"Blackblade" wrote in message ...
[...]
Edward Dolan wrote:

This is where I came in a hundred posts ago with my complaint
against the stupidity of what the managers were incorrectly
permitting.

Indeed you did. And in all that blather you've done precisely nothing to explain WHY the managers were doing so incorrectly.

Conflict of both means and purpose - with plenty of details provided for dunderheads like you who can't figure out anything on your own.

You complain that you don't like bikes on trails and then assert that all serious hikers feel the same way. However, you've done nothing to prove that and, as I am a hiker too and know a fair few hikers, I am not going to believe your blank assertion without backup. I think it's just you and a few extremists who have a bee in your bonnets about bikes.

It is very convenient to believe what you want to believe even though others are telling you that what you believe is nuts.

You conveniently forget that Parks' core objectives are to provide recreation, preserve wildlife and protect the resource. Against those objectives, of course they're going to allow mountainbiking if that's what a significant percentage of the population, who pay for the parks, want to do. They are not going to pander to extremists like you who won't share one iota.

The only extremists I know about are mountain bikers who are interlopers and usurpers. That is the beauty of anything public paid for by taxes – there is seldom any relationship between who is paying and what you are getting. I could give you thousands of examples of that truism.

You then come up with the most laughable concept of all ... "Best Use" ... but your best use is simply what you want to do.

Best use is what any person with an iota of common sense would acknowledge it to be. This lets you out.
[...]

If you pull single sentences out of my paragraphs to respond
to, then we will be off on a tangential issue which you will lose because such
posting is universally recognized as the behavior of a scoundrel and a cad. Your
deviltry will be pitted against My Saintliness. Think you can win an argument
when it is going to be all about the correct manner of posting on a
newsgroup?

Ed, the standard for newsgroups is that, when challenged to support a position, you are able to justify it with facts and logic. When challenged you simply assert 'I KNOW it's true'. So don't start whinging when I point out the massive fallacies you commit.

Always post the complete paragraph that you are responding to and I will take it from there. I do not chop your paragraphs and I do not expect my paragraphs to be chopped either. You also need to learn to delete material you are not responding to. Why burden the reader unnecessarily?
[...]

Listen up you confounded jackass! You remarked previously that
since I hike alone I possibly can't get along with others - so I am telling you
why I prefer to hike alone. Jeez, you can't follow anything! Go back a few posts
and look it up! I am way too lazy to ever do anything like that
myself.

Unlike you, I DO refer back to what was previously said. And the original question was WHY you think you are able to represent what other hikers think, particularly when you tend to hike alone as you report.

Nope, you have to go back a few steps further to arrive at the point I was making in response to your remark ... something about why I prefer to hike alone is because I can’t get along with others? I told you why I like to hike alone and enlarged on it ... but of course it was just another case of casting pearls before swine because you can’t keep track of whatever moronic points you are trying to make.
[...]

You didn't answer the question. WHY are you entitled to
dictate how people should enjoy a public resource ?

The resource itself dictates that. I can clearly see what the
resource is and you can't.

The resource dictates nothing ... clearly I CAN ride on trails shared with hikers since I do so every week.

I reiterate ... WHY do you think you are entitled to dictate to others as to how they use a public resource. And don't say it's 'Best Use' because, as we both know, that's just what you want to do ... and is in no way a justification. I could just as easily state that "Trails must be managed to optimise user satisfaction" ... with every bit as much validity if it's just opinion.

The resource itself dictates what is best use to all except idiots like you.
[...]

The park mangers are not doing their jobs correctly. I blame
them more than I do those who like you are simply taking advantage of their
dereliction of duty.

WHY are they not doing their jobs correctly Ed ? If their remit is as I stated above, which is it, then they're doing what they should ... trying to fairly apportion a scarce resource to satisfy as many as possible.

For your world to make any sense one would have to accept that your pronouncements on what is the 'best' and 'right' use of a trail have the status of fact. It doesn't, it's simply your opinion and you've not even shown that a significant percentage of the hiking population share it.

All serious hikers and equestrians hate to have bikes on trails. It is just that simple. Why? It is conflict of means and purpose. Trails cannot be all things to all people. Trails not only have a best use, but in some cases an only use. Designated Wilderness Areas in the US exemplify this to perfection.
[...]

You want to take every world literally and then give them all
equal importance, and that can never be the case when you are reading anything
that borders on being literature. You simply don't know how to read me and I
suspect not anyone else either. You pounce on words which are not even germane
to what I am saying. Less statistics and more poetry would teach you how to
read.

Good grief. Maybe you should try the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Defence ... get a qualified poet to certify that beauty = truth and then assert that life is guilty for failing to be either !

You are not writing literature Ed ... you're debating in a forum. You intentionally want to generalise simply because, deep down, you know that everything you're saying just comes down to 'because that's what I want'.

And, lastly, if you are trying to write poetry I suggest you desist .... it's awful !

See – you pounced on the words ‘literature’ and ‘poetry’, as though that was my central thought. God, you are such a sucker and so easily lead. Even so I grade my prose superior to yours.

I do generalize because I have enough intellect to be able to do that. Too bad it is beyond you!

Deaths from mountain biking are rare but not unheard of.
Serious injuries from mountain biking are common as mud. I put "death and
injuries" together because they go together, but not because they are equal in
numbers. If you knew how to read, that is how you would have read it without
making an issue of deaths. You sir are an idiot!

Your problem is that, when it comes to injuries and fatalities,
that your fundamental premise ... that mountainbiking is extremely dangerous ...
is provably false. It is safer than driving, rugby, skiing and many other
activities. You can throw all the blather you wish at it but you can't
change that fundamental truth.

Riding a bike on a trail is indeed a sport, but such an
activity has no business being on a trail used by hikers. That is not what
trails are for. Mountain biking compared to hiking, which is not a sport, is
extremely dangerous. It is even dangerous compared to other sports. It is not
the same thing as driving a car, but it is similar to alpine skiing, another
outdoor sport that is dangerous.

Racing a bike is a sport, simply riding it is not. Just as running to win a race is a sport whilst going for a walk is not. However, they are all recreations and there is no objective rationale to ban them. Your 'best use' is nonsense.

I have already told you that not all recreations are equal. Riding a bike on a trail in the mountains is a sport and is akin to alpine skiing. Trails were designed specifically for walking humans and walking horses. That is the best use and the only use to all but idiots like you.

And, no, mountainbiking is much safer than alpine skiing ... it's much more akin to cross country skiing.

Not in the mountains it ain’t!
[...]

Bikers need to be restricted from trails for the same reason
that motorcyclists need to be restricted from trails. No difference whatsoever.
I have seen trails ruined by biker traffic and have never seen the same from
hiker traffic. The erosion, even if not quantitatively different (highly
doubtful), is qualitatively different because feet and wheels are different from
one another.

If you're never seen hiker trails ruined by erosion I take it that Snowdon wasted their £1.5million on reinforcing the trails to repair them after hiker damage ?

I have seen plenty of trails damaged by hikers, but they are still passable. Trails that suffer the most damage from hikers will lie close to resorts or trail heads and are due to hikers taking shortcuts from the trail. There is also a certain amount of natural water erosion which takes place hikers or no hikers. On the other hand, a trail destroyed by bikers is often not passable by hikers except by scrambling.

Mountain bikers are barbarians and have no right to be on any trail used by hikers – unless they want to get off their god damn ****ing bikes and walk like everyone else. When they crash and injure themselves, I rejoice! If and when they manage to kill themselves, I say good riddance to bad rubbish! Death to mountain biking!

“Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground.”
~ Christina Rossetti (Psalm 24),
from "A Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets"

Mountain bikes have wheels. Wheels are for roads.

Trails are for walking. What’s the matter? Can’t walk?

Ed Dolan the Great
aka
Saint Edward the Great