Land Access Weirdness
When you all are out mtbiking in the middle of nowhere and you come across No Trespassing signs do you ever wonder what’s up? —Or maybe you live in the middle of rurburbia like I do and you know all the vacant land around and suddenly NT signs pop up on some of it. And just sit there for 5 years. No sign of life over there, just signs.
There’s a local trail that’s on a couple hundred empty wooded park acres and part of it went onto a private lot. The guy put brush across the trail and signs up a few years back. I called up and asked why. He said they might someday build a retirement home for his dad on that lot. I guess he thought we’d keep riding right on thru the living room if he didn’t train us away from there during the preceding 20 years. Oh well.
Another 200 acre vacant lot has an old trail on it that I commute to town on. I’ve never seen a soul out there. Or sign of one. I never see anyone around here for that matter. When I got an office in town I thought I’d make it official and call the owner and ask permission. (I grew up on the trail but never knew whose it was.) Found out. It was an older gent. He said he couldn’t let me due to liability reasons. Oh well. I’ll stay my usual invisible self. There’s a couple NT signs on the whole place-not where the trail goes in and out-so I never saw em.
As more city folk move out here, more NT signs go up, but you still don’t see anyone. Occasionally I see people in the parks. But the rest of everywhere, the bedroom communities and the vacant places between them-not a soul. Just houses and cars. I’ve hung out in the backlots, in the margins, forever it seems-nobody but me and those NT signs.
Now I know all about the touchy politics of mtbs and access. But my scene around here is so full of signs and empty of people that it’s scary, almost philosophical!
Probably up north further some NT signs protect someone’s quiet, heavily armed retreat and you wouldn’t want to come around that bend and find that cabin.
But most I suppose are up from fear of vandalism/liability.
So anyway: If a biker rides an old 2trak thru an NT area and no one sees him, was he
really there?
–JP
PS: I just remembered something we ran into on last week’s vacation to the far north.
Our friends 30 miles out in nowhere above the Soo run a B&B and have about 20 miles of emptiness and hills behind them for mtbers in the bug-free weeks of spring and telewhackers in winter. They have wolves and bear. I always considered it ‘way out there.’ Rock and lakes and not much else.
Well, I just heard that their new neighbor a long ways off in one direction just gated the 100-yr-old logging 2-track that is the only access for 6 other remote parcels of land, including some of their favorite riding. While their only other neighbor way over in the other direction (who’s huge, rides only snowmobiles and dislikes them hippies…and who just went on full disability) bought an isolated 40 acres, a corner of which, 1/2 mi back in the woods, crosses the other main 2-track our pals and their clients use to access the boonies. He put up NT signs and offered access for $150/mo.
A simple appeal to a lawyer showed that established access can’t be limited and that closing a gate one day a year is all that is allowed to renewed guardianship of what would still have to be an accessible road.
Even in the great white north hell is other people.
