Delaware Water Gap Mountain Bike Route Reaches A Dead End

November 21, 2004
BY FRED J. AUN
For the Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey

A skilled mountain biker can go up, down or over almost anything. But it seems there's one obstacle too tough for even the knobbiest of tires: government red-tape.

Back in 1998, some fanfare surrounded the ribbon-cutting for a 9-mile-long mountain biking route atop the Kittatinny Ridge in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The event culminated five years of effort by the Kittatinny Mountain Bike Association (KMBA), which was challenged by hikers who feared the two-wheeled trekkers would venture off the authorized paths and onto off-limits routes, including the Appalachian Trail.

KMBA prevailed, ensuring the hikers as well as the National Park Service -- which manages the 70,000-acre recreation area -- that off-road cyclists would stay on the approved trails.

They weren't really trails. The route followed former roads that once served the Blue Mountain lakes housing developments on top of the ridge in Walpack Township. The houses were razed in preparation for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' scuttled plan to dam the Delaware River at Tocks Island and flood the Walpack Valley.

The park service endorsed the trail plan. In fact, it included the ribbon-cutting as part of the recreation area's 1998 celebration of National Trails Day.

It was fun while it lasted, but if you take your mountain bike on those trails these days you might get ticketed by a park ranger. The first authorized mountain biking trail in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, like the Tocks Island Dam itself, was de-authorized four years after it opened.

Pending federal approvals of the trails for biking, the trails at Blue Mountain Lakes are now closed to biking," says the recreation area's Web site these days.

Turns out that, back in 2002, a watchdog group called the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) took issue with the National Park Service for allowing mountain bikes in several national parks and recreation areas, including Delaware Water Gap. PEER asserted the park service violated its own regulations by permitting off-road bicycling without first "promulgating" the "special regulations" that would make them legal.

In a Feb. 12, 2002 letter to NPS Director Fran Mainella, PEER said mountain biking in Delaware Water Gap and Redwood National Park "may be occurring on roadless, undeveloped areas that have never been studied by the NPS for wilderness designation, a plain violation of long-standing NPS Management Policies."

Former Delaware Water Gap superintendent Richard Ring wrote back, saying the government considered the paths "park roads" used for administrative purposes, not environmentally endangered wilderness trails. Nevertheless, the park service buckled.

We were challenged on the fact we didn't have a regulation in place," said recreation area chief ranger Phil Selleck. "We don't have a regulation on the books for Blue Mountain Lakes."

In essence, this means park rangers and maintenance crews can still drive their pickup and dump trucks on these rock-strewn dirt roads built decades ago. Mountain bikes, however, must stay away.

Selleck noted the park has about 250 miles of other roads where mountain biking is legal, so authorizing the Blue Mountain Lakes' roads again is not a high priority.

But even though some of the Water Gap roads legal for mountain bikes are unpaved and pretty rugged, they are also open to motor vehicles. While the Blue Mountain Lakes trails were far from "technical" or challenging, they were at least devoid of bounding SUVs.

Informed about the Water Gap situation, Jenn Dice, government affairs director for the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) said the group's local members are interested in pushing for a return of off-road biking to Blue Mountain Lakes. "It's really frustrating to us," she said. "All trails are open to hikers by default, but to open one trail for mountain bikes you have to go through this extremely long process."

Lyle Lange, the Kittatinny Mountain Bike Association member who secured the short-lived Blue Mountain Lakes trail plan, could not be reached for comment. But Jay Jones, an IMBA New Jersey representative, said another group of which he is a member, the Jersey Off-Road Bicycle Association (JORBA), will consider organizing "people interested in resurrecting a volunteer mountain-biker base of support to work with the park service."