I’m skipping a post here. My final two days of riding weren’t exactly what I wanted due to the heavy rains, and the result was some gorgeous photos and some impromptu trail work to remove some fallen trees off of a couple of the short sections of yellow trail.

There’s something that’s bothered the hell out of me since I made my plea to help the Syllamo trails more than a year ago. On the “great” end, local support has grown, and we now have a Friends of the Syllamo Trail IMBA chapter. However, on the “really shitty” end, noone is acknowledging that the biggest factor in our fight against the overgrowth that plagues the system is logging. If you read any newspaper article or other publication about the cool things going on to help the trail, the blame is placed on a wind storm and an ice storm. No mention is ever made of the fact that those things were cleaned up pretty quickly, or the fact that mother nature’s tree/branch removal tended towards already weakened/sick trees.

Logging has taken a much greater toll on the trails than anything nature-borne (save for maybe the hogs, but that’s a different issue). The impacts are both acute and chronic- initially, when an area is cleared, the overgrowth goes haywire with thorns and all other types of brush. Also, the loggers knock down and leave for dead what looks like as many trees as they remove. Chronically, the pine that they plant back in place of the hardwood is weaker and doesn’t have as solid of a canopy, so basically they’re creating a section of trail that will ALWAYS be a high maintenance area.

I’m not going to go full-on treehugger and say STOP ALL LOGGING. Humans are rampant consumers of trees. I understand that those have to come from somewhere. It’s a necessary evil (think of that next time you wipe your ass with virgin hardwood). It also supports jobs in the local economy. I get it. However, the US Forest service funded and built a trail system that they’re seemingly content to systematically destroy one timber sale at a time.

I was hoping that, since we’ve got such a strong group of trail supporters now, that we could do something to avoid removing trees from just the trail sections of the National Forest. Relatively speaking, it is a small corner of the available area of timber. However, the Friends of the Syllamo Trails group is not willing to address this issue:

I’m really disappointed, sad, and a whole other range of emotions. On one hand, the group is an excellent conglomeration of local and regional people that’s already done and will continue to do great things for the trail system. On the other hand, they’re going to ignore the giant, hulking elephant in the Forest Service boardroom… the one that’s going out to football-field sections of trail and permanently destroying what’s there. It’s not like we don’t have a voice in this. Take a look at what the Pisgah-area trail advocates are up to: Please Comment on Timber Production, etc. in Pisgah National Forest (PS- please click and send that email if you like riding at Pisgah).

I’m not sure what to do next. I wholly support the work of the F.O.S.T. group, and I’ll continue supporting them and their efforts however I can. But, as long as we purposefully ignore the biggest thing that’s harming the trail system, the problems it has now will only get more widespread as more timber is cut.