Thought I could provide some additional insight into this issue, as it sounds like the same type of issues my bike club has had for the past 5 years. My mountain biking club, Caledon Cycling Club, has been fighting and negotiating for access rights to trails on conservation land for some time. In particular, they have been working with the Bruce Trail land owners and various Ontario conservation centres. Agree or disagree, many people hold unproven ideas that mountain bikers cause enormous damage to the environment, and so the uphill battle began.
Through the work of various key people on our club executive (one of whom works for a regional municipality), we have maintained access to 80% of the trails that we once had.
They found that 3 strategies provided the most effective means of negotiating with conservation managers and land owners.
1. Ensure that you minimize the fears of liability to the land owners. These days, liability (and the new generation of lawyers who spread this fear) is of major concern. You must prove that it is not an issue, or that your organization has 3rd party liability coverage for its members, or that your organization is self-disciplined with strict policies.
2. Show that you have political clout. Nothing gets the attention of government conservation centres more than a long list of club members that live in the local area and pay for the use of the facilities.
3. Prove that promoting the recreational activity (ie. Geocaching) will INCREASE revenues for the conservation centre. Many of Ontario’s conservation centres are poor in cash and could be swayed with ideas that will help them generate more income. Most of these centres (and also provincial parks) have to balance their own budgets with self-generated income.
You guys are right about how these parks and centres operate. There is really no central management group, as each park or conservation centre has a lot of management autonomy of their own, and sets their own policies. You have to approach these parks one at a time. Sometimes each park has conflicting or rhetorical policies. For this one conservation centre, Palgrave, we got approval to cut some new trail as long as a professional botanist supervised and reviewed our locations for environmental impact. One year later, some heavy machinery crashed and slashed through the forest, doing selective forestry, and destroying our trail in the process. Argggggg! Another conservation centre just down the road, called Albion Hills, has new trails cut for mountain biking all the time, hosts two 24 hour races on these trails of 600 participants, holds 2 adventure races, and does a ton of school trip classes. Go figure….
Cache-tech, I would stop restricting caches on Ontario conservation land until you specifically get complaints from a specific conservation centre. For sure, there is no central authority for these centres. Provincial parks have more central authority, but again, they have their own management policies on many issues. I think the public at large would have a poor image of people hiding objects all over provincial parks (not me of course).
Still, don’t withdraw cache approvals as a blanket policy.
That’s my $0.02.
Rick.
