Ah, Simple. Your suggestions are good, really. And we've tried them.

The unofficial organized ride has been a staple of wednesday nights in this town for eleven years. The core group of people is still the same, and it has never involved the "dark side". We've been here all along. This is the group that disappeared while we were being blackballed. Well meaning, but too afraid to speak up.

The character who owns the evil LBS is a sort of cult figure in town. For some reason no-one will do anything against him. Despite the fact that he is quite openly into the drug scene and has many children and young kids look up to him.

The wife of the current "president" of the official "club" is a city councillor. Nobody really respects her, but I suspect she'll win when she runs for mayor in our next election.

We have given information to government ministries. Only to find out that a ministry official was the club's PR guy.

Our newspaper reporter smokes weed with the bike shop owner. She also ambushed "our" ride last summer, was very agressive with them, then said in the paper that our group was not willing to cooperate.

We pretty much feel like Mulder and Skully. We don't know who to trust.

Oh, yes, and I do have pictures. Even this spring I emailed our city guy with pictures of a half built stunt on city property that used live trees and cut down live trees in its construction. That was months ago. The stunt is still there. Oh, and I cc'd that email to the club executive. The silence has been deafening.

Most of the trails are on crown land. The ones that are on private land are ones that none of our group would ever go near. So they never bother to say anything about those ones either! And, oh, guess who it was who alerted the rancher to the story in the newspaper? Yup, DH just picked up the phone and let him know. At least some action came from that, but it didn't stop the hooligans from just riding on the other guys' land!

Basically, people hope that we will just go away. Hence the threats. And the group we ride with knows that the actions the government ministries are taking are only against stunts. Our group doesn't really care about the stunts - take 'em or leave 'em. Our trails are not about to be shut down by government so we can just keep riding.

During the bogus public meetings, some of our group did show up and speak up....but they were out yelled and out jeered in a crowded room full of little sh***s from out of town. Once the club actually came together we had some good representation on the club. That lasted for about 3 meetings. Once they realized what the club is *actually* doing, they just backed away so as not to be implicated when someone finally discovers it. They learned from our example to not say No.

So we are feeling a lot like we've tried just about everything and our hope has disappeared. Again, I wish you ladies were actually here. Despite the dark side, I'd at least have great people to ride with .... not just DH!

Namaste,
~T~