Illegal Trail Building Casting Bad Light on Mountain Biking

Trail building and trail maintenance is a lot of fun and very rewarding but all trail work needs to be sanctioned.   Meaning you have to go through the proper channels and do things the right way.  I bring this up because I came across an article via the Associated Press about illegal trail building in Lake Tahoe. The article has since popped up with weak attempts of  casting a local spin on it.  I found the original article via Las Vegas Review Journal.

The illegal trails are laced with stunts and jumps which points the finger at free riders. But casts a very negative shadow on the entire mountain biking community.

Joel Baty, an avid mountain biker and rental manager at Olympic Bike Shop in Tahoe City, Calif., said freeriders want trails like those at Whistler Mountain Bike Park in British Columbia, one of the world’s premier mountain bike parks.

“The existing trails just aren’t challenging enough for more advanced riders,” he said. “So what happens is they go out and build stunts and bigger jumps, and the Forest Service doesn’t tend to like that sort of stuff.”

I’m not much for jumps and stunts and features like those preferred by free riders but I do admire them for pushing the envelope. However this illegal activity needs to stop. Issues like this affect the entire mountain biking community. If you want to build trails, do it right and follow the rules so you don’t ruin it for everyone else.

According to the article, the illegal mountain bike trail issue is more of problem in the western states but there have been several incidents across the country.. like one this one…

In North Carolina, four men were arrested in 2003 on suspicion of building an illegal bike trail in the Pisgah National Forest. They agreed to pay a fine, to accept an indefinite ban from the national forest and to take part in supervised trail work to avoid prosecution.

The Forest Service also has worked with bike clubs to close many user-created trails in the Pisgah’s Bent Creek Experimental Forest near Asheville, N.C.

“It’s hard to catch these folks, because they’re out in remote areas,” said Randy Burgess, a Pisgah district ranger.

As I mentioned earlier, the original article is being syndicated with added local spin on the issue. One very weak attempt came from the Registered Guard of Eugene, OR. They started bringing up stuff about pirate trails that actually weren’t pirate at all. A friend of mine makes some good points…

The problem I have with this is it talks about *our* national forests (implying the NFs of the R-G’s readers — local people) plus the story ran under the banner “Oregon Life,” also implying a local connection to the problem. The story was NOT local, and it’s subsequent localization focused on the “problem” of one Bend guy who used to build illegal trails (in Oregon?) but turned good by deciding to work with his local NF through COTA. Where’s the local love? If anything, Oregon is out front of the national problem because its mountain bikers work *with* local NF managers.

I just feel like the story cast mountain bikers — *all* mountain bikers — in a bad light. The common public makes no distinction between freeriders, XC geeks, shuttle monkeys, etc. To the masses, we’re just guys in the woods with bikes.

As a community of mountain bikers we need to work together to combat this problem, but how?