Grizzly Bear Conflict Closes Famous Canadian Trail In Banff National Park

IMBA Trail News
Volume 11, Number 3
July-August 1998

Bicyclists Accuse Park Of "Discrimination"

In 1996 Bike magazine featured the Bryant Creek Trail on their cover, and declared it "the crown jewel of Canadian mountain biking." This year they listed it as the most endangered singletrack in North America. Today, Bryant Creek Trail is closed to bicycling, so cycling activists in Alberta are trying to mobilize international support to get it re-opened.

Bryant Creek Trail is a 51 km out-and-back ride into a magnificent Rocky Mountain forest in Canada's busiest national park, about 130 kilometers west of Calgary. It begins in Kananaskis Country Recreation Area, enters Banff National Park, and ends in Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park, at a remote, famous lodge situated at the foot of the namesake mountain. The first half of the ride is relatively level on non-motorized doubletrack, while the second half is steep, technical singletrack. Some people ride the first half, stash their bikes and hike onward with backpacks.

Bike use has increased dramatically, with as many as 60 or 70 cyclists on the busiest weekends. Combined with large numbers of hikers and equestrians, the human recreational presence is disturbing grizzly bears and gray wolves. What those large carnivores need is real, deep wilderness, with fewer of their two-legged competitors. Park managers and mountain bikers agree, the number of people visiting Bryant Creek Trail should be reduced. But why single out mountain bikers?

Unjustified discrimination is the heart of the matter, according to Ben Marriott, president of the Bow Valley Mountain Bike Alliance in Lake Louise, Alberta. No scientific studies have been performed to compare impacts of non-motorized recreational users on grizzlies and wolves, he notes.

Laura Lee Dyck, president of the Calgary Mountain Bike Alliance, maintains that closing the trail to mountain bicycling, but not to hiking and horseback riding, will not achieve the goal of protecting grizzly bears and gray wolves. "The numbers of hikers and equestrians will continue to rise, so at best Parks Canada is only applying a band-aid," she said.

Banff National Park Superintendent Charlie Zinkan is remaining firm on the closure. "Because a person on a mountain bike can travel more miles than a hiker, they effectively shrink habitat from a human disturbance point of view," he told ITN.

Science or just values?

"That kind of anecdotal evidence doesn't cut it any more," Dyck argued. She pointed out that helicopters frequently pass over the Bryant Creek area, with unknown consequences for the wildlife habitat and obvious effects on recreationists.

Marriott added that horses can go the same distance as bicyclists, yet equestrians are not banned. He noted the potential impact of hikers, who remain present in grizzly habitat for longer periods of time than cyclists. A literature review titled "Wildlife Disturbance from Backcountry Trail Use," prepared last year by Banff Park Warden Karsten Heuer, supports this viewpoint. Heuer stressed that scientific understanding of recreational impacts on wildlife is minimal and mitigation techniques are unproved. The warden acknowledged, "Limited evidence suggests that the longer the disturbance, the greater its impacts For example, walkers are noisier, slower and are more likely to stray from a trail than cyclists."

But Zinkan added another consideration. When Parks Canada first evaluated biking in the national parks in the 1980s, the agency made a decision that in cases of conflict, they would favor "traditional" uses such as hiking and equestrian over newer uses. He also noted that national parks policy in Canada does allow mountain biking on trails, unlike United States National Park Service policy.

"People get sidetracked. It's not as if we're banning mountain biking generally, or this is the tip of other things to come. That's not the case. This is site specific," Zinkan asserted. He pointed out that 281 kilometers of trail are open to biking in the park, and this closure is only 16 km. Among the group of national and provincial parks in the area, there are roughly 1,900 km of trails, and 1,200 are open to bicycling, he observed.

Marriott responded that the 16 km closure is in the middle of a 51 km route, so it eliminates one of the world's classic rides, important to all cyclists, especially those among the 3/4 million people in the nearby metro area. Dyck noted that another ongoing process could threaten access to the 1,200 km of open trails.

Crafting a solution

Marriott said that his group supports the goals of Parks Canada. "We believe that Parks Canada is right, that there is a problem of overuse. But that is from all user groups combined. We want to be part of the solution, and not be perceived as the problem."

The Bow Valley Mountain Bike Alliance (BVMBA) has offered two potential solutions: a quota system on day use, or a complete closure of the trail to all users.

The quota system would fairly allot a finite number of recreation visitor days among equally acceptable recreation forms. To facilitate this, the neighboring British Columbia Provincial Parks -- which support mountain biking in their Mount Assiniboine Park -- offered Parks Canada the use of their telephone reservation system.

But Banff National Park rejected that option. In a February, 1997 letter Zinkan explained, "A group of senior managers decided that the easiest way to accomplish this [the reduction in human visitation] would be to eliminate mountain bike use since this represents a large number of users and a large number of disturbance events and because this measure is easier to implement than applying a quota system to day users."

Both Marriott and Dyck said that their mountain bike groups value ecological integrity above human use and they would accept complete closure of the trail, because it's a fair solution which does address the problem of impacts to wildlife. Marriott noted that BVMBA already supports the prohibition of people from Johnson Lakes, a large, montane ecosystem three miles north of the town of Banff. "We sympathize with the aims. Johnson Lakes is needed as a wildlife corridor."

A faulty process

The cyclists also complain that the national park closed the trail without any public process: no meetings, no request for comments, no discussions with users. Zinkan maintains that a single public meeting in January, 1997, was the public process. But Marriott countered, "That meeting was the first time anybody heard about those closures... There was no public consultation. Consultation takes place during the formation of a policy. This was more or less comment on a policy that had already been decided."

In the United States, which has relatively easy access to courts and a National Environmental Policy Act which mandates public process, a similar agency action would probably result in a lawsuit with a likelihood of success. But Marriott discounted that strategy for Bryant Creek. He guessed it would cost $50,000 and did not see great prospects of success.

Instead, the cyclists are working the political angle. They have obtained more than 2,500 signatures on a petition. They will educate cyclists at an upcoming World Cup race in Alberta. Press coverage has been excellent. The Calgary Mountain Bike Assoc. held a "Hike Your Bike" rally on the Bryant Creek Trail on July 11.

Readers of this article are encouraged to participate in this political dialog (see Action Alert, left page). Banff National Park is often a leader in management practices across Canada, and the recreation discrimination issue transcends Banff boundaries. Much is at stake.