Posted By stupidbike on 08/07/2008 6:25 PM
Yes i have ridden multi-use (non motorized) trails, particularly in Draper Utah. The City bought a 23k trail machine, bought Corner Canyon for Millions to keep it open space with trails and is cutting miles and miles of new trails to add to the existing system.
Granted, most of the trails are sandy and hold up to horses well, but some of the trails are bad for anyone to be on when wet. From November to post spring thaw, these trails have gates across them. There is tremendous signage around and user info about staying off wet trails. User groups educate and work on trails (my team has done over 200 hours of work on these trails) The city police and county sheriffs ticket and chase people riding moto's and atv's where they are not supposed 2. A local MTB race with 300+ people pre-registered was postponed to a Wednesday night due to rain to protect the trails.
IT CAN BE DONE, excuses limit access, solutions solve problems. Do you think 3 bucks a day is worth it to ride a trail? a few hours of trail work, user education for all use types?
Access will not grow by creating isolated pockets of use.
The key is to get the land manager involved in the policy making and enforcement.
I don't think anybody is making excuses. The two
examples you mention both involve areas with sand and different soil composition. It seems sand seems to help with drainage and
those trails sustain horses better although I have ridden sandy trails with big
pits of sand created by horse traffic that suck your wheels in.
I don’t know if you saw earlier but an IMBA designed trail
was built at Taylorsville several years
ago. It was destroyed in less than a day
by equestrians. Otter creek park
experimented with allowing horses on all of the trails a couple of years
ago. The damage to what use to be the
bike hike trails was so extensive so fast the experiment was stopped only after
a few months.
You talk about education, it is hard to educate people who simply
don’t care. They don’t have deal with
the mess their bad habits create, the horse they ride deals with it. The
equestrians are just along for the ride.
I’m not saying the equestrians shouldn’t have a place to
ride, they do. They have 100’s and maybe
even over 1000 miles of trail to ride in Kentucky
alone. The trails equestrians have
access to easily dwarfs that of what mountain bikers have access. I have tried to ride those trails only to
quickly learn any trail that allows equestrian use should be avoided. Alls we want is small piece of that or access
to trails that already do not allow equestrians.
I don’t care about user fees, but are they going to be enough
to pay for constant repairs a horse trail demands. Are they going to pay someone to go through
and clean up the horse shit and trash the equestrians leave behind? I seriously doubted, it would take more than
$3 a day. Do I want to waste my time on
building something that is going to be torn to bits the next day, when I can
spend my time building a trail that is going to be around for a decade? I think not.
I’m sorry but I have seen too much bad from equestrian used trails.
|