I won’t make any secret of my prejudices. While I spend several hundred hours in the saddle every year, I don’t do singletrack. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the skill involved in piloting a bike down a path barely wide enough for a walker. I do. But I don’t think bikes belong on what are, in fact, footpaths. I ride down forest roads and jeep trails without hesitation. But when two wheel ruts dwindle down to one track, I either continue on foot—sometimes carrying my bike, sometimes not—or I turn around.

Is this predilection well-founded? I think it is, and I could go on at some length about my reasons. But I won’t. Not now, at any rate. Instead, I’ll just give an example from a few weeks back. Let me set the scene: I was walking along a woodland trail. It was original laid out as a hiking trail, but in the last few years it’s been discovered by mountain bikers and now—thanks in large measure to the promotional efforts of the local Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) chapter—it’s fast becoming a biker hangout. The trail is narrow and steep in places, and many sections run right along the edge of high cutbanks on The River. Make one misstep and you’re grabbing air, launched on a trajectory that will end in a big splash and a long swim. Which doesn’t discourage the bolder bikers from treating the trail like a private speedway, with little or no recognition that they may meet a plodding walker around the next sharp bend in the trail.

And that’s what happened to me. When the water’s high, The River roars. But bikes are quiet. That’s one of their virtues, of course, yet it also means that walkers don’t get much warning that something fast and furious is headed down the trail toward them, right on a collision course. And on the day in question, this is exactly how things played out. I found myself scrambling off the trail to avoid an unwanted encounter with a biker who was hellbent on preserving his momentum at all costs.

If I’d left it a second or two later, or been a little slower off the mark, who knows what would have happened. Nothing pleasant, to be sure. It was, as a man once said after a hard day in June, a close-run thing. But I escaped unscathed. No thanks to the biker, I might add, who clearly had as little concern for my skin as he did for his own. Credit the happy ending to my better than average hearing and quick reflexes, instead.

Will my luck hold in the weeks to come? I hope so, but the local bikers seem to be—forgive me—on a roll, aided and abetted by a “conservation” organization that has apparently decided to abandon its erstwhile commitment to “protect[ing] wild lands” and “responsible recreation” in exchange for… Well, what exactly? Speed at any price? Perhaps this is an example of the ADK’s new “balanced approach” to conservation: wilderness as a sort of open-air roller derby, with no quarter asked and none given. Walking is so pedestrian, after all. I guess the ADK thinks it’s time for a change.

Time for a change? OK. That’s one thing the ADK and I can agree on. But I’ll bet we have different ideas about what form that change ought to take…

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