Yesterday I wrote about a sign I saw in Richmond’s Forest Hill Park. Scroll down two posts to read what it said. Now we find out who’s behind it (kind of) and why they put it (and others like it) up.
A.J. Lagoe of 8 News filed a report yesterday on a tree that fell on a house on 32nd Street in Woodland Heights. The occupants and at least the one neighbor who spoke on camera seem to think that erosion caused by mountain bike trails caused a tree to fall from Forest Hill Park across the street into another tree, which then fell on the house. Click here for Lagoe’s story. It’s one of the “8 News Featured Videos.“ Click here for a video a mountain biker made of riding through Forest Hill Park.
Look, I’m sympathetic to someone who’s had their house damaged like that. And I understand the tendency to try to blame someone or something for what happened. But whoever thinks that trail use caused this is just wrong. And I’d bet dollars to donuts says this person has a problem with MTBers in the park in general and is using them as a scapegoat.
Let’s look at what these people are suggesting. These trails have been in the park for years, and this perfectly healthy oak tree was never the worse for wear. Then we get almost six inches of rain in two days and the trees falls, coming up at the roots. It seems likely to me that the huge amount of rain we got is what actually caused the tree to fall. It’s not like it was the only tree that fell in the region in the past two days. Many others have fallen in places where no trails exist. The neighbors would say the trail weakened the tree. Let’s look at that.
If the trail wasn’t there, you’d have maybe some ivy or other ground cover growing there. These people are suggesting that ivy would have held up this oak. It’s preposterous. If you’ve been to Forest Hill Park you know that the trails, which are used by a more varied group of people than just MTBers, are at most 2-3 feet wide. And it’s not like they’re cut deep into the ground. They’re trails! They are areas where brush and vegetation has been cleared. Think about an oak tree—and this was a big, healthy one. The percentage of its root structure that was exposed couldn’t have been more than 5 percent. And that assumes that exposing a root structure causes weakening of a tree. Those roots go deep into the ground underneath and around the trail in question.
And if all that isn’t enough, the tree is 17 feet from a trail!
The fact is we had a huge amount of rain, the tree fell on a house and now people want to blame someone. Mountain bikers are a convenient choice for people who don’t like them using the park anyway. The problem is that they have no facts to back up their assertions with.
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