Crested Butte, Colorado has some of the best mountain bike trails anywhere in the world. With one awesome trail we have an access issue. The Snodgrass Trail is an intermediate trail flowing through an Aspen grove that can be enjoyed by everyone. Except if you try to ride it after the middle of August. 18% of the trails length crosses private land and that landowner closes access typically in the middle of August denying everyone the opportunity to ride the entire trail. A CB grassroots organization is petitioning the US Forerst Service to approve a reroute and get the trail on public land ensuring unrestricted access the entire riding season. If you care about trail access please consider signing our petition. For every upvote I hope to see a new name on the petition..PLEASE! Sign the petition to ensure unrestricted trail access.
by CBMtnBiker
9 Comments
I care about trail access but do not agree with out-of-town folks signing petitions for things happening far from them. I think easy online access to petitions cheapen their efforts.
I say this as a person on a local board that has petitions cross their desk from time to time and I just ignore them when I find them signed by a bunch of people out of state. I’m more convinced by 50 concerned locals than 500 randos.
I understand this issue concerns the US Forest Service, which is of course a national organization, but this issue is not a national issue.
i live in CB and I’m not into this. I would much rather focus on getting new trails built than worrying about Snodgrass. it’s not that good of a trail to cause a huge uproar about. riding season is done by mid oct so you’re only losing access to one mediocre trail for 2 months. spend the money and the time and the effort on getting new trail built or keeping the local ranchers from covering all the Brush Creek trails in cowshit and aggressive cows for most of the summer.
You get what you vote for people. If you care about access to public lands and funding of recreation and conservation, your time to make your voice heard was November 2024.
Unless you are privately funding this trail, it’s not getting built. There is no more money. And the public land it still on will likely be up for sale anyway.
Why does the owner close it in August?
The *USA’s* US Forest Service?? 🤣😂🤣
The ultimate trail access move would be to build more housing in crested Butte or Colorado mountain towns in general…
Good luck I’ll stick with my area
I work for a trail org in California and working with the forest service has become hell over the last 4 years. Winter storms destroyed many of our trails 2-3 years ago and the forest service still hasn’t given us permission to simply restore the trails that we’ve maintained for decades. Nearly 100% of our local districts efforts have been going into preventing access to the forest. We’ve resorted to using grant money to pay for archeological studies for the trails we want to work on. Still waiting for the go ahead restore our trails.
I know that our district is especially bad, but trying to get new trail or even a reroute ok’d by forest service is going to be a long uphill battle.
A public easement might be an easier path forward.
This is how/why bootleg trails were invented. Not suggesting that anyone do that buuuuut…