Mountain Bikers Destroying Jasper National Park, Canada

So glad to see you are raising the question about mountain biking in
US
National Parks.
They have become a complete menace in Jasper. Parks Canada in the
2000
Jasper National Park Management Plan stated it would "permit mountain
biking on designated trails". Eight years later not one trail has been
designated and the bikes are all over the place including the wildlife
corridors around the 3 Valley Confluence which are critical travel
areas for grizzlies and other wildlife to get around all the
development in the valley bottom. Parks received more than $1.7
million
to improve ecological integrity and has so far spent the whole lot on
improving trails for human use with the misguided idea that if trails
were better in the vicinity of Jasper town site the bikers would not
want to go further afield onto all the rogue trails that they have cut
for themselves through the woods.
Our JEA website has a page on the issue at
http://www.jasperenvironmental.org/trails.htm I put it together in
2005 and it badly needs updating but the situation is still the same.
The stakeholders' meetings were heavily loaded with mountain bikers
and
Parks even got the IMBA group to come up and design some of the
trails.
Downhill mountain bikers have set up three illegal trails coming down
from below Marmot Mountain to Highway 93: a truck takes the bikers up
there and then ferries them up again after each decent. Two mountain
bikers got charged by a grizzly on an officially closed trail behind
Pyramid Lake this summer.
The Trails Committee has put a map together which shows promise in
that
it reflects some of the recommendations made by the wardens on
avoiding
the wildlife corridors. However that map has sat on the
Superintendent's (or Alan Latourelle's) desk now for three months. The
last we heard they were going to present it to the local stakeholders
for their opinions; these of course will be completely loaded with
mountain bikers.
Enough of my ranting on this issue. How are you both? Obviously still
very much involved in the battles. Basil and I are trying to back off
a
bit as he will be 90 next year and is having trouble with spinal
stenosis and does not like to drive the car any more. However we try
to
get out and have a walk each morning and I usually take off and do my
own hiking in the afternoons. We were so sorry that we could not get
together with you last fall for a presentation here in Jasper. We are
in the process now of some reorganization in the JEA and hoping
someone
would like to take on the public education/guest speaker aspect of it.
We have had a big battle over Marmot Basin which is meant to be coming
up with its Long-Range Plan but the guidelines that Parks approved for
them are disgraceful. In spite of strong condemnation by ENGOS they
are
approving possible expansion with ski lifts into Whistlers Creek
Valley, a ski lift to the summit of the basin increasing access into
the Valley and summer use on the ski hill which is good grizzly
habitat. Through the Access to Information we discovered that all the
park biologists were also against it as it involved an exchange of
land
that was meant to be a "substantial environmental gain" and was
actually nothing of the sort. We have had a lot of help from WCWC on
this: they published a pamphlet (see attached) for us and also put the
issue on their 2009 Endangered Spaces Calendar (April). Of course
whatever Marmot gets the Banff ski hills will want too so we are also
getting help from the Bow Valley Naturalists and UTSB.
--
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

On Nov 10, 10:45*pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:

snip something about a percieved problem with bicycles

While pseudo-environmentalists complain about bicycles that have
little to no real impact on the environment, a real problem goes
unchecked.

http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/facts/steps.php


What is Mountain Top Removal Mining?

Mountaintop removal / valley fill coal mining (MTR) has been called
strip mining on steroids. One author says the process should be more
accurately named: mountain range removal. Mountaintop removal /valley
fill mining annihilates ecosystems, transforming some of the most
biologically diverse temperate forests in the world into biologically
barren moonscapes.





Steps and Effects

1. Forests are clear-cut; often scaping away topsoil, lumber,
understory herbs such as ginseng and goldenseal, and all other forms
of life that do not move out of the way quickly enough. Wildlife
habitat is destroyed and vegetation loss often leads to floods and
landslides. Next, explosives up to 100 times as strong as ones that
tore open the Oklahoma City Federal building blast up to 800 feet off
mountaintops. Explosions can cause damage to home foundations and
wells. “Fly rock,” more aptly named fly boulder, can rain off
mountains, endangering resident’s lives and homes.

2. Huge Shovels dig into the soil and trucks haul it away or push it
into adjacent valleys.

3. A dragline digs into the rock to expose the coal. These machines
can weigh up to 8 million pounds with a base as big as a gymnasium and
as tall as a 20-story building. These machines allow coal companies to
hire fewer workers. A small crew can tear apart a mountain in less
than a year, working night and day. Coal companies make big profits at
the expense of us all.

4. Giant machines then scoop out the layers of coal, dumping millions
of tons of “overburden” – the former mountaintops – into the narrow
adjacent valleys, thereby creating valley fills. Coal companies have
forever buried over 1,200 miles of biologically crucial Appalachian
headwaters streams

5. Coal companies are supposed to reclaim land, but all too often mine
sites are left stripped and bare. Even where attempts to replant
vegetation have been made, the mountain is never again returned to its
healty state. Reclamation Problems


Community Impacts

Coal washing often results in thousands of gallons of contaminated
water that looks like black sludge and contains toxic chemicals and
heavy metals. The sludge, or slurry, is often contained behind earthen
dams in huge sludge ponds. One of these ponds broke on February 26th,
1972 above the community of Buffalo Creek in southern West Virginia.
Pittston Coal Company had been warned that the dam was dangerous, but
they did nothing. Heavy rain caused the pond to fill up and it
breached the dam, sending a wall of black water into the valley below.
Over 132 million gallons of black wastewater raged through the valley.
125 people were killed, 1100 injured and 4000 were left homeless. Over
1000 cars and trucks were destroyed and the disaster did 50 million
dollars in damage. The coal company called it an “act of God”.




Mingo County flood in West Virginia
June 2004

Mountaintop removal generates huge amounts of waste. While the solid
waste becomes valley fills, liquid waste is stored in massive,
dangerous coal slurry impoundments, often built in the headwaters of a
watershed. The slurry is a witch’s brew of water used to wash the coal
for market, carcinogenic chemicals used in the washing process and
coal fines (small particles) laden with all the compounds found in
coal, including toxic heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury.
Frequent blackwater spills from these impoundments choke the life out
of streams. One “spill” of 306 million gallons that sentsludge up to
fifteen feet thick into resident’s yards and fouled 75 miles of
waterways, has been called the southeast’s worst environmental
disaster.

Of course, it’s not only the people who suffer. The U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service has written that mountaintop removal’s destruction of
WV’s vast contiguous forests destroys key nesting habitat for neo-
tropical migrant bird populations, and thereby decreases the migratory
bird populations throughout the northeast U.S.


How could this happen?

A federal judge has twice ruled that most valley fills are illegal
under the Clean Water Act (CWA). His first ruling was overturned on a
jurisdictional issue, and his second ruling is now under appeal by the
Bush administration. In case the appeal doesn’t go the way he wants,
Bush has rewritten a 25-year-old rule of the CWA, thus legalizing
illegal valley fills. The federal judge reminded Bush that only
Congress can rewrite the laws of the land. The whole issue is up in
the air. Other aspects of MTR are also illegal, but the outlaw coal
industry has many politicians, from the local to the national level,
in its pocket. Coal companies continue to buy politicians’ support, so
they can do whatever they want, choking out the democratic political
process just as their frequent spills choke the life out of streams.

Bush received millions of dollars from the coal industry during his
2000 election campaign One of Bush’s big supporters in West Virginia,
James “Buck” Harless (a Bush “Pioneer”), who raised $250,000 for Bush,
had a private audience with the President at Bush’s ranch. What’s
more, his grandson, James H. Harless II, was chosen as an energy
policy adviser during the White House transition.