: Future of crawling at stake, Farmington DRMP, DEIS


landusepbb
06-23-2002, 08:42 AM
Don't you hate it when it happens in your own yard.
Well, it is happening now. I got my copy of the
above, and it doesn't look good. For those of you
unfamiliar with the Farmington area, it is one of the
premier rock crawling 4 wheeling destinations in the
world, many competitions like RCAA and Pro-Rocks are
held here every year in places like Chokecherry Canyon
and The Rock Garden. The preferred alternative
virtually totally takes away the "open" designation
that is the norm for most of the million and a half
acres that surround the area. What this means is we
will no longer be able to develop trails or obstacles
without a fricking EIS, and there is so much area out
there that we are just starting to figure out hard
core trails on. Wheeling would be limited to
"existing roads and trails", this would potentially
spell the end to developing new and better obstacles
for the competitions.

And talk about apathy, this is the home of it. Out of
1600 people that voiced interest in the process and
were sent postcards to request a copy of the document,
only 140 did so, and I would be that most of those
were oil and gas folks. JUst as an example of this
apathy the BLM and Sheriff's Dept. recently held a
meeting at San Juan College concerning issues in
Chokecherry Canyon. There were about 10 people from
my club, NO ONE from the other 4by club, Cliffhangers,
and from what I could see NO other motorized
recreationists.

Anyway, this one is huge, will have a giant impact on
the future of rock crawling and competitions.