Tips For The Best Mountain Biking Experience

Over the last year, territory for bike riding in the Santa Monica Mountains has become more and more limited as the bikes themselves become more and more popular. The state Department of Parks and Recreation and the National Park Service have banned bikes from most trails in the area, allowing them for the most part only on wide for Mountain Bike Tips, level fire roads built for emergency vehicles and dismissed by the bikers as unchallenging and less than scenic.

The third major public landowner in the hills, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, is to consider a similar policy Tuesday night. Rangers, hikers and equestrians say the growing opposition to mountain bikes stems from safety problems and environmental damage to the trails during the five years since Mountain Bike Tips were first mass-done. They talk of bikers careening down hillsides at speeds up to 40 m.p.h., injuring themselves, colliding with hikers and scaring horses. They describe rutted, uneven trails and fragments of shattered reflectors littering the paths.

The bikers acknowledge that some of their number have been inconsiderate and insensitive on the trails. But they say "the kamikazes," as they refer to the speed demons, are a distinct minority. They see the new rules as discrimination against one group of sports lovers who have as much right as the others to use public land.

Other mountain parks in the Los Angeles area, however, may also ban the bikes from the trails. Officials of Angeles National Forest and Los Padres National Forest, where most trails are now open to bikes, are studying the matter.

As the sport is taken up by others in California, "it's probably coming to the point where it's going to have to be addressed on a statewide basis," said John D. Hart, safety officer for the state parks.

"The Los Angeles Basin, Santa Barbara, the Bay Area and the Boulder, Colo., area are the places where the sport is established in sufficient numbers to be visible," said Glenn Odell, executive director for land access of the National Off-Road Bicycle Assn. "And those are the places where we're seeing the threat of closures."

"If there's a litter problem along the John Muir Trail, they don't exclude the backpackers from the trail," he said. "Those users are a given. But off-road bicycling is still suffering from a lack of clout, being the new kid on the block."

Mountain Biking