ENF finishes work on closed ‘meadow’ routes. ALL are now OPEN for use!

Way back in 2011, 42 OHV routes within the Eldorado National Forest were closed because someone filed a lawsuit claiming they were damaging near by meadows.

A few years later, 18 of those routes were reopened after it was determined that they NEVER were damaging near by meadows. Yes, it took years.

The Deer Valley Trail, although cleared of damaging near by meadows, took longer to reopen due to endangered species concerns.

Well, the ENF has finally finished repairs to all of the routes in questions and all of the once closed routes have now been reopened. Of course, most of those are approaching their seasonal closures so check for the status before you head out.

Here is a link to the Forest Service news release:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/eldorado/news-events/?cid=FSEPRD601691

What I would ask all of you to learn from this is you need to need to develop a very close relationship with your local FS representatives.

What should have happen in this case was local OHV clubs keeping an eye on these trails to do maintenance in certain places to prevent damage to near by meadows. Now it’s hard for the basic Jeeper to know when that type of damage is being done but a few of these trails were obvious issues.

The Richardson Lake Trail was one case. For a few years I had notices a section that literally went through a meadow and it was looking bad. I had a plan in the back of my head to move small boulders to eliminate the mud by harden the crossing, but I never acted on it. My bad, the route was closed for years.

With a close relationship with your local FS rep, maybe there could be an immediate field trip to each meadow to evaluate, in a very public way, the condition of each trail and to develop a plan to repair each trail rather than close it.

The anti-OHV people will do anything to close our trails, we need to do everything to keep them open.

Rubicon Ronin