Here in the States, there’s a big dust-up between mountain bikers and big, powerful organisations like the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, and the US Forest Service. The controversy surrounds national wilderness areas - protected tracts of land that don’t allow “mechanical transport”- and the ink is flowing fast and furious in mountain bike magazines, outdoors blogs, and social media. But the specifics of the legislation and the debate have been detailed elsewhere, and I want to explore something more central to the issue: the deep division, and seemingly eternal conflict, between mountain bikers and walkers in the US.
Sometimes it feels like an immutable truth, a code written into the fabric of the universe: mountain bikers and walkers don’t get along here. That’s just how it is. In the original blueprints for existence, we were created to butt heads until the end of time. But why? What’s the essential difference that keeps driving us apart?