Working with OHV management is always tricky; rules are made for the honest person, and they suffer every time one the "others" knocks down a fence, or does "wheel'lees"(sp) in a wet meadow. From reading the FS memo they seem to be aiming to stop long term damage to meadows. People have always tended to build roads/trails in a straight line through-not around-things like meadows. Today, we have started to realize that that does long term damage to certain environments and when vehicles get stuck there , we pour gravel on it and keep on going-sort that band-aid solution to a long term problem again! One of my major bitches, was the early spring adventurer, and people like me and others who needed to get somewhere out there or the rancher who kept driving around these "unstuck" areas and just kept mucking up everything-and when things dried you had a whole bunch of little ruts, that soon became big ruts-and the same thing happening year after year. What do you do, if you close it down, one side yells at you and if you leave it open, the other does! But that is another band-aid solution! A few years before I retired, we started to address that problem-i,e., roads used over and over again through meadows and other sensitive areas, by rerouting existing roads when possible "around" these meadows, sand dunes, and other sensitive areas. We tried to do this when project access required going through these areas-it became part of EA process, no big fights, one project at a time and eventually people get used to doing it that way. You try to manage things from a larger ecological viewpoint like a watershed, or drainage, some type of environmental zone, it makes it easier and more cost effective. The "over-all" problem could be addressed in the larger OHV /EIS plans that way! You know, close it off if you really have to, give them this area or that to play in, reroute a creek/road or whatever, but I guess that seems to simple to work today, with each side dug in, but after, years of fighting the OHV problem, it seemed to work where I was, it made both common, engineering and environmental sense! If my BLM office could figure it out, wonder why not everyone else-of course, most of the people I worked with left and retired when I did between 05-8. Oh someone just hit a homerun in the Giants game, be back.
Smoke
Just another example, of why we need to stay involved or things like this can happen more than they should. If you have an area up in the ENF, that is affected by this decision, go to one of those meetings, volunteer to help clear a new road, -not saying you have not, but get that decision back down to the Ranger Dist/Forest Office decision makers-they might just appreciate the help-being in the barrel is no fun and they may or may not do the right thing. The FS has been beat up for years and maybe these last few cycles of "my way or the Highway" directions from above managers has destroyed moral and replaced the doers with the "yes-sir' you right types so nothing can help-good luck!
