~ Bad Trail Building in Moab ~
I give voice to doomed plants by offering time lapse photos of spots of a recently contructed trail to demonstrate results of our poor choices. Put your curser on the photo to see the date of the photos. There will be more of these coming to demonstrate that this particular spot on the trail will eventually be "blown out" by tire tracks. Then adjacent areas of crypto will be smothered in buried sand, turn to sand themselves and in turn blow onto more crypto. We end up with the Sahara eventually. A "singletrack" need only be 6" wide to accommodate a bike tire, but most people on a mountain bike do not know how to ride it. Read the information on crytobiotic soil crusts to find more understanding.
The picture above is of a spot on a newly installed trail north of Moab. The trail was less than a couple of weeks old when this picture was taken. Notice the rusty line that marks the trail route (the best feature of the trail construction), and notice a single stray track that avoids the rocks and the painted line! Now look directly below at what happens to the stray track. Remember that the crytobiotic soil crust this track traveled through took well over 250 years to develop!
The pile of rocks gauges our perspective. We are now facing downhill on the same spot, but a season later, after the trail had been used for a race. Racing is the prime destructive force in Moab for mountain bike trail damage! Companies like Granny Gear are the true eco-terrorists and evil doers! Notice the softness of the sand in this picture. Here the sand concealed by subdesert soil crusts is very fine, almost like white wheat flour, easily disturbed by tires, wind and any flow of water generated by brief rainfall. This single garden on the rock was thousands of years in the making, probably originating as a single stray rock lying on the surface of the Moab Entrada Slickrock Tongue. Over the decades, centuries, wind blew sand across the rock, lodging individual grains against and under the rock, then spores of cyanobacteria landed and grew into tiny root systems, knitting the grains of sand together like fish caught in a net. Cyanobacteria is neither plant nor animal, but a completely unique organism that stabilizes our soils in this climate and location. Once the growth of cyanobacteria creates an invisible cap, the stable surface holds moisture in sands under the cap, encouraging colonization by lichen, algae and mosses. Mosses collect sand grains in amid the fine hairs on the surface. The primative plants begin the process of turning sunlight into nitrogen, preparing the new soils for yuccas, flowers and cacti seen in this spot. It took upwards of a thousand years to create this small garden. It takes only a single track and about three months of repeated use to seal this tiny garden's doom, relegating it to the status of areas blown out by irresponsible recreational use. God is a fine gardener. If you read Genesis, you will find that God created Adam and Eve to "tend the garden." We are sad failures as His creations, because we think we own this garden, when in fact, it owns us. Note: All soil crusts in this section of trail are doomed, by the tracks themselves and the soft sands they expose, which blows onto adjacent crusts and smothers them, causing more sand to be exposed and blown onto more adjacent crusts. This is a endless cycle as long as the sand is continuously stirred by the presence of bicycle tires. More pictures of this spot will demonstrate the progression of damage over time.
The picture above demonstrates the effects of "uneducation," the actual removal of fact from consciousness through reinforcement of bad behavior via mass action and lessons from "on high." UNeducation is the learning of careless, souless, selfishness. Through the carelessness of others, in this case trail builders who demonstrate through their work an ignorance in the face of their own destruction (WE are part of nature, despite our attempts to forget it). The trails across the rock here reinforce stupid behavior by showing no respect for life. If Joe Blow, the trail builder, not only rides across thousand year old soil crusts, but builds a trail that encourages the destruction of the only life that can exist here, then it is OK for Susan Suck to do it, too. And if Joe Blow says I am full of shit for saying this is a very bad thing, then Susan Suck feels the same way, too. And I ask you: What generation do these newcomers represent? The generation that thinks heroes are made in a war against a lesser foe, an innocent. And it may be fitting that this generation, the one whose challenge all along has been to right the wrongs of generations who have ignored the sanctity of nature, will suffer in unimaginable ways from the brunt of nature's fury in the coming global superstorm and following ice age. Why? Because the facts are there to know and understand, but they choose uneducation over knowledge, apathy over the tears of awareness. It is easier to forget than to create from knowledge. This is a new generation taught to remove from the conscious mind any truth that doesn't fit into selfish goals or personal enjoyment (the American dream is a tale of greed and oppression forgetting the blood of slaves and 500 Indian Nations). But there is no joy in their hearts or they would stop and experience it here in this spot by opening up to the wonder that is life in balance. In the lower left hand corner of the shot you can see well developed soil crusts (many hundreds of years old). This entire area is covered with soil crusts that will vanish in just decade due to these stray tracks that encourage more uneducation. I watched the Klondike Bluffs Trail deteriorate like this over twenty years, and in that area spots like this are now completely dead with no existing soil crusts. And what is even more horrible is that areas surrounding them are dead as well from drifting sand. I'll continue to document this spot over time to demonstrate the complete stupidity of the mass mind. Ignorance is bliss? I think not. The people who carelessly ride their bikes over the flesh of Mother Earth are not happy people. They are desperate and neurotic in their recreational activities, any joy they find is quickly followed by the cravings of a junkie. I see them daily out on this trail. And do you think the trail is wide enough for them? This is a MOUNTAIN BIKE TRAIL for petesake! It is the width of a county road and despite the fact that there is plenty of room to manuever around an elephant on this track, they insist on riding over virgin soil crusts. Even guided trips are doing this at this point in time as the copycats that came into Moab. One company who hires totally ignorant guides actually copied our website as a template for theirs, rewording our environmental policies to look like they care, but then hiring young inexperienced guides (we know of one who even said he had worked for us--though he hadn't--that company would never call us to verify because I will rip then a new one) who do not have a clue and don't even care.
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Drifting sands smother rare living soils.
The image to the left is of a newly built trail a few miles outside of Moab, Utah. The picture was taken three months after the trail's creation. To the untrained eye, it looks like any other track through sand, but an educated local rider will notice exposed sands drifting onto and covering adjacent cryptobiotic soil crusts, the bottom of the food chain in this environment, the most important organisms in our local ecology. This is why you do not run a trail over the Moab Entrada Slickrock Tongue that leads into or across ANY vegetation. The vegetation pictured here is dead or dying, even the silver Blackbrush you see on the lower left, a banzi-like plant which lives for many hundreds of years. The "crypto" provides nourishment for these tiny trees, but it is smothered by sands exposed by uneducated or uncaring trail builders, dooming the existence of plantlife that depends on decades of peace and calm to exist. The problem explodes as the crypto dies and more sand is exposed to the wind. Eventually a huge area is destroyed, and the damage can be endless if the process is not stopped in time. No more crypto, and eventually no more juniper or pinon, then no more animals, then, well, who cares, we only have until 2012 anyway?
Ride the rock. Avoid the crusts.
The image above: See the rock? See the crypto bordering the bare rock? See the line marking the trail? Well, it looks like a few people didn't see a damn thing. This is a perfect example of very bad form. If you learn about Moab's ecology before you visit, you will be appauled by the ignorance and outright stupidity of people who call themselves "mountain bikers." I placed the two rocks you see standing in the newly created sand. Maybe someone will notice and consider reasons why someone would keep them from riding over that "dried mud-looking stuff."
Stay out of the pits!
Here is a good example of a poor route finding, as well as poor riding form. Those pits in the rock, the ones with blackened rings and dried mud bottoms are FULL of life. They might look like pools of dried mud to the uninformed, but there are thousands of eggs lying dormant, waiting for rain. Crypto stabilizes the carbon-laiden muds in these pits. When the pits fill with water, eggs lying on top of the mud and underneath hatch into a plethora of rare fresh water desert shrimp species, toads and insects. A prime rule when riding the bare rock in Canyon Country is to avoid these pits at all costs. See the line of the trail? Well, the trail builders have just told every idiot without a clue that it is just fine to ride through these pits. The trail insists on it. The choice of trail line should be a teaching tool! If someone rides a line on the rock that avoids every pit, then the rider eventually understands that they are being avoided for a reason, so they then avoid them out of habit, and some may even ask someone on the trail why the trail weaves around them.
Leave Moab a better cyclist.
Dreamride's private skills clinics have been featured on Good Morning America and in Sunset Magazine. We not only give you the skills to handle your bike, but to ride with respect for the environment. You have to be good to travel in places where the ground is alive and extremely fragile. We ride the rock. Let us teach you how to avoid the vegetation.
