> A member of the Santa Monica Mountains Trail Council asked me to put this
> over the internet immediately. If you ride in So. Cal and use this trail the
> following is of interest to you.
>
> Please send letters to PROTEST the opening to mountain bikes the Will Rogers
> portion of the Backbone Trail (includes Chicken Ridge). The trail is not
> safe for multi use and hikers and horsemen are in danger...
> ...Trails should not be open for multi use just by arbitrarly
> decisions or influenced by lobbying of special interest groups...
Be careful, here. There seems to be two basic positions that
one can assume: "we must all hang together or we will all hang
separately" and "we're just fine, it's those other guys who
cause all the trouble and that should be banned."
Assuming either position gets you into some pretty odd places.
For example, the Bay State (Mass) Trail Riders is urging its
members to write letters *against* banning motorized ORVs in
the state forests. The reasoning is that, if they can do it
to ORVs, they can do it to us. There's *plenty* of hikers and
mountain bikers who would just love to see the horses disappear.
If you take the "we're just fine, it's those other guys" position,
you find yourself in a four-way shooting match among hikers,
mountain bikers, horseback riders, and ORV people, all with
very good arguments about why the other three should be
banned. (MB's and ORVs: if we're so scary, obviously
the realy safety issue is the horses, they should be banned.)
(MB's: if the hikers want to ban us because we erode the
trail so much, they really ought to ban the horses, they
tear up the trail much more than we do. You hear this very
often from the Colorado MBs.) (Hikers: you're
all three (MB, H, ORVs) unnatural and eco-destructive and
should be banned.) (Tree huggers: nobody should be on the trails,
you should all be banned.) Temporary alliances form as one group tries
to get rid of the other, only to discover later that their
former allies have turned on them and are now trying to
get them banned. There's a Massachusetts ORV guy posting on
the MB group right now trying to drum up support for ORV's by
claiming that it is all the horseback rider's fault, and
if you don't support us, then the horseback riders are
coming after you next. Every group in turn tears its hair
out in frustration over the "Beavis and Butthead" members
of its own contingent who cause all the bad will with
the other groups.
I am not familiar with this particular trail in question
and there may indeed be objective reasons why it shouldn't
be open to mountain bikers. But. Think long and hard before
you indulge your first impulse on these questions.
Linda B. Merims
lbm@ici.net
Massachusetts, USA