On Monday this past week, Ken Camp and I attended the volunteer crew leader meeting at the Pisgah Ranger station. These meetings will be occuring monthly from now on, with plans being coordinated with the forest service for trail work throughout the district.
I won't bore you with details about worker's comp issues, CPR/FA, etc, but would like to metnion these important points:
1) Every trail in the district has an assigned volunteer group responsible for it's maintenance and improvement. According to the FS, no other group can do work on another group's desingated trail without permission.
2) For the past year or so, no trail has been officially assigned to any cycling group, although BRBC has been doing work at Bent Creek via the BioWheels Racing trail crew.
3) After this meeting, and much repeated advocacy, PAS received assignment of the section of Squirrel Gap Trail from Horse Cove to Laurel Creek trails. THIS IS A SIGNIFCANT ACCOMPLISHMENT. For the past few years, Pisgah Trailblazers, an equestrian group, has been doing work on Squirrel Gap even though they do not have legal access to that section. They were doing this to attempt to advocate to get full, legal access to this section of trail . This assignment of the trail to PAS basically makes sure that this won't happen (not that we have anything against equestrians- this is just a narrow ridgeline trail that horses would, IMO, have a significnat negative impact on the trail).
Soon, we will be announcing a scheduled work day for Squirrel Gap trail that, hopefully, will include a re-route of the huge washout about 1/2 way through the assigned section. All interested parties will be strongly encouraged to attend.
The best part of this is that Ken and I were able to speak to the Trailblazers afterwards and agree to work on this trail as team for the future- the equestrians still have assigned responsibility for the section from Wolf Ford up to Horse Cove. We've verbally agreed to treat the trail as one corridor and make sure that our respective work projects are planned together.
Good stuff.
Look for more news in the future.
Mike Brown, PAS advocacy officer
