Trust And Teamwork Lead To Open Trails
IMBA Trail News
Volume 11, Number 1
March-April 1998
By Michael Kelley
I, too, had the great pleasure of attending the First International Trails and Greenways Conference in San Diego.
The goal was to make trails and greenways an essential part of public policy by making the connection between trails and transportation, recreation, urban policy, public health, economic development, biodiversity, habitat protection, stormwater management, sustainability, livable communities, rural policy, land use planning and more. It was a mouthful, but we had three days to chew on it.
The annual California Trails Conference, which preceded the RTC gathering, focused on the California Trail Plan, which had not been updated since it was enacted in 1978. Some 185 attendees grappled with their vision of the trail system in the year 2010.
For me, the highlight turned out to be "Trails, Environmental Degradation, and User Conflict -- A Case for a Team Process."
The session recounted events at Annadel State Park, one of our favorite Bay Area places. Years ago, it was beautiful. There were great singletrack opportunities, and a regime that was friendly to multi-use. For a while anarchy prevailed. But there was a pollution of social trails and the main attraction came to be a park where all users could go where they wanted to. It was being loved to death.
Along came State Park Ecologist Marla Hastings, who was responsible for the ecology of some 30,000 acres in the region. She was appalled at the degradation, and set out to fix it. This could have been a recipe for disaster, given the experience of other parks where "impact" so often became synonymous with "closure." Fortunately, this was not Marla's approach. She and her pals formed the "A Team," consisting of 11 people, five of whom represented muscle powered users. Among them was Ken Wells, activist extraordinaire since the early days of Responsible Organized Mountain Pedalers.
The A Team undertook an unprecedented group process, working from August, 1995, to spring, 1997. From the beginning, the players set aside pre-conceptions and assumptions and listened to one another. They met frequently, did trail projects, and had "awareness" and "recognition" days. They came to have high regard and trust for one another.
The first task was to formulate a Team issue statement and to quantify trails and use. They found that most users were men, aged 26-45; 60% were on mountain bikes, 4% were equestrians, and the rest hikers. They averaged 50 visits per year, and generally preferred steep, rocky, and narrow trail opportunities.
The A Team found that the root causes of the literally dozens of problems were lack of enforcement, education, revenue and staff, maintenance, and volunteers. These root causes were not tied to any particular user groups.
In addition to the root causes, the A Team reached consensus on several key ideas. There had to be a basic plan for narrow shared trails that provided an experience that was "intimate with the earth." (I presume trail rash was not a necessary element of this.) There had to be a diversity of trail opportunities, and if there were adequate, legal, narrow-gauge trails, it would be possible to eliminate the illegal ones.
The A Team agreed that the problems had not been caused by users, but instead were caused by the original trail and road design, (or, more accurately, a lack of design) and that these were problems that could be fixed by building new trails, repairing others, and closing some to return them to nature.
They realized that reducing the width of trails caused a significant reduction in environmental impact as well as better trail experiences for all users -- clearly a win-win situation. Future plans include removing several fire roads, and converting them to multiple-use paths.
The A Team agreed that all trails in the park should be multi-use, with the only exceptions in a few environmentally sensitive areas. This has become the official policy.
After the plan was completed, the press was invited to review the product, and wonderful publicity resulted. There has been nearly 100% compliance with trail closures, and no reported negative incidents on the new shared use singletrack trails. All the trails that were worked on are in great condition, and the new singletracks show no damage, even after the recent rains. These results were outstanding, particularly given the net decrease in the number of available trails.
There still remain the problems of maintaining trails with only two staff members. To solve this, the A Team is looking into a user permit project to provide the extra funds for maintenance and staff. The A Team is also continuing to act as an advisory committee for the Park, and assisting with volunteer patrols (combined horse and bike "Mounted Assistance Units") and trail design, repair, and construction.
As an added benefit which should appeal to her bosses in Sacramento, Marla was able to parlay the A Team effort into big dollars. The Plan provided the documentation for successful grant requests exceeding $200,000 to narrow existing fire roads into paths.
So how was Annadel able to get so many shared use trails, when so many other jurisdictions were unsuccessful? The team process was critical. The land managers recognized their responsibility to preserve the land, and at same time meet the needs of their constituency. They remained aware of their roles as public servants, and always tried to balance competing concerns. They bought into the project in a big way, were invested with a sense of ownership, and took great care to make it work. The biggest contribution, once barriers of mistrust were removed, was awareness that all users wanted essentially the same trail experiences. Above all, the A Team took a great deal of time to meet together, witness a multitude of diverse opinions, and coalesce into a few fixable problems as trust built. It was clearly worth the effort, and they all appear to be getting along like the figures on the cover of Watchtower Magazine.
Happy trails.
Reprinted with permission from the Bicycle Trails Council of the East Bay.
