Gnarly sentence handed down on some Vermont trail builders looking for some extra spice in their life.
Great reporting on the situation here, has interviews with the main builder and opposition - https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/mountain-biking-case-signals-crackdown-on-rogue-trail-building/
Last month, Attorney General Charity Clark announced a $35,000 settlement against two men who eventually admitted responsibility: endurance athletes Cyril Brunner and Aaron Rice. Both were also officers of the very trail organizations that were supposed to be partnering with the state to support responsible trail building.
From the article, how a "No Strava" sign on the trail was interpreted by prosecutors:
To state officials, the sign was damning evidence that Brunner and his pals were trying to keep their trail a secret, for use only by them and their clique of riders. Opuszynski’s memo said such signs were “installed in an effort to keep this trail ‘off the grid’ and hidden from land managers and to keep the trail used by those that were ‘in the know.’” The attorney general’s complaint echoed the claim.
Interview with reporter of the article below
Land managers and NIMBYs lose their minds when they see wood structures built for skinny's and drops. Alarm bells go off for "double black", "unpermitted construction", and "Liability".
If they had kept the trail limited to dirt and natural features, they might still be riding that trail today.
Silver lining? That was the most even-handed news report on illegal trail building that I've ever seen. A conspicuous absence of pearl clutching and hyperbole. Maybe there's hope for the future yet.
IIRC, this is how Braille at the Soquel Demonstration Forest started life - late 90's or early 2000s I think. It got closed for a while when land managers found out about it, but eventually was reopened as a legalized trail.
Illegal trails are the life blood of mountain biking. Unfortunately, there is less land in the Northeast than other places so the viable spots are a) more tightly patrolled and b) not on logging land c) home to legal networks often controlled by older riders less down with cool features. There is also an outbreak of Sierra Club Stickuptheasseosis in the region who don't like trails that aren't for walking.
I'll take one of those "no strava" signs. LMAO
But yeah, good journalism, almost like that guy rides bikes. Funny how ski areas can get away with downing acres of trees, but build a little singletrack? you get fined or jail. But that's always how it's been here in the states.
Watch. In 3 years the state will take out all that hand made beauty and make it a legal hiking trail, and pass it off as their idea.
Pretty much how it went down at my local spot. All the cool wood features were torn down by the town/state people ages ago, some of the wreckage is still there. Biking still isn’t strictly legal. NEMBA has been trying to get it legal for, decades I think at this point? Still no news. Still being ridden daily. Every once in a while someone tries to bump the process along.
Yeah rule number one of illegal trail building is don't use any wood or screws. Besides the fact that it looks more illegal and permanent than piles of dirt, my understanding is that wooden structures of any sort leave the land manager more legally exposed. Crashing and getting hurt on a dirt trail is different in the eyes of the law than crashing and getting hurt on a structure made of imported construction materials that should have been permitted and engineered for safety.
My property is about 6 acres but is completely surrounded by a 400+ acre county park. The part of the park that surrounds my property is like “no man’s land”, there’s no county trails, infrastructure, or even a perceptible border between my property and the park. So it makes it feel as if I have 50+ nicely wooded acres surrounding my house. I have trails all over my property and a good bit that snake into the park property. I purposely build all my wooden and big features on my actual property and keep the trails on park land as natural as possible. I’ve always kept in the back of my mind that if my trails on the park property were ever discovered and became an issue, it would be a lot easier to ask for forgiveness if my rogue trails looked more like gloried hiking trails.
I think a huge part of this case involved the cutting down of some trees which the enforcers can then ascribe monetary value to. Once that is cataloged the accused can be held responsible for destruction of property and prosecution becomes much easier.
So if you do happen to stray onto some unknown property, don't build anything outa wood, and go around the trees, don't cut em down.
There was a similar situation around here in the San Juans not long ago with some national forest people coming down very hard on some riders thought to be responsible for building. Riders were caught riding, not building, and told in very clear terms that if they were caught building they'd be facing federal charges with potentially six figure fines attached. They got off with a stern warning.
Meanwhile just a short distance up the road from the above incident, there is massive dispersed camping and people off roading all over the place in jeeps and on motos and hunting galore. The contradictions are never ending. For some reason a narrow ribbon of single track that happens to be used by people on bicycles really triggers a lot of emotion.
typical skier behavior all around, trail cops got outranked by the flannel daddy
trails look difficult for difficult’s sake, one look at those mini skinnies and I’m absolutely staying on the dirt anyways…the name is trying way too hard, fuck it!
Yup - I remember this case coming up a month or so ago and while it seems harsh, the fact they cut down trees AND built structures in there is pretty hard to defend...we really can't allow that behaviour to carry on
Most of the people I.....have heard of..... would pretty much only build trails with a rake, if anything! And while some places turn a blind eye to pirate trails, structures are almost always frowned upon and cutting down any tree for any reason without permission is a cardinal sin IMO. If people push it too far it makes getting legitimate trails even harder!
327 trees is a lot of trees.
But I’m very curious how they got that number. I assume it must include saplings and they estimated it?
All but two of the trees were under 6" if I remember right. The irony in that to me is that in New England they go out and thin out shrubs and saplings every single year at ski areas and sometimes the people helping to do that will make their own secret gladed spot. There are definitely spots where the tiny trees are too tight to just go around.
The article outlines the details the work well. "All but two of the 327 felled trees measured under six inches. The foresters’ inventory initially tallied potential fines at around $16,000. But the state law allows damages of up to triple that amount, depending on the circumstances". 327 saplings are pretty easy to remove. I can go on a ride and lop 50 aspen saplings encroaching on a trail in about 3 minutes. Now, 3,000 hours of work was put into this trail, so there was a lot more than lopping trees, thats a lot of work. "elaborate series of wooden ramps, jumps, pathways and bridges, some constructed with two-by-fours and bolted securely into boulders and rock outcroppings"
Rogue building you often are removing deadfall. I'm sure the legislators would say that was illegal too. Cut a down 15" down tree? Thats probably $15,000. These guys really were just made an example of by the legislators, which is too bad to be the face of something that has been bubbling up for decades. Trails take way too long to get approved, and have no clear path to get there. We're currently working with the FS on a proposal that started 15 years ago, and its not even out for public comment! Think about how much bikes have changed in 15 years.
Another call out is that Strava gave this trail away even with a sign telling people not do. I've found its nearly impossible to keep a trail off strava and it just gives a bullseye to land owners. I don't see it changing, people are too ignorant and self entitled to stop. I've tried making strava segments to tell people to turn off their phone, it doesn't matter. And once a handful of people strava it, people just think "well its on it, must be legirt". If you're considering building a rogue trail, you have to understand this new dynamic; all it takes is a few ignorant folks to give it away and you're now in the bullseye. Land owners may slap some webcams up and when you go to clear it the next year, got ya. Or the hunters (one stumbled on this trail) who are paying $1,000 reward for illegal trailbuilding https://www.pinkbike.com/news/a-colorado-hunting-non-profit-is-offering-a-reward-for-turning-in-unsanctioned-trailbuilders.html . They can just use a heatmap and boom, $1,000 to them!
Now I can 100% relate with this guy. In the last two decades, the major focus has been building intermediate machine built trails. Sure, theres been some jump focused builds like a-line style, but call me old school, I love me some narrow, steep, natural tech, especially on granite. If done right, it has such minimal impact on the surrounding areas. It's the type of trails I seek out when I go somewhere, not 4' wide path. In my town, we have had 1 mile of hand built black trails built since 2010, and I don't remember any official maintenance days on them since. In that time we've had 23 miles of green and 31 miles of intermediate built, the majority machine built. So we're stuck riding down old game trails put in 40 years ago with poor alignment and heavy maintenance. And you go "well lets try this alternate line" and the hikers lose their mind and put booby traps up.
Does anyone have a video of the trail? Where's the gofundme?
Most of this stuff purely comes down to approvals, especially at the state land management level. Whether you want to make a bike trail, ski resort, or "selectively log to improve species diversity and forest health", you need to make a good enough case to get it approved. 2 of those 3 things in generate revenue , so you can guess which will get prioritized and approved.
I agree about the unavoidability of Strava, but I drew a different conclusion about how to respond to that reality.
Instead of working extra hard to hide the trail, keep it secret, and try to avoid people who use Strava from finding out about a trail, I think illegal trail building should be built in such a way to anticipate, plan for, and hope for people to find out about the trail. The question should be: if this trail is going to be discovered by the authorities no matter what, how can I build it so that it's worth maybe keeping around?
If you're building a super dank secret loam stash that goes straight down the fall line, it really shouldn't ever be grandfathered into legal status. Once it gets skidded to death in the first year or two, it will be useless for everyone, and it will be an endless time sink to maintain. These sorts of trails are tailor-made to be shut down as soon as they're discovered. Ditto for wooden structures of any kind, sketchy creek crossing bridges, blind jumps that are designed to kill people who aren't the trail builders, layouts that guarantee user conflict, other bad trail alignments that are super high maintenance, trails that cross wetlands or cause erosion risk to nearby protected bodies of water, etc.
Trails get grandfathered in all the time, so how can you make your trail worth grandfathering in? It might need to be a little less "SICK" than you imagined, but I agree that there are too many horrible machine-built flow trails with 180 switchbacks and 6 foot wide endless traverses, and one of the best antidotes I know to that problem is illegal handbuilt trails that eventually become legal handbuilt trails.
There’s a couple no Strava zones in Squamish that lasted for almost a decade before someone decided to post them all to open street. Same thing happened up in Whistler. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/vigilante-mapping-rmow-slrd-urged-to-challenge-unsanctioned-publishing-of-bike-trails-12562440
Didn’t one of the quotes from the land managers read something like “the no Strava signs showed the intention of the builders to be a private trail for people in the know rather than the public”.
I certainly am all for a lot of Lee way for Trailbuilders. I think there is entirely too much red tape which is exactly why rogue trails isn’t going to go away annytime soon on public land. And when miscommunication happens it can usually just be the effort of fixing it. And sometimes asking for forgiveness can mean you get more done. But considering these guys basically were two timing the land managers by working with them publicly and doing their own thing secretly. It’s not too shocking they were made an example of whether I agree with the size of fines or not.
I agree with you that trails will eventually get discovered. However, not all builds should be able to get grandfathered. Build some natural, crazy lines that would also get eroded quickly when too many riders ride it, enjoy it with your friends until they get closed down. Rinse and repeat. Beauty of this is, that the trails often are too technical for the majority of riders, so they take longer to show up on Strava. As a bonus, if you can locate the start and end of the trail in the middle of nowhere with no connecting entrances and exits to existing trails or fire roads, they are harder to discover and a lot of people would not ride them even if they know that they are there.
You know, "natural, crazy lines" that are "too technical for the majority of riders" don't have to be erosion risks. You can build steep, natural, crazy trails that hold up to traffic, and like you said, if they're too steep and gnarly for most riders they don't have to hold up to nearly as much traffic. Tons of excellent examples of trails like this. Granted that it's harder to build like this because you have to use your brain a bit more than plowing straight down the fall line, but it's not impossible.
I guess it really matters where you're writing from and making this suggestion. I don't know where "DK" is, which is what your profile says. If you're talking about building secret skidder trails deep in the depths of crown land in central or eastern British Columbia nowhere near a metro area, sure.
But I see way too much of this style of hack it in/burn it out trail building in highly dense riding areas like Whistler, Squamish, Bellingham, Seattle, Portland, Santa Cruz, etc and it really bums me out. It's not a good look for mountain biking. North Vancouver and Le Pleney in France have been in the news recently for whole riding zones getting shut down because riders WOULD NOT STOP hacking in new steep skidder trails despite a huge density of them existing and despite repeated calls by land managers to stop cutting new steep skidder trails.
I am not arguing against that steep lines can be build to withstand erosion. However, that needs more work and time, making the loss of trails when discovered and shut down more painful. And to be clear: straight down the mountain skid lines are not what i am talking about. But armoring the trail with stones, building berms, etc. is a no go on these trails IMO.
Fully with you on not doing this in close proximity to established trail systems, that is just asking for trouble.
Currently living in Denmark, so not many opportunities for building pirate trails because of little public land and higher population density (and no tall enough hills 😕). Here and there a small line connecting fire roads is possible, not much more. But living in the PNW before and having lived in other places in Europe, there were quite some cool trails that were built by just cleaning out the branches and then starting to ride lines in. In one spot we even raked the leaves back onto the line after each session to keep it hidden. And, like I wrote, having to hike your bike in and out of the trail increased the longevity of it quite a bit. They usually got first discovered and shut down when felling operations moved in every couple of years.
@TEAMROBOT , your points are valid and I agree that some unsanctioned trails are built way too unsustainably. As someone who maintains a lot of old poorly aligned non bike trails, I cringe at a steep fall line trail that I know will fall apart after the first big rain storm. Some of that could be the builders style, but it also could be due to the rushed nature of building fast to avoid being caught. Fall line is a whole lot easier to make than a bench cut!
But you are only looking at it from the lens of mountain biking. In the US many landowners are primarily concerned about ecological impacts, especially to animals, and my experience is this is what shuts down trails most around here. The backcountry hunters and anglers in Colorado is specifically pissed off about disrupted corridors to elk. I have not see any maps that tell you all of those corridors either. I've seen that even the most sustainably built trails shut down due to wildlife concerns, like deer, elk, and bighorn sheep.
I would doubt this trail in particular was an unsustainable skidder. But the other user groups, such as hunters, hikers got pissed when they found it. Now its now easier than ever to find where a trail is by putting on the internet maps, and find who is maintaining it by slapping up a game cam. All trails need maintenance, trees fall, and when that builder goes to clear those trees with a chainsaw its putting them more at risk of being found.
If you like a trail that is unsanctioned, unless the builder gives permission to strava it, not recording it should be the culture. But it seems pretty unlikely that will actually happen without a cultural shift.
That article is interesting in that locals are upset with the rouge MAPPING of the rouges as if the unapproved (I say individually motivated) creation of new trails are already broadly accepted and an unspoken line was crossed by the mappers, not builders. Polar opposite to the situation in VT or NE as a whole.
In my few visits to the Squamish/S2S area I was amazed at how many world class trails exist that are not on any official maps. Most were very well built, maintained and have creative signs set a bit back into the trail away from plain view. They seemed to be people's passion projects and were not only being tolerated, but accepted as positive contributions into the networks and riding culture.
Is this just a case of mountain biking having a stronger presence in the local outdoor culture in BC? Or are there generally fewer restrictions to a motivated builder getting the green light/forgiveness to construct a trail on public land? Likely a complicated answer, but lately I've been thinking a lot about how they make that work over in the S2S and how it can be applied elsewhere.
I’m a board member for my local trail building group. We mostly do trail work at a state park about 2 miles from my house. In a roundabout way, we are lucky that the state parks are understaffed and underfunded. We’ve had a few big projects, mostly large bridges, and a few new trails, that came with funding and help from park staff. But other than that, we basically subsidize the state park’s maintenance, they don’t even take care of fallen trees, a few of us are certified sawyers and are allowed to operate in the park.
Over the last 10 years we’ve added probably 10 miles of trails to the existing park system and most of them start out as what we call “social” trails. They start out as rake and ride trails, we address drainage and build everything by hand. We avoid doing anything crazy like fall lines, removing live trees etc. And overtime they have all been integrated into the existing park system. We’ve had a few rangers wag a finger at us from time to time but they know we do it right and maintain them on our own time. When I was younger I would get mad that we weren’t building “gnarly” stuff on the new trails we were building but I’ve come to realize that the better a rogue trail is designed, built and maintained can go a long way to legitimizing it.
because Canada > USA
Also illegal to do it for ski lines on state land in an unapproved capacity... 839 trees, and a settlement of $75,000. Even inprisonment in some cases.
https://vtdigger.org/2023/10/23/state-settles-timber-trespass-case-with-man-who-sought-to-create-backcountry-ski-glades/
https://www.rutlandherald.com/news/2-sentenced-for-cutting-illegal-trail/article_507215e8-fb56-5399-8706-db624d1daa5f.html
I more meant people do it within ski areas as kind of semi-sanctioned side projects adjacent to maintenance of marked ski runs. A little different because of land use agreements I suppose, but the semi-sanctioned part of it feels like a gray area to me. If you are volunteering to help maintain marked runs at a ski area and you and some buddies (some of which maybe work for the mountain) maintain unmarked glades that technically don't exist is that fundamentally different? I think it is, but there's also the slippery slope aspect of it where I can see how that culture would lend itself to people deciding similar activities are okay for bike trails. Especially when it's not super far from a ski area (I never rode these trails so I don't know where exactly they were located, but Mt. Mansfield isn't exactly a super large area).
When it comes to building steep trails there is no right answer. There is a billion wrong ones. If done well from the beginning a few hrs of maintenance everyonce in a while is plenty. Only time I ever had an issue was when a tree came down in the perfectly wrong spot and redirected drainage down the trail. And even then it was maybe a 2 hr job to fix up nice.
The primary issue will always be the fact people like to do THEIR thing. Even the most flexible and well intentioned groups will have competing interests. And the more people your trailwork brings in, there will always be both well intentioned and selfish outsiders who either need to be brought in, mitigated, or in the worst cases flushed out. And the majority of people who are actually good at leading these types of groups aren’t necessarily the best or most up to date Trailbuilders.
Having lived in both regions, the fact that most of the land is public timberlands makes a huge difference. Land managers care less about building on these trails than private owners or conservationists more common on the east coast where forests don't exist to be clearcut. Also that there is so much more land is a piece of the puzzle too.
Patapsco?
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