Hi Ridecampers; I read and appreciated Kathie Ford's post regarding the problems people in Auburn Calif. are encountering with damaged and lost trails, closed trails etc.
Here in Los Angeles County, people who ride are made to feel like freaks of nature. I think politicians and developers would be really really happy if we would buy video games, crawl up on our couches and never emerge from our concrete cells. There was an article yesterday in the Los Angeles times about the riders in Altadena fighting to save their trails. Here in the San Gabriel Valley, we are bordered on the north by the San Gabriel Mountain range and many of us love to ride and train in this area. The problem is that access is being blocked by housing developers and street construction. Once you get up in the mountains you can ride forever, but it's getting harder and harder in the lowlands. One of our local trails we call Walnut Creek. It is a pretty much unbuildable creek that runs between a couple of communities...San Dimas and Covina. The county put in telephone poles laying on the ground in the staging area, so you have to drive in between them to park. Trouble is, you cannot tie your horse to the trailer anymore, and it's trick to load even. The reason for this is to...protect the parking lot from kids doing donuts. Did they grade it and smooth it first? NO. So now there are permanent ruts with poles. Then they laid telephone poles at the top of each ravine that leads down or up hill from the creek. So on a muddy day , you have to walk your horse over the big poles....(did I say walk? ha ha. good luck with that, I meant jump) down a slippery muddy boggy bank into a freezing stream, and back up the other side through a muddy boggy slippery bank up hill, and jump over another pole. Did anyone on this ride list say that they love to do three day eventing? This is the place. On a green horse? Disastrous. Frightening. Dangerous. Anyway, I am gonna send you guys the link to the times article and then the email address to LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich's office. In the article it stated that he is going to a meeting tommorrow and they are going to hopefully investigate the developers to see if they kept their promises. (They need an audit to find out this about developers? ha ha They never do. Its a given) Please help us Californians by reading the article and please send a comment to the supervisors office, or even to the LA times if you are enthusiastic about it! Many of us distance riders use these trails! Help.
Mike Antonovich
Thanks Ridecampers; Beth Glover
(Developers...bah humbug)