The Colorado River doesn’t so much flow through Gore Canyon as it kicks and screams. This canyon, sixty miles from the Colorado’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, is testimony to Precambrian stubbornness. Here the river loses 340 feet in only five miles, its steepest drop along 1,470 miles to the Sea of Cortez.

When I lived in nearby Kremmling, Colorado, during the late 1970s, I sometimes walked through the canyon along the railroad tracks in awe of the thunderous rapids. I couldn’t imagine going through them in a boat.

Neither could most rafters and kayakers. Under the rating system then employed on western rivers, Gore Canyon was rated Class V, extremely difficult, and Class VI, unraftable except at risk of death. Sections could be kayaked at low flow times but not without portages.

Revisiting Gore Canyon recently, I found startling changes. Kayakers and rafters descend the rapids by the dozen. Some twenty outfitters are authorized by the Bureau of Land Management to take thrill-seeking customers through the gorge. A nationally televised festival is held there. The river of my youth had, by the summer of 2003, become overrun by thousands of weekend warriors.

Similar massive changes in recreation have been visited upon the national forests and other public land during the last decade. Partly at work is a changed mindset. In boats, on skis and aboard motorized vehicles, outdoor enthusiasts are pushing old envelopes. The impossible became extreme, and extreme is mainstream.

Accelerating changes in technology also explain the transformation of Gore Canyon and other public land. Shorter flat-bottomed kayaks made of plastic allow access to narrow, tumbling mountain creeks that only a decade ago might as well have been the moon. Stronger plastics used in rafts are less vulnerable to punctures, allowing the boats to bounce off rocks. Webs have replaced sealed floors, allowing water to drain while the boat is still in the rapid. This means improved maneuverability for self-bailing rafts.

Winter and summer, from canyon rivers to mountain peaks to desert dunes, technology has become a major player in recreational use of public land. From mountain bikes to dirt bikes and from snowshoes to snowmobiles, technology is allowing more people to go farther and faster—with sometimes benign but, more often, disturbing impacts.

This incremental encroachment began innocently with army surplus Willys jeeps after World War II. Snowmobiles arrived in the 1950s, proliferating in the 1960s. Honda introduced the first all-terrain vehicle in 1970, and Kawasaki delivered the first personal watercraft, the Jet Ski, in 1973. Bicycle enthusiasts in the 1970s modified old balloon-tire clunkers, ushering in a boom that began in the late 1980s. Since then, the toys have become stronger and bigger, lighter and more powerful. Our technology has compressed distances and bridged difficulties. We have machines, not people, to match our mountains. “Off-road vehicles have surged to the forefront of a land manager’s headache,” says David Havlick in his book, No Place Distant.

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Susan Marsh has watched this evolution for fifteen years. She offers the example of snowmobiles. “It used to be that they stayed pretty much on the trail, because when the snow was soft and bottomless, they weren’t powerful enough to get through,” says Marsh, the recreation, wilderness and trail coordinator on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. “But now there are 800- to 850-cc engines that can basically climb up a cliff. The same is basically true of mountain bikes with their new shocks, and ATVs are also getting better. The bottom line with all these kinds of technological toys is that people are penetrating the forest in larger numbers and during all seasons, and so our remote, little-used refuge areas are becoming less so.”

Scrambling land managers continually lag behind the technological advances. “We’re not entirely sure what all the impacts are,” says Marsh. “Is it a problem for critical wildlife species? Are we losing our most wild and pristine end of the spectrum and not even knowing it? We have a lot of concerns.”

In Jackson Hole and elsewhere, proliferating technology has turned the backcountry into the frontcountry. In wilderness areas, trail runners wearing shock-absorbing shoes lope into meadows that are for a backpacker a day’s trudge from civilization. There’s also more congestion, such as at Teton Pass. There, on the Idaho-Wyoming border, technological advances in skis, snowshoes and snowboards have spurred more people to seek virgin powder. Friction between users is more frequent. In warmer weather, horseback riders are upset with mountain bikers, mountain bikers by dirt bikers, and so on.

Of most concern to land managers are impacts from motorized vehicles. A long list of impacts begins with soil compaction, trampled forage and fragmented wildlife habitat. These threats to the integrity of public land have been recognized since the 1970s. President Richard Nixon in 1972 and President Jimmy Carter in 1977 issued executive orders directing federal land mangers to manage the use of off-road vehicles. Given wide latitude, many land managers did nothing. Even today, off-road and off-trail motorized and mechanized travel is permitted on most BLM land as well as on many sections of national forests.

With few vehicles, managing off-road use was postponed in deference to other, more urgent matters, says Liz Close, the Ogden, UtahÐbased director of recreation for the Intermountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service. But skyrocketing purchases of motorized vehicles during the last twenty years have created urgency. “This is everyone’s top issue,” she says. Punctuating that assessment is a message last year from Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth that recreation is one of the top four issues facing land managers. Off-road vehicles also spread invasive weeds, another of Bosworth’s top issues.

Close admits to frustration. Forest managers, she says, “are feeling that their management is not adequate to protect their resources.” She is part of a team that in a new policy being formally proposed, would mandate that vehicles on national forests stay on designated roads and tails. The only negotiable item in this policy is which roads and trails would remain open.

Scott Kovarovics, director of the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition, is supportive but wary. “Real reform as opposed to rhetoric” requires two actions, he says. First, each national forest must have a deadline—sooner rather than later—for compliance. Second, the Forest Service policy must address the spaghetti tangle of legal and renegade roads and trails. “Simply designating every single track on the landscape and then saying the problem is solved is not a real response,” he says. “The agency should be building a manageable, affordable road system from the ground up. The agency must admit that it doesn’t have the personnel or other resources to manage the use that exists today.” Without those stipulations, says Kovarovics, public policy pronouncements are only window dressing.