Welcoming committee

These three welcomed me when I got in on Friday evening.  Come to Boulder Junction, and you can see them for yourself.   

 Quiet Hunting brings a perversion of the normal sense of a "nice" or "not nice" weekend.  It was cold and windy this weekend, so there was a lot of peace and quiet.  The little lake we are next to is open, and the loons are already there.    There were "peepers" out the first night, but I think they thought better of it Saturday and Sunday. I hadn't been up in a while, so it would have been irresponsible to do any yard work.  Better to just stand around and look at things.   

Lakeland Times: NR board says No.

Good summary by Nathan Bortz linked above.

 

A very interesting quote by NHAL superintentent Steve Petersen- "Now, if someone approaches us in five years and says, "these ATV's are lightweight, have a top speed of eight mph, differentials and two psi tires-that we will consider".

And there is the problem in a nutshell.  What kind of sport is ATV'ing going to be five years from now?   The ATV industry knows its biggest market-and most potential for making money-is in machines that are bigger, faster, and more able to tear up the terrain.    True ATV trail supporters need to step back and examine who their friends are.   They have been played by an industry that doesn't have their interests at heart.

Victory!

As many of you know, the State Natural Resources Board voted on Wednesday to drop plans for ATV routes in the NHAL forest. I will post more on this, but just wanted to say it was a long battle.  In fact, this blog started about the time the DNR proposed a first trail for the Master Plan.  

More on this to follow.  Each time a trail proposal has been defeated, another seems to rise up.  Joel Patenaude writes that this will give us a reprieve till at least 2020, when the new Master Plan is in place, unless-and this is certainly a possibility-a trail is put in by legislative fiat.  We know from the pier fiasco that this could happen.  

But for now, the important lesson is that spirited opposition matters.  There will be some people to thank, in a later post. 

Music as a weapon

An interesting essay in the Atlantic on the everpresence of background music.