Opinion: STOP Riding Like This! Ease the Impact of Mountain Biking on the Environment | Singetracks

Enough whining already! Stop berating politicians and land managers for avoiding a fair public process, an absence of bipartisanship, unilateral decisions, dismissing scientific data leading to blind edicts preventing, prohibiting, and pilfering our trails under pretenses that mountain biking harms the environment more than other forms of trail use until…

…we put ourselves under the microscope.

Unfair politician person who closes MTB trails for no good reason
PC: Thomas Le Ngo via Flickr.com Creative Commons License (no changes made)

The issue isn’t whether or not mountain biking degrades a trail or impacts the environment in some harmful way, but to what extent it does and how much control YOU have over it. While the impacts of off-road biking have been shown to be equal to (and according to some research, less than) hiking, it is dually important to develop and encourage a certain self-awareness to identify, break, and prevent poor but avoidable riding behaviors to mitigate environmental damage.

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