Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Off-roading outdoorsfolks

(Photo of an Outlander from www.atv.info -- not a trail at Bonny Lake)

As officials contemplate closing some areas of the state to off-roaders one area has been set aside. This, from state parks:

OHV area open at Bonny Lake State Park

IDALIA, Colo. — Bonny Lake State Park has opened an area for off- highway vehicle (OHV) use for 4-wheelers, 3-wheelers and dirt bikes. The area is in the northeast section of the park, adjacent to the North Cove campground in the dry lake bottom of North Cove.

There's about 150 acres with natural jumps and ridges. A half-mile trail has been established to improve shore-fishing access to the north end of the Bonny Lake Dam.

The new OHV area will be open daily from 8 a.m. to sundown until Oct. 31. All OHVs must have a current and valid OHV registration, which is available at the Bonny Lake Park Office. You can't ride into the park, though, you have to haul in.

And all riders must wear helmets and eye protection.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know what? Good. That's what I say. There is nothing wrong with providing places for high impact recreation like this. They're gonna do it somewhere, they're not going to go away. Might as well work to organize it, and provide some sense of structure.

Dena Rosenberry said...

Totally. Set aside decent places to ride - near campsites - and I'm sure you'll have less intrusion elsewhere.

PikeTalk said...

As for Bonny lake. Thats great. But I think there is alot of misunderstanding in recent BLM changes.

The recent change in BLM policy is to move from having "open areas" to "open routes". This is a good move in my opinion. I am an ATV and 4x4 person, usually several times a week all year long, but the general public does NOT do enough research to know what kind of public lands they are riding on. It seems very few can tell you the difference between DOI National Parks, Dept. Of Ag. National Forests, State parks and State BLM lands. BLM switching to open routes instead of their traditional open areas, for motorized trail will put them inline with existing US Forest Service travel management thinking. Do you wanna see how too many of my fellow offroaders abuse our urban interface? See: http://www.piketalk.com

Dena Rosenberry said...

Piketalk, cool blog. Mind if we feature it in a post?

I rode dirt bikes throughout my childhood and a neighbor - an ecology teacher who coached our motocross team - always said we had to be mindful of what we were doing where so we didn't get our access taken away.

You think more people would realize that.

PikeTalk said...

Feature away...it is there to try and get Public Land users to think before they act.