BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

(Not a lot of SGLs in this area, but still seems worth paying attention to.)

There was a heated discussion on the PTAG Facebook page about this.

Sounds like a great idea, if you want to get shot! All I need is to put myself into the woods with a bunch of bike hater yinzers who drove their pickup trucks to camp, got drunk for 3 days, and are stumbling through the woods with high powered rifles. No thanks.

PA hunting license buys and maintains thousands of acres of State game lands they want non hunters to chip in

ericf - my nearest mountain biking destination is Bavington, and it's fantastic, and it's a SGL. But that's precisely why I will only go on Sunday, a non-hunting day. I consider proposals to allow Sunday hunting to be a greater threat than a small yearly fee. However, parts of trails such as the GAP pass through small sections of SGL's, and it would be ludicrous to require trail riders to pay a fee to pass through these limited sections (like a shrubbery, for instance). Established multi-use trails need to be kept exempt from this, if it goes forward at all.

Ni!

Yeah, I guess the game commission would prefer to maintain the trails in Bavington instead of the mountain bikers. Sure, go for it. If I'm paying for access, they better damn well take care of the trails instead of relying on volunteers to do it for them.

What I'd like to know is how the gamelands are funded and where the money collected for a hunting license goes... If a proportion of the hunting license money goes to maintaining the lands themselves (not paying for hunting-specific things unrelated to cycling like game wardens, stocking lakes with fish, etc). then I could see paying the same amount which would be proportional to what hunters pay and it would also end up being a smaller amount than being licensed to hunt. What I suspect is that very little from the licensing fee actually goes to maintaining the lands, so that advertising a fee for mountain bikers to "pay their fair share" is actually unfounded. Odds are, we already pay our fair share through some other type of tax. I don't know, it depends on how these lands are funded. I have an acquaintance that is a warden, I'll probe his mind next time we run into each other. Personally, I ride in state game lands all the time. I haven't hunted in years but if a fee was incorporated for riding, I'd probably just grab a hunting license if that covered both. Most hunters are friendly to cyclists in the woods and sober, in my experience. Hell, in some cases you are doing them a favor if you chase some wildlife out to them. That said, I wear orange. I also don't ride during turkey and deer seasons. I'm not really worried about someone mistaking me for small game. That said, some watery tart did lob a sword at me once.

Decision is tabled until December, but how about this quote: "Most of the damage occurring on game lands is coming not from lawful riders, but those — mainly mountain bikers — creating their own trails, bumps and obstacles on game lands illegally, he said." Read more: http://triblive.com/sports/outdoors/6833185-74/game-lands-permit#ixzz3EHYuL3Dd

Oh... those "mountain bikers" (which are most likely local kids with walmart bikes... I know I was once guilty of such behavior although I was more likely to be on a dirtbike) All the adult mountain bikers that I know have plenty of state park lands where they have permission to build trails and bumps and obstacles and wouldn't waste time on some other property where they don't have explicit permission...

Or we could properly fund the parks system in the first place, and not have to rely on user fees for every damned thing.

There are adult MTB riders on $4k full suspension bikes who like to build illegal trails with man made 'features' because it's hard to get trails like this built legally. They want their man made drops, gaps, berms, rock gardens, technical features and such. IMBA, PTAG, and other trail advocacy groups actively discourage this because it negatively affects the image of mountain bikers as a whole. This is one of those cases where that image causes problems.