I don't know much about this place. I rode there a few times WBITD on steep, old school raked-in trails. Last year a friend from Waterbury brought me there. We rode in on Merrit's trail and noodled around on old trail up top before dropping out Skullies, a trail lots of folks had been raving about. It was fun, but clearly doomed.
Growing pains there this year. I read excavators on Skully, I can imagine they are attempting to fix the many switchback turns with no grade reversals and dealing with groundwater. This network is all private land. This means that if enough land becomes involved, act 250 would be the applicable regulatory statute. 10 acres as the threshold, somewhere between 20 and 30 miles of trails depending on average width is where a network starts to get in the ball park.
Reading the FB posts, their basic difficulty seems to be trail users not being able to find definitive trail info, or just don't know or care to stay off wet trails.
I am not belittling all the hard work done on the trails there. I am suggesting that a community opened a door they can not close, and I wonder what the future of a particularly fragile, privately owned trail network might be. Now part of the MTB product of Vt, it's super close to Burlington.
My questions are what are user numbers? What's the long term goals here? What is the vision of success? Can this place handle Perry Hill-level traffic? Do the locals want 20k users a season on their land?
Richmond seems like a real good example of a small network that has been around for a long time, monetizing it's self very recently. It's a good chance to be objective about what's getting better and worse there.
Any regulars want to chime in?
Growing pains there this year. I read excavators on Skully, I can imagine they are attempting to fix the many switchback turns with no grade reversals and dealing with groundwater. This network is all private land. This means that if enough land becomes involved, act 250 would be the applicable regulatory statute. 10 acres as the threshold, somewhere between 20 and 30 miles of trails depending on average width is where a network starts to get in the ball park.
Reading the FB posts, their basic difficulty seems to be trail users not being able to find definitive trail info, or just don't know or care to stay off wet trails.
I am not belittling all the hard work done on the trails there. I am suggesting that a community opened a door they can not close, and I wonder what the future of a particularly fragile, privately owned trail network might be. Now part of the MTB product of Vt, it's super close to Burlington.
My questions are what are user numbers? What's the long term goals here? What is the vision of success? Can this place handle Perry Hill-level traffic? Do the locals want 20k users a season on their land?
Richmond seems like a real good example of a small network that has been around for a long time, monetizing it's self very recently. It's a good chance to be objective about what's getting better and worse there.
Any regulars want to chime in?