Riding off-highway vehicles (ATVs, UTVs, dirtbikes etc) is very popular in Colorado. The highways here are filled with armadas of linked vehicles – trucks towing enormous flatbed trailers carrying a mix of dirtbikes and ATVs, RVs towing tricked-out jeeps, jeeps towing offroad-capable trailers, even an RV towing an SUV with an ATV mounted on top of it for an RV/SUV/ATV grand slam. It seems over the top at times, a sprawling and awkward menagerie of internal combustion engines and frames for any type of terrain they might encounter.
However, the more we looked, the more we realized it’s basically a different culture’s form of wilderness exploration and radical self-reliance. Sure, the frontier is gone and there are no more wagon trains, but you can re-enact the experience by transporting your family unit in a fortress-home on wheels with its specialized set of scout vehicles for reaching the most remote corners of an inhospitable landscape.
We decided to try this out. We rented a UTV in Silverton, an old mining town, and went up into the mountains on OHV trails to check out abandoned mines, mountains streaked red by surface iron deposits, and other surprises. It was an absurd amount of fun, the grown-up version of playing with toy trucks. It also let us cover a very large amount of interesting landscape in a short time.
On this day we also noticed that, on average, OHV owners are really nice people. Despite us being obviously liberal west coast tourists in a rental OHV, we had plenty of people coming up to us and chatting us up, and everyone had extremely polite road manners in terms of pulling over or backing up when the road got too narrow.
There are certainly drawbacks to OHVs. They’re noisy enough that it’s basically impossible for OHV trails to coexist with hiking trails in the same area. They pollute substantially more than cars. They disturb the soil and local wildlife. I think a lot of these issues can be addressed by carefully choosing what areas they’re allowed in and by mandating particular standards for the engines they use.