danhickstein’s Recent Comments

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  Mountainbikers like the planet too

  One of the main reasons why I am an environmentalist is because I spend so much time outside rock climbing and mountain biking, activities that I do realize, have an effect on the landscape.  In most cases I feel that these impacts are minimal compared to the benefits.  When we provide mountain bikers with more trails to ride on, we create more people who are going to fight to keep the planet in good condition. Also, opening more trails to mountain bikes spreads out the traffic and makes it less annoying for hikers on the trails. It's certainly not a good idea to open every trail in the national parks to mountain bikes, but that is not the issue here.  This proposal merely allows park managers to make their own decisions about how trails are used.  This will obviously result in a handful of mostly-unused trails being opened to mountainbikes with all the popular trails remaining closed to anything but hiking.  I should think that a proposal to put trail-use decisions into local hands would be widely supported in a forum such as this.  On Bush admin aims to increase mountain-bike access to national parks posted 1 year, 1 month ago 6 Responses