99% Invisible - 529- The Wilderness Tool

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for trail workers who maintain the country’s roughly 112 million acres of protected land. That’s ahead of chain saws and newly made crosscuts. And the reason this old tool has stuck around so long -- even in an age when there’s a newer, better gadget coming out every year -- it goes way beyond the physical saw itself. The rise, fall, and unexpected second life of the crosscut saw is also the story of how America created the very concept of wilderness.The Wilderness Tool

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every year park rangers and trail workers across the US take part in a kind of scavenger hunt on their days off. They're looking for a particular tool, one that's often over 100 years old, but to them it shines like a diamond. And with the right combination of strategy and luck, they might spot the perfect one, on the wall of a local cracker barrel restaurant. That's 99PI producer, Lashemadon. Because this hot commodity is an antique, steel blade, cross cut saw. Imagine one of those old, timey lumberjack photos. The kind where two men in plaid are working away at a tree, holding opposite ends of a huge human-length saw.

That is a vintage cross cut. Oh gosh. The first saw I named, I named all with a king Arthur theme. So I had Arthur and Gwynnevere, of course, and then along came Lance a lot. This is Dolly Chapman. She's worked on trail crews for more than three decades, building and maintaining trails with the U.S. Forest Service.

And Garif and Lynette, who were a couple, and Elaine, and Percival. And of course, I have ex-caliber as my favorite acts. Dallies and expert at finding, using, and maintaining these coveted sauce. And she's got a matchmaking reputation. People call her up to get paired with their perfect cross cut. Dallies saws hang side-by-side in her workshop in Northern California, looking a little bit like a walk-in closet full of incredibly sharp clothes. She has 40 of these vintage saws in her collection, which is pretty amazing,

given the links that soiers and collectors go to in order to get their hands on even one of these things. A lot of what I like about them is there's so much more to them than you see at first glance. I saw it for Ezure when the previous owner saw junk. Some people spend hours mining websites like eBay and Craigslist, other search in person on saw hunting road trips, driving up and down highways to stop by yard sales, antique stores, and even places where the saws

aren't technically for sale. If you go in restaurants in rural areas, restaurants and bars, you see painted saws hanging above the bar and on the wall. I'm sure you've been in a restaurant with a painted saw on the wall and not noticed it yet. On its face, it may seem a little intense, you know, to care about old saws so much that you end up trying to barter with your cracker barrel server because they have a wall decoration, you just really want to take home.

But the vintage crosscuts that trail crew leaders go hunting for. They aren't just for show. Often, the plan is to put these saws back to use. After the paint has been scrubbed clean and the teeth have been sharpened, many return to the woods, bucking and felling trees in the American outdoors. In fact, vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for the hundreds of trail workers who maintained the American backcountry today. That's head of chain saws and newly made crosscuts.

And the reason this old tool has stuck around for so long, even in an age where there's a newer, better gadget coming out every year, it goes way beyond the physical saw itself. Because the rise, fall, and unexpected second life of the Crosscut saw is the story of how America created the very concept of wilderness. Wilderness. It's a word that summons images of old growth forests and ancient untouched mountain peaks. Honestly, when I hear that word and I think about it, I picture myself on a ridge in the mountains, looking probably across other ridges in the mountains.

This is Adam Soards. I'm an environmental historian and have studied public lands for about a quarter of a century, national parks, national forests, things like that. The concept of wilderness might seem like it's been around forever, like it came with the planet as a kind of package deal. But in the long history of the natural world, the idea of wilderness that we're familiar with today is actually pretty new. The word wilderness first popped into use in the year 1200, essentially to describe land not being used for farming.

Much later, the colonization of North America gave wilderness a new meaning and a new purpose. It became a way to define and distinguish white settler society. Early wilderness in the US mostly meant danger, a place to be wary of. This kind of thinking helped European settlers define themselves in opposition to indigenous people. So starting around the 17th century, the idea was that white people lived in civilization, and indigenous people lived in the hostile wilderness. And for 200 years, that's how it went.

Wilderness didn't have the greatest reviews. Then came the Industrial Revolution, which was when wilderness started to take a different shape. Industrialization created the conditions for certain things to grow chaoticly and exponentially. Things like cities, factories, pollution, a working class. It shattered the old patterns of rural life and it brought on new ways of relating to land. There's a lot more people that are talking about the busyness of cities and the crowdedness of cities.

The Crosscut Saw played a major part in America's industrialization. This tool, it helped Lager's topple countless Douglas Furs and Redwoods to make way for new cities. And Adam says that it was around this time during the chaos of the industrial revolution that wilderness had a glow up. So beginning in the mid-part, or the late part of the industrial revolution that wilderness had a glow up. So beginning in the mid-part, or the late part of the 19th century,

celebration of the wild begins. As steam and coal power came on the scene, cities got bigger, noisier, and more polluted. The idea of wilderness became more and more appealing as a contrast to the pressures of industrial capitalism. And as that industrialization expands and as the cities get bigger, that desire to not only have access to those places, but to create those places and protect them intensify.

Wilderness started to represent an escape from an urban life that felt like it was expanding out of control. Writers and poets described wild spaces as pure instead of scary, safe instead of savage, no longer an un-farmed wasteland, but more of a temple, something of value to humans that needed to be protected from humans. There's sort of a religious dimension to part of that. There's an anti-urban dimension and an anti-urbanite position too.

So we don't like the people who live there, so we need to go to these other places where they might be pure. By the romantic era, American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Throbe believed that wilderness was a creation of God that provided important space for intellectual and spiritual stimulation. A place where good men could become great men. The famous photographer, Ansel Adams, became known for his landscape photos of the American West.

And Adams helped propel the idea that America's wilderness was a point of pride and national identity. And maybe a lot of this kind of thinking is sounding familiar at this point. But at the time, the idea of wilderness was still mostly an intellectual and artistic one. Actual wild places weren't so accessible to the urban masses yet, and most people definitely weren't going there on vacation. That started to change in the early 1900s when the U.S. government established the

Forest Service and Park Service, and America's wild spaces started to gain national attention. You and your family can enjoy this wonderland at very modest rates because a variety of tent accommodations are available. Attent like this, with comfortable furnishings, lights, bedding, costs only $2.50 daily per person, and fine meals are available at least. An outdoor recreation movement took off that would only grow and grow and grow,

as Americans hiked, canoeed, and camped their way into the first decades of the 20th century. Wilderness became a place where not just wealthy artists, but everyday Americans could find the promise of health, relaxation, and moral regeneration. By the 1920s, the park service was building cushy resorts, complete with dude ranches and even scheduled bear feedings. So in order to get as many tourists as possible into these parks, the government went hard on building roads. And all this development meant that the crosscut saw was an extremely high demand.

These saws were being churned out in huge numbers by manufacturers who were selling newer models every year. There were three main companies in the US that made them. There was the Distance Saw Company, the Atkins saw company, and the Simon's saw and steel company. They tried to outsell each other every year. They each made their own steel. By the Great Depression, millions of Americans were put to work.

Many of them wielding the crosscut to clear trails and lay down miles and miles of pavement. These saws helped make way for the next big thing that shaped wilderness history. Cars By this time, over a million cars were being sold in the country each year. Many of their owners eager to drive the widely publicized Park to Park Highway, which connected 13 national parks by road. From Yellowstone, you could drive north to Glacier, west to the Cascades, south through the Sierras, and east past the Grand Canyon.

Travel and east, travel and west, wherever you go, Chevy services, Ben, Southwood or North, gear plates or far-dares, a Chevrolet team,, even for your Chevrolet car. See the U.S. thing in your Chevrolet. These new highways combined with affordable cars and promotional campaigns, well, they got millions of Americans outside. Within just four years, National Park Attendance tripled. But the success of these efforts concerned some of those early worshipers of the wild. With all these roads and tourism, it seemed to them that wilderness was at risk of losing its moral character, its purity.

The unique quality of wilderness was that it existed outside of human life. So if all these pristine landscapes would one day be rolled over by hundreds of cars a day, was that wilderness at all? of cars a day. Was that wilderness at all? And so in 1935, a new political movement started to emerge, spearheaded by a small group of people with one specific goal in mind. Let's not have roads everywhere. Let's keep some cars away. A group of eight Americans got together to defend the wilderness against recreational and commercial overuse. to defend the wilderness against recreational and commercial overuse. Among them was ecologist Alda Leopold

for a service chief Bob Marshall and Benton Mackay, the guy behind the Appalachian Trail. Together, they called themselves the wilderness society, and they had one specific enemy, the car. What united them was not every last detail about what they thought wilderness should be, but what united them was the every last detail about what they thought wilderness should be, but what united them was the fight against the automobile. The Wilderness Society wanted Congress to create a new type of federal land called Wilderness

with a capital W. They wanted wilderness to be part of the country's public lands, but unlike other types of public land, like national parks, forests, and monuments, wilderness would be a separate category, a place with specific and permanent restrictions on human activity. The wilderness society dreamed of preserving plots of land throughout the country,

where roads and most types of commercial development would be forbidden. This included things like logging, resorts, or any type of human-made structure. This was a hard sell. I mean, setting aside millions of acres of land that you can't claim ownership of or make profit on doesn't sound very American to me. But they kept trying. As World War II swung around, wood became a critical war material, and the demand for

lumber grew exponentially. And it was around this time that chainsaws entered the chat. Within just a few years, chainsaws were doing all the work, and crosscut saws were completely obsolete. The efficiency of chainsaws helped fulfill the country's appetite for wood during the war. And because it could cut more wood at a faster rate, it had major economic appeal. Chain Saws so dramatically replaced the old crosscuts that crosscut manufacturing came

to a grinding halt. So there were thousands of crosscut saws in the country belonging to logging companies, belonging to woodcutters, belonging to individuals for which there was no use anymore. Picture hundreds of crates of crosscut saws being pushed to the back of warehouses because no one wanted them anymore. These tools eventually found their way to antique stores or someone's basement. Others found new purpose as wall decoration. And just like that, with cross cuts no longer in use commercially at least, the American outdoors got a whole lot louder. Eventually, the wilderness society's anti-car campaign succeeded.

After 66 legislative rewrites, wilderness became a concept that was signed into law. Members of the Cabinet and the Congress, ladies and gentlemen, this is very happy and historic occasion for all who love the great American outdoors. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, and America did something no other country had ever done. It passed a law to protect land and preserve it in its natural state. The Wilderness Bill preserves our posterity for all time to come, 9 million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder. It presented something powerfully new in public land's history by placing value on collective

restraint. Today there are roughly 112 million acres of protected wilderness. Wilderness went from being a set of cultural values to physical plots of land with defined borders and a legal definition. And not definition? Well, it's a doozy. Well, I have it right next to me. I can read off some of the phrases, in an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. Untrammeled. It's oddly poetic, a choice of word that somehow manages to be specific and a bit vague all at once.

Wilderness is a place of primeval character that act goes on to say, that it should be preserved in its natural conditions and allowed to maintain its ecological freedom. One important thing to note about this new capital W wilderness is that the untrammeled part was actually enforceable by law, which meant that all this land suddenly had to be free of all mechanization and motors. There's a particular section of the act, section 4c if you want to follow along at home, and it excludes the use of motorized equipment, which means no snowmobiles, no jackhammers, no powered rock drills, and no chain saws, meaning that people working in the wilderness started to rely heavily on crosscut saws again. As in, sorry, Cracker Barrel, but we're going to need those crosscuts back.

So, a saw. Now, there are all different types of saws. And I'm going to go over a bunch of them because it is fascinating. What I like about crosscuts is that I follow Dolly Chapman down to a national forest just outside San Diego, where she was leading a cross-cut saw training for park rangers and trail workers. At the end of the training, participants would walk away with a certification, allowing them to use cross-cuts on the job.

I think we're ready for you guys to start grabbing saws and working together. This is the part of the day I wait before. Dali told me that when the Wilderness Act first passed, a lot of people didn't want to switch from chain saws to cross cuts. I worked on one national forest where instead of sawing fallen trees, they would blast them out of the way. And I was a blaster too and that sounded like fun. As in using explosives to clear trees instead of sawing them at all. And then there were the people who tried to sneak chainsaws in. But after a while, there were enough of a sharpening crosscuts and doing a really good job with it that people were saying, hey, this is fun. We want to use the crosscut saw.

Now there are some case-by-case exceptions to the axe rule against motorized tools. But by drastically reducing the use of things like chainsaws, it's made wilderness areas quiet in a way that's unlike anywhere else. Quiet from all the human-made noise at least. Except when you're out there, it's actually loud. You can hear the wind, you can hear the water, you know, stumbling over the rocks. You hear the breeze through the trees, so you can hear all these things that you can't hear elsewhere when you're hearing traffic.

It's a strong, strong, strong, strong, strong. Crosscuts first made it come back because they had to, but now they're increasingly desirable, even in non-wilderness areas, where chain saws are technically allowed. With a lot of forested land seeing increasingly long fire seasons, some trail crews are finding that crosscuts are just safer. You don't need to haul a bunch of flammable fuel like you would with a chainsaw.

And the relative quiet of a crosscut is a lot less disturbing to wildlife. Ever since the crosscut revival though, the vintage saw has become harder to find, especially as some are being snatched up by collectors or competitive lumberjacks. Many others are being kept as family heirlooms. In fact, the wilderness act and its emphasis on the purity of nature. It's kindled interest from a whole subculture of diehard crosscut users, sharpeners, and collectors. Back at Dolly's training, people continued taking turns pulling a cross cut through a fallen log, 2x2.

Pretty soon, it was my turn. And as I hesitantly walked towards the log, I thought back to a moment that morning when everyone shared what they loved about this tool. A well-sharp and vintage cross cut moves cleanly across the grain of a log, pulling out wood in a sort of noodle-like shape. Dolly says the test of a good saw is if you see a pile of fresh spaghetti forming at your feet as you move back and forth. And then when you're sawing through wood with it, it makes a singing noise, just a beautiful, comfortable, rhythmic sort of... I won't say it sounds like bells, but it's kind of a singing noise. And, sure, you're sweating in your goggles and your hard hat, butt muscles clenched in preparation for every pull. But there's also something elegant about it. This saw demands a kind of dance between two people,

a thoughtful exercise in communication and trust. In short, what people tend to love most about the crosscut is in the experience. These days, new crosscut saws are being manufactured again. There are modern-day crosscuts available for purchase online. And Dali says there's actually plenty of these models lying around mostly unused in federal storage facilities. When the US government spends money on tools, there are a lot of requirements that they buy only new equipment and that they

buy American-made equipment. And we really don't want our government employees to be buying things off of eBay or buying antiques that doesn't sound professional. So no need to dig around for secondhand tools in old logging towns. And yet every trail worker I've spoken to for this story has said they strongly prefer the vintage crosscut. Even the Forest Service published a study in 2005 comparing the quality of vintage and modern saws, favoring the older ones.

These are just better, and a lot of us, I'd say, me included, would only want to use an antique saw because it is better. It's going to feel better in the hand, better balance, better flex to the metal. It'll stay sharp longer, it'll cut smoother. They're just far superior to anything made today. These old saws, they're made from a higher quality steel and the teeth are set in a crescent-shaped arc. So there are practical arguments that they do cut better. But perhaps more important is something less tangible than the shape of the arc and the quality of the steel.

I think more and more. I like this one because it has a history because it might have worked in a logging camp because it's 90 years old because I restored it from real wreckage on the back floor of an antique store. So there is that nostalgia. That nostalgia for the antique crosscut,

it's complicated. Because in it, I can't help but hear parallels to the way we think about wilderness. That nostalgia for the antique crosscut, it's complicated. Because in it, I can't help but hear parallels to the way we think about wilderness today. It makes me think back to something Adam told me, that one motivation behind protecting these places as wilderness was the desire to preserve a frontier frame of mind, that wilderness could be a place for the weary urban human to use traditional tools like the crosscut and imagine doing what their ancestors did on the open frontier.

There's a certain romantic idea to using a vintage crosscut that feels really similar to the romance that Aldo Leopold and others felt about wilderness in the 19th century, the pursuit of something untouched, unsullied by contact with humans and industry. There seems to be this really big obsession with purity. This is Shandinez. Shandinez is a conservationist who used to lead crews within Sestrolands Conservation Corps, an all-indigenous environmental group based out of New Mexico. Weilding a crosscut has long been part of Shandin's family history.

Back in the mid-30s, both of her grandfather's were crosscut soyares for a logging company in the Chuska Mountains. Shandin never anticipated felling trees with cross cuts herself. But for the past 10 years, she's led trail crews into the back country on work trips, rarely going into the wilderness without a cross cut saw.

And Shandine says she gets the romantic allure, both with cross cuts and with wilderness. I think before I became as involved with outdoor recreation and working on trails and increasing that access, I did have like this romanticized thought and I guess kind of like a colonized thought of like, wow, this is really beautiful. Humans are the worst. Keeping it in like this like quote, pristine state or before I realized that uninhabited land is a myth. Uninhabited land is a myth.

But think about wilderness is that it never really existed. Not today, not in the days of Teddy Roosevelt or in the industrial revolution and definitely not back when European settlers landed in North America. revolution and definitely not back when European settlers landed in North America. Because long before these spaces were even referred to as wilderness, they were populated and tended to by the indigenous people who lived there. John Muir and Everett Russe came in and spoke about these places so eloquently, but it lacked a lot of knowledge. It lacked a lot and just holds a lot of deep-seated racism and hate towards Indians. John Meir, a forefather of the American wilderness movement, argued that wilderness should be cleared of all of its inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urban humans need for spiritual renewal. In his writing, Mier described indigenous people as, quote,

dirty, lazy, and uncivilized. In one essay collection, he wrote to promote national parks. He assured perspective tourists that most indigenous people were dead or, quote, civilized into useless innocence. And remember, Ansel Adams, that famous nature photographer? Well, he actively avoided photographing any of the local Miwa who lived in Yosemite Valley, even though they were rarely out of his sight. He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land, he knew that the Miwa had tended

to for at least 4,000 years. And he knew that indigenous people throughout the country were forcibly evicted from what are now our wilderness areas. All in the interest of protecting these spaces from human disturbance. But for me being of this land, you know, my people are of this land. It feels like a, I guess, like a continued exploitation of land and like the name of purity. And again, purity being like a staple of white supremacy and colonization. This pursuit of purity is a big part of what influenced the wilderness act of 1964,

because coded within the language of preservation was that wilderness landscapes should be free from human presence. Ultimately, uninhabited wilderness as a concept had to first be created before it could be preserved. Despite its colonialist underpinnings, it's undeniable that the wilderness axe passage was a shining moment in American environmental history. It set millions of square miles of valuable land aside for the sake of protection from American capitalism. And in doing so, it said, we value what's already here. And yet, it's unclear whether the acts leave it be philosophy is still useful when it comes to land management.

And some ecologists are pushing for a different approach. It's an approach that, more closely, echoes how wilderness land had been tended to by the indigenous people who lived there long before it was ever thought of as wilderness. Low intensity human intervention. Here's an example. Bandair National Monument in New Mexico is an area that's been ravaged by a century of fire suppression and livestock grazing, and it led to really damaging rates of soil erosion. Much of this land is in capital W wilderness, which means workers are limited to primitive tools. But in 2007, they made a bold decision. They decided to take chainsaws to nearly 5,000 acres of land.

Soyers cut small juniper trees and mulched the ground with their branches. This kind of action, using chain saws instead of crosscuts in the wilderness, and at such a scale, it was a rare exception to the wilderness-axe rule against motors. And it worked. In the 15 years since, rates of erosion have fallen by at least an order of magnitude, and the population of native grasses increased threefold. It's hard to imagine crosscut saws being able to wield such exponential results so quickly. Ultimately, these questions about wilderness, who and what it's for and how we relate

to it, it's a debate that will continue to rage on. Because at the heart of it all, wilderness doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, and it probably never will. Last summer, I hiked into the John Meer wilderness in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At around 10,000 feet along a quiet trail, the sign at the wilderness boundary laid out the rules, simple enough to understand, closed to motor vehicles and motorized equipment, violations punishable.

It was August, too early yet for full sun, but the fog poured from the stony peaks beyond the tree line. I crossed the threshold into wilderness, suddenly very aware of how much effort went into creating an arbitrary border that I'd only recently begun to understand. As I plotted along, my eyes cast downward on the trail, I thought about all the sweat and precision that goes into carving trails like this out of mountainside, all the trees that were chopped with cross cuts to make a path like this possible.

The way we've romanticized our country's wilderness, I'm wary of it, but I'm also prone to it. I think about how easy it can be to fall into the idea that there are sacred lands, protected wilderness like this one, and perhaps more disposable lands, like the changing cities many of us return home to. I catch myself clinging to the romantic idea that when I step into the wilderness, I'm heading somewhere better than us, a place that's protected from us, that there are some places where we can still walk a dozen miles and not find a gas station or a McDonald's, but instead a glistening lake. Coming up, we learned that when the wilderness act stated that no machines are allowed in

the wilderness, they really meant it. Stay tuned. And we're back with Lashmidon. Hey, Lasha. Hey, Roman. I love this episode so much. I love thinking about wilderness as kind of a designed space. Like, it's still something that's in the purview of the show, but it is almost completely the opposite of the show. Yeah. And, you know, in this episode, there were so many interesting rabbit holes that I wish I could have gone down as a reporter. You know, there's so much more to say when it comes to cross cuts, themselves, to conservation, which is our own can of worms, land management, Indigenous rights, land back. But I wanted to share just this one extra tiny tidbit with you that I ended up leaving

out of the episode, but I still find myself telling people at parties. Okay, I am ready. Go for it. So, do you remember some of that language that's used to describe what is and what isn't allowed in wilderness, according to the Wilderness Act? Yeah, I mean, the key things I remember are as no motorized objects, no mechanical transport, that kind of thing. Yes.

And I find the language and choice of words in this piece of legislation really interesting, especially because the language kind of oscillates between the highly precise and poetically vague, sometimes even within the same paragraph. And there's these lyrical descriptions where wilderness is described using the words untrammeled

and primeval, you know, describing it as a place for a visitor who does not remain. And people are always referring back to this exact text, you know, this weirdly poetic document to try and sort out what is and isn't allowed in capital W wilderness. And one of the biggest debates has been about wheels. Whoa.

Okay. So, I mean, I know a wheel in axle is this sort of original, simple machine, but I would not have thought that would be banned. Yeah. Wheels are technically one of the simplest machines. And because of that, they're not allowed in the wilderness. Any kind of transportation with wheels, any tools with wheels, generally wilderness areas can only be accessed by horseback, backcountry skiing, kayaking or canoeing, hiking. I had no idea. The language says

no mechanized or motorized equipment shall be used. Mechanized means as in machine. We could have a whole podcast about Dalai's first unconcerned. Yeah, and Dalai says, back when the wilderness act first passed and there were these new rules to work with all of a sudden, trail crews would still use wheelbarrows to move material around. But then as managers began interpreting the wilderness act a little more strictly, they said, well, wait a minute, a wheelbarrow has a wheel, therefore it's mechanized equipment, and we shouldn't be using that in the wilderness. So the Forest Service, where Dolly worked, decided to stop using wheelbarrows and trail work

altogether, mostly to set an example for hikers and people coming into the wilderness recreationally. And their perspective was if land managers were seeing using wheelbarrows, what argument would there be to prevent other forms of wheeled transport on the same trails, like mountain bikes, baby strollers, and deer carts? Wow. Wait, what's a deer cart? I think it's a cart that's used to haul your game. Oh, I see. Okay, but how did they do their work without wheelbarrows? I mean, you know, second to a saw, it seems like the most important tool for a labor-intensive

earth-moving job. Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts. So instead of wheelbarrows, they use shoulder bags, tote bags, basically. Sometimes known as dirt bags. To haul dirt and rocks from one place to another without using any form of machine, or even if it's simple machinery. It isn't just a delightful image. It is.

I mean, I've never had a positive connotation to the phrase dirt bag before, but now I do. It's just amazing. But it does seem very hard if you're just hauling dirt on your back. That seems incredibly difficult. It's incredible commitment. And today, there is one big exception to the No Wheels and Wilderness norm and its wheelchairs. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was able to negotiate with the Wilderness Act. So people who use wheelchairs for everyday indoor mobility are allowed to use them in a wilderness area. Oh, that makes sense. I'm glad they made that exception. But you mentioned mountain bikes, though. What about them? So in regards to mountain bikes, this is where things get a little bit spicy.

Okay. Because mountain bikes, they aren't motorized. They are mechanized in that they provide a mechanical advantage with their wheels. And they are human powered. And they have a very large following. So their ambiguity kind of puts them in an awkward spot when it comes to wilderness access. Yeah, I bet, yeah. So several mountain biking groups have been pushing

for decades, for mountain bikes to be allowed in the wilderness. And a big part of their argument takes us right back to that vague open-ended language in the wilderness act. People who say that mountain bikes shouldn't be considered mechanical transport say that the wilderness act could have explicitly banned bicycles in their language. They could have been specific, but they weren't. I mean, that's a good point, but the wilderness act was from 1964, right? And so, were mountain bikes even a thing then?

Mountain bikes weren't even invented at that point. Okay, okay. That's what I thought. Regular road bicycles were around and were used, but the first mountain bikes came around over a decade later. So some people say, you know, how could the writers of the Wilderness Act possibly have anticipated that people would have wanted to take their bikes into the wilderness, into the mountains. So their point of view is that the authors of the wilderness act never specifically intended to ban bikes and therefore bikes should be allowed in the wilderness.

Exactly. And I will say this is only in regards to wilderness areas. You can use mountain bikes in state forests, state parks, national parks, things like that. But in regards to wilderness areas, another element to the argument that mountain bikers make is that they feel that they do less damage than hikers and equestrians who are both allowed on wilderness trails. And I mean, in 2006, the National Park Service released a study supporting that claim. The study was about what mode of travel affects trails the most.

And the results showed that horse trails led to the most severe levels of erosion, then hiking trails, and then bike trails, which showed very little signs of erosion. And on the other side of the debate, people argue that bicycles can damage habitat, disturb wildlife, still lead to some levels of erosion, and also that allowing bicycles in wilderness

areas has the potential to increase conflict with hikers and limit the hikers ability to enter that dreamy wilderness mindset, you know, just kind of harshes the vibe. Yeah, I'm sympathetic to this because I'm much, I mean, I'm a hiker more than a biker, and bikes are very cool, but they totally harsh my vibe when I'm hiking. In any case, this debate about wheels and wilderness, it came into public conversation in a really big way in 2017, because that year there was an attempt to pass a bill literally called the Wheels Over Wilderness Bill. Okay. And this bill advocated for federal wilderness areas to allow not just mountain bikes, but all kinds of wheels. It didn't pass, but it did set anti-wheel advocates off.

So I found dozens of fiery op-eds published in 2017 with headlines like, and I'm quoting my favorite one here, five lies being told to get mountain bikes into the wilderness. Okay. So yeah, it is getting spicy. It's a little contentious, yeah. And to each their own. For now though, all wheels,

besides wheelchairs are still bent, and hikers and chill workers alike just navigate their way around that rule. And all this makes me think of this one hilarious anecdote that Dolly told me from her time working on trails and I just have to share it with you. Okay. So this one time when Dolly was leading a trail crew, her manager told her that there was a giant tire down in a wilderness area

that had probably rolled down from the top of a ski hill. It was like the tire that went to a big loader machine or something. Sure enough, down in the creek bed was a six-foot diameter, huge rubber tire that probably weighed 300 pounds. And my boss said, can you get it out of the wilderness? So, Dolly tried to crowdsource for the best solution. And some people said, well, wait till the air quality boards says it's okay and burn it. I thought, gross. Other people were like, why don't you stretch the tire between two trees and then cut it into little pieces and haul it out? And I thought, my God, that would take forever. And then

one person said, well, get a big volunteer group for a boy scout troop and tip it on edge and roll it out. And somebody else said, no, that would be illegal. That would be using a wheel in the wilderness. I said, but it is a wheel in the wilderness. It was hilarious because they were saying it would be okay to carry it out, but not to roll it out because that would be using a wheel in the wilderness. And I said, that is just going too far with being a wilderness purist.

Oh my goodness. So what if they end up, they couldn't use it as a wheel. They couldn't use a wheel as a wheel. That is so funny to me. Okay, so what did she end up doing? Nothing. Nothing. I transferred to a different forest.

I don't know what happened. But if Dolly had her way, she said she probably would have buried it, which we all know, burying your problems isn't usually the best way to deal with them, but in this case, I get it. Wow, that is such an amazing story. Well, thank you so much, Lasha. It's so much fun.

Yeah, thank you. 99% Invisible was produced this week by La Shaman Dawn, edited by Kelly Prime, original music by Swan Riau, sound mix by Martin Gonzalez, fact checking by Sona Avakian. Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Kurt Colstad is our digital director, the Resident team includes Chris Barube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Jason De Leon, Vivian Le, Jacob Moltenado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Dolly Chapman, Adam Sowards, and Shundin Nez. Thanks also to Joe Sorrentino, Chaz Robles, Kyle Chujillo, and Robert Parks. 99% invisible as part of this titcher and serious XM podcast family, now headquartered six

blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Oregon on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. And now when I meet someone who thinks I'm going to play the saw, you may have heard of people playing across the saw as a musical instrument. And I don't quite know how it's done. I think you need a bow like you'd play a violin and you bend it and that's something I still have to learn. I have no idea how to play music on a crosscut

saw. One, please, a violinist! They're on the banks of the Mosul, Marlene Sain. And then Marlene Sainte down took out a saw from a case and played it like a violin. It sounded exactly like this. Oh! you