The increased popularity of off-road vehicles1 (ORVs) in recent decades has coincided with technological advances enabling these machines to penetrate deeper into the backcountry than ever before. High-powered engines driving aggressive knobby tires can quickly remove vegetation cover and erode soils along trails, primitive roads, and unauthorized, visitor-created routes. Research has demonstrated these motorized uses to be substantially more impacting to natural resource conditions and the experiences of recreational visitors than other non-motorized forms of recreation. Increasingly these machines are being used in places once considered pristine and wild. Furthermore, their use on federal lands has grown substantially, though land managers have frequently been unable to address the resulting resource damage to soils, vegetation, wildlife, cultural resources. In addition, their use has been the source of escalating user conflicts
