Liberty Lake Bikers Clean Up Their Act Commissioners Allow Motorcyclists To Stay After They Spruce Up Park

The pop-pop-pop of off-road motorcycles will continue at Liberty Lake and soon may be joined by the roar of big rigs.

Motorcyclists who helped clean up the county’s off-road vehicle park in recent months have earned the right to continue riding there, county commissioners decided Tuesday.

“You met the challenge,” Commissioner Phil Harris told about 50 riders who rallied to keep the park open.

“I was skeptical,” said Commissioner Kate McCaslin.

Responding to neighbors’ complaints about trespassing, erosion, litter and vandalism, commissioners in April closed the park to four-wheel-drive vehicles. They didn’t ban motorcycles but said they would if riders didn’t clean up the park - and their acts - by March 1998.

Tuesday’s hearing was supposed to be an update on that progress. Commissioners had vowed to close the park if the report wasn’t good.

It was.

County parks director Wyn Birkenthal said riders from several clubs helped build trails to discourage renegade riders from going outside the park. The work crews fixed fences, planted grass on denuded slopes, hauled trash and barricaded trails that were especially erosion-prone.

It wasn’t entirely a volunteer effort. The county spent about $10,000 building ponds to hold runoff and on other work, Birkenthal said.

Commissioners were so impressed they canceled the March meeting.

They also told Birkenthal to meet with four-wheel-drive clubs to find ways to bring Jeeps and similar vehicles back into the park without hurting the land.

In the past, some drivers have turned marshes into mud bogs, Birkenthal said. Under the commissioners’ mandate, he and the clubs will have to find a way to prevent that damage.

The off-road riding area is part of the 2,900-acre Liberty Lake County Park, which was purchased in 1966 with federal money for conservation projects. In the mid-1980s, the state used money from the gas tax and the sale of off-road vehicle stickers to increase the riding area from 300 to 350 acres.

Park neighbor Darrell Hilgers testified Tuesday that “there’s been no change up there” since commissioners issued their cleanit-or-lose-it edict. Erosion, vandalism, trespassing and dangerous riding still persist, he said.

“The park itself is too small. Most of them use it for a parking lot” so they can ride illegally on neighboring private land, said Hilgers.

Hilgers urged commissioners to close the park unless they can hire a ranger to patrol it. But he was the lone dissident.

Riders said they’ve lost so many good riding areas that they can’t afford to lose any more - especially one as convenient to Spokane as the Liberty Lake park.

Several speakers from North Idaho said they can’t find such good riding in their own state. The thousands of miles of logging roads in Idaho forests aren’t rugged enough, said a rider from the Silver Valley.

“You could take your car or your wife’s Grand Cherokee” on logging roads, he said.

Another Idahoan said people who complain about things like motorcycle noise and the smoke from grass fields are mostly transplants.

“They’d do well to go back to where they come from,” he said to applause.

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