Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Constance Berto

...

   I had a long talk with the park supt. and he admitted the document was full of errors.  I told him it has so many flaws and wrong assumptions it should be withdrawn and rewritten. He asked me to send him a memo listing our concerns, and I sent him four pages.

     The person who wrote it knows nothing about horses or horse camping and sought no advice before she wrote it...

Whatever became of the "How to Build a Horse Camp" and

"How To Build Equestrian Trails" books that the American

Horse Council (and others) were sponsoring? The lady writing

the book about horse camps was from Arizona, presented her

wonderful drawings at the very first Clemson equestrian trails

conference waaay back in 1998, and yet I've never seen it

advertised as complete and for sale on any web site related

to equestrian trail issues.

 

Ditto Prof. Woods' book on Horse Trails.

 

The International Mountain Biking Association, on the

other hand, has done a spectacular job producing two

wonderful books that seek to *set the agenda* for the

land managers, land planners, and landscape architects

who know nothing about mountain biking or mountain

bikers, but who nevertheless have responsibility for

providing services to mountain bikers.

 

See: 

"Managing Mountain Biking" at

 http://www.imba.com/resources/bike_management/managing_mountain_bikes.html

 

and

 

"Trail Solutions:  IMBA's Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack"

http://www.imba.com/resources/trail_building/trail_solutions.html

 

IMBA figured out that if people don't know what to think, *tell*

them what to think!  Don't let them invent it on their own!  You can

bet that both of these books are on the desk of any land management

professional charged with creating a land management plan that

includes mountain biking--perhaps even as a *new* use of the land.

 

As fewer and fewer public lands civil servants know anything about

horses (the Rangers at Point Reyes used to use Morgans to patrol the

park--do they still?), and as more and more land management plans

are contracted out to private consulting firms whose employees know

nothing about horses except what they saw in old westerns, making

the basic facts about horses available in an easily-approached, concise form

is *imperative*.  (Horse use at Cades Cove was grossly under-counted

because the statistical survey measuring recreational use was conducted

in a way--probably by accident--that virtually guaranteed that the surveyors

would never encounter a horse!)

 

Both Envirohorse (http://www.californiastatehorsemen.com/envirohorse.htm)

and the Equestrian Land Conservation Resource (www.elcr.org) are collecting

such information, but it is in the form of over 100 separate papers

written by different people at different times with different goals--making

it very hard for the planning professional to glean the pertinent information

ECLR's one link to a book on trail construction points to yet another

IMBA publication!:  http://www.imba.com/resources/trail_building/nstbd.html

 

Remember, all this has happened to us under a Republican president

with a Republican congress.  What if the Democrats do win back the

White House and retain their majority in Congress?

 

We don't have our act together.  And we are out of time.

 

Linda Marins

(Liberal Democrat)