I find it hard to place blame on user groups when, for the most part, leaders of these groups want to do the right thing by maintaining their trails or minimizing their impact so they can continue to enjoy said trails.
I much rather place blame on those who manage the trails.
This opinion comes from my (albeit somewhat limited) experiences as a trail maintainer. The hill I learned to mountain bike on is Burnaby Mountain. I grew up in the neighbourhood in its shadow, and spent a lot of time pushing my clapped-out DH up that hill. Recently, the City of Burnaby put up some nice fences blocking as many of the illegal trails as they could find, and planted trees on the trails to further discourage poaching. This bummed me out, because the best turns on the hill are on one of these illegal trails. The legal trails are old, constantly being washed out, and need top-to-bottom rebuilds (as evidenced by the amount of rockwork I have put in on trail days).
And the thing is, the mountain bikers in the area would _love_ to do the required labour _for free_. But the city refuses to allow this, requiring that all maintenance is done under paid supervision (so obviously they don't want to spend money on this).
This clearly pushes mountain bikers to make their own changes, build their own trails, and end up clashing with the city.
Best part is, the hikers also prefer this because then they don't have to watch for bikers flying around the blind corners that need the bushes trimmed...
Then, extending this towards Eagle Mountain, my current romping grounds, the moto association is trying their best to get a moto-specific loop put in place. The more effort they've been putting into this, the less poaching we have seen of the mtb trails. This effort has required a lot of interfacing with the City of Coquitlam, but it has been immensely appreciated by both moto and mtb users.
If you give people the opportunities to build and maintain what they want, my experience says that there will be fewer conflicts and better trails for all users.
Perhaps the inverse to "If you build it, they will come" is if you don't build it, someone else will, but if you don't let them build it they won't leave...
Anyways, always nice to read what yall write, thanks!
March 13, 2024, 10:30 a.m. - UMichael
I find it hard to place blame on user groups when, for the most part, leaders of these groups want to do the right thing by maintaining their trails or minimizing their impact so they can continue to enjoy said trails. I much rather place blame on those who manage the trails. This opinion comes from my (albeit somewhat limited) experiences as a trail maintainer. The hill I learned to mountain bike on is Burnaby Mountain. I grew up in the neighbourhood in its shadow, and spent a lot of time pushing my clapped-out DH up that hill. Recently, the City of Burnaby put up some nice fences blocking as many of the illegal trails as they could find, and planted trees on the trails to further discourage poaching. This bummed me out, because the best turns on the hill are on one of these illegal trails. The legal trails are old, constantly being washed out, and need top-to-bottom rebuilds (as evidenced by the amount of rockwork I have put in on trail days). And the thing is, the mountain bikers in the area would _love_ to do the required labour _for free_. But the city refuses to allow this, requiring that all maintenance is done under paid supervision (so obviously they don't want to spend money on this). This clearly pushes mountain bikers to make their own changes, build their own trails, and end up clashing with the city. Best part is, the hikers also prefer this because then they don't have to watch for bikers flying around the blind corners that need the bushes trimmed... Then, extending this towards Eagle Mountain, my current romping grounds, the moto association is trying their best to get a moto-specific loop put in place. The more effort they've been putting into this, the less poaching we have seen of the mtb trails. This effort has required a lot of interfacing with the City of Coquitlam, but it has been immensely appreciated by both moto and mtb users. If you give people the opportunities to build and maintain what they want, my experience says that there will be fewer conflicts and better trails for all users. Perhaps the inverse to "If you build it, they will come" is if you don't build it, someone else will, but if you don't let them build it they won't leave... Anyways, always nice to read what yall write, thanks!