How many of your are members of IMBA? International Mountain Biking Assn. It's a good way to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to trail preservatio for mountain bikers. Also, any of you go to trail work days?

anyway... drum roll please:
I am the co-president of the newly formed IMBA chapter here in my commnunity. We didn't have a mountain biking club so I quit my *****ing and got together with another person and got the ball rolling.

As for illegal trails 99% of the time, nope. Most of the ones that are illegal around here are private property; it's not a matter of closure.

This club thing is pretty exciting, but what a lot of work. LBTC, I hear your story all too well. Free riders are notoriously unorganized, and independent. Getting them together on anything that smacks of organization is like herding cats. This is where working with IMBA can really help. They have tons of resources for how to work with governemnt on issues like TTFs (technical trail features, the non scary name for stunts that doesn't freak out land managers...) and clubs. I know you said you don't care about that, you just want the trails back, but ultimately mountain bikers need to work together and not get divided by the type of riding that we do.

When we started getting this club together, that was on thing I knew we needed to do as our area has a pretty good downhill and free ride contingent. at one of the main mixed riding areas. My partner in making this club is a die hard xc rider, and I was really clear that embracing the whole community is the only way to make it work. There are many commnunites where legal free ride parks have been built, which is a far cry from the mayhem LBTC describes.

So, here's some of what we've done since January:
*website www.fttrc.org ( I did it, it's functional and not pretty)
*approved by the city for Adoptapark for the main riding are, for cleanup and seasonal trail maintenance. I do a walk through with them next week to see exactly what they have in mind. We'll have a cleanup day soon after that.
*One of the state parks wants us to ride all the trails and rate them for mountain bikers based on the IMBA trail rating system
*The Subaru Trail Care Crew is coming for a 4 day workshop in August and we are sponsoring it.

wow, what a long answer to a short question!!! The whole trail thing is critical to mountain biking.

penny