I recently moved across town to a new neighborhood for the purposes of being closer to work and grad school. I moved into a cool new neighborhood and one of the biggest selling points for me is that the neighborhood backs up to wilderness area, with about 500 acres of private open space owned by the neighborhood. The neighborhood also has it's own private singletrack trails running through the open space. There is a total of about 8 miles of singletrack, 2 loop trails and 2 smaller trails connecting the loops. The trails are flowy, mellow meadow skipping type trails and see a lot of families and kids from the neighborhood. I also jog on them if I am not in the mood for a bike ride.
The trails connect to a heavily used regional mountain biking trail. This trail sees quite a bit of traffic. Despite the fact that we have no trespassing signs posted, a lot of people seem to enjoy poaching our trails. Our private trails see less use than the public trails and are therefore in much better shape. Lately I have been getting annoyed with all of the people poaching our private single track trails. It isn't even the blatant trespassing that bothers me... It is the fact that these people who poach the trails seem to have no respect.
There is a large group of 8 or 9 bikeriders who regularly poach our trails to add extra mileage to their trips and enjoy our trails which are "better". They fly through the trails with no regard for the kids and families that might be using the trails. I have come around blind corners and been scared shitless by some of these people, and almost got nailed one day while I was out for a run. Another time I had to quickly bail off the trail to avoid someone flying along the trail and ended up running my bike through some thistle. This gave me 2 flat tires. It seems that these people simply use our trails as a fun way for them to add mileage to their rides before connecting back to the public trails. After big rain events in the summer I began to notice that some people were often poaching the trails while they were still very muddy, leaving big ruts in the trails. One of the steepest sections of the trail became borderline dangerous after some particularly heavy use following a rain storm.
I was at the neighborhood pool one day and started chatting up a couple guys with really nice bikes. After talking to them for a few minutes it turned out that they didn't even live in the neighborhood. They were biking the regional public trail from a nearby town and using our trails because they were "the best". These guys even had the balls to sneak into our neighborhood pool when the lifeguards weren't looking to cool off mid bike ride. Looking back on the situation I really should have confronted these guys and told them they were trespassing, but I am a generally non confrontational person.
Another thing that bothers me about this situation is that the trails are our neighborhood's responsibility to maintain, so any repairs / maintenance of the trails will cost the neighborhood, not the people poaching the trails. So what do you guys think? Should I just get over it? I realize this is a first world problem, but something about this situation has been irritating me. I was thinking about going to the board and asking for bigger no trespassing signs to be posted, however I think most of the people poaching the trails already know they are trespassing. Should I start calling people out that I know are trespassing??
Any ideas?
Bookmarks