in the far northwest and on islands such as the Uists, Harris and Jura.
Eye of the beholder
‘I know where she means,’ said Peggy. ‘It’s the country on the fells above the tarn.
It’s as wild as wild.’
Winter Holiday, Arthur Ransome
The first of these defining attributes is: ‘The perceived naturalness of the land cover’. The word ‘perceived’ is crucial. What many of us imagine to be wild, natural, or unspoiled country is nothing of the kind. Think about the Lake District fells, and especially the lower fells, where most of the best mountain bike trails are. This is not pristine land. It has been worked for centuries, if not millennia. The bare, open, treeless state of most of the fells is not natural; it’s the result of long-term grazing (many say over-grazing) by sheep. In George Monbiot’s words, the landscape is ‘sheepwrecked’. And, as he and others have pointed out, the flooding of December 2015/January 2016 in Cumbria (and elsewhere) would almost certainly have been less catastrophic if more of the land had been wooded.
Of course, it’s in the eye of the beholder (like the Sitka-spruce ‘wilderness’ of Kielder?). For me, one of the delights of riding in the Lakes is that the trails are so well-defined, and that they have history. They’ve been made over generations by stolid packhorses, or quarrymen trudging to work before dawn, or simply by the to-ing and fro-ing of countless sheep. It is a heavily-worked landscape, and still a working one. And many people love it deeply, just as it is. But calling it wilderness stretches any reasonable definition past breaking point.
Even apparently wilder areas in Scotland, especially in the glens and lower slopes, show the effects of extensive grazing, often by deer rather than sheep. A telling example is Knoydart; inaccessible by road, it’s often called the wildest area on the British mainland. It was here that the John Muir Trust made its first land acquisition in 1987, 1255 hectares in the area known as Li and Coire Dhorrcail: ‘At this time the land was mostly bare, grazed to the bone first by sheep and then by high populations of deer.’
Controlling the red deer, and a lot of other hard work, has seen native trees returning along with a lot of other wildlife, including pine martens and roe deer. It’s a great example of rewilding, long before the term became trendy. Even so, Cameron McNeish, a leading writer and broadcaster on hill-walking and mountain issues, declares unequivocally that “we don't have wilderness in the UK... (not) real genuine wilderness, as in some areas of the US, even in Scotland. What we have is 'wild land' that has been shaped and formed largely by man's hand, and there are very few areas of wild land that are not used for something commercially, even if it's just sheep grazing”.
The value of wilderness
Wilderness is a necessity … They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls.
John Muir (Scottish-born American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
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