On The Trail/ Orv Groups Trying To Protect Trail Areas And Their Right To Ride

Thursday evening in late June, volunteers from a local motorcycle club cut logs, drilled holes, and tightened bolts to restore three felled sections of perimeter fence at the Liberty Lake off-road vehicle park.

As the group’s members finished their work, two hikers approached on the trail.

After a long pause, Joe Close, the Panhandle Trail Riders Association (PANTRA) member who organized the work party said, “You’re on the wrong trail, sir.”

“I heard the distinct sounds of chain saws,” Derrell Hilgers replied.

Hilgers owns 15 acres of land adjacent to the ORV park. “I had to make sure it wasn’t somebody out here carving a new trail.”

Though Close didn’t recognize Hilgers, he recognized his concerns.

Landowners like Hilgers are tired of renegade motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle riders pulling down fences and ripping up their land.

“It’s too small of a park,” Hilgers said. “In a few minutes they’ve seen it all and then it becomes a parking lot for bigger things.”

Some riders like to cross Hilger’s land to reach Mica Peak and the Big Rock area. Add erosion, budget constraints, and environmentalists, and riders like Close are getting worried.

They fear they’ll be kicked off all their favorite spots, from Liberty Lake, where they teach their kids to ride, to the national forest areas, where they ride through the back country. favorite spots, from Liberty Lake, where they teach their kids to ride, to the national forest areas, where they ride through the back country.

“This little park is like a microscope of all our problems,” said Close, a Veradale resident.

So he and other ORV riders are mending fences to protect their interests.

Throughout the summer, they’ll map the Liberty Lake ORV park, assess its conditions, and make maintenance recommendations to the county.

County parks officials closed the park in late April when spring runoff sent water rivulets streaming from the 300-plus acre park’s steep banks and onto Idaho Road. The park reopened on June 1.

“We needed to minimize erosion during the sensitive spring months,” said Liberty Lake County Park ranger Bryant Robinson.

“Everything that runs off the hill has the chance of getting in the lake below.”

The closure surprised riders, who say the park has never looked better.

In 1997, county officials banned four-wheel drive cars and trucks from the scarred park and authorized the use of $82,000 remaining from an old state grant to improve conditions.

ORV users volunteered more than 400 hours seeding hillsides, digging trenches and building catch basins to collect water and minimize erosion. They also put up signs to keep riders informed of park rules and boundaries.

“The grass is green now,” said Tom Hildesheim, a member of the Spokane-area Brush Bunch motorcycle club. “Before (the park) was just a scab on the hillside.”

County officials agree the park looks better, but they point out that three years after trenches were dug they have filled with silt and that warning signs have been torn down. The placard announcing the big rig ban was recently ripped from the ground and burned.

“It looks trashy,” Robinson said, “So people are bound to treat it trashy.”

In fact, Robinson regularly cleans up broken glass and bonfire remnants from the parking lot.

The county doesn’t have the resources to hire full-time security guards to police the area, said Parks Maintenance Manager Bob Hughes, since the the department oversees 9,000 acres of park with only about three million dollars.

“We’re building swimming pools that serve 1,000 people a day,” he said. “Where do you think our energy should be placed?”

Hughes, however, will consider any proposal the ORV community presents to him in September and hopes to fund some immediate projects.

“I think I can give them a couple of weekends with a backhoe, some grass seed and a person or two to help,” Hughes said. “But getting a maintenance plan in place will take a long time. It won’t be a quick fix.”

One of the long-term projects on Close’s mind is fencing the park’s western boundary along Idaho Road.

The state’s Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation gave the county a grant to fence the property in 1994. But the county decided not to fence the longest stretch along Idaho Road, since fencing it was too expensive and the steepness of the hillside made it unnecessary. But over the years all-terrain vehicle riders and motorcyclists have been riding down the hill and onto Idaho Road, frightening drivers on the road.

“There isn’t a week goes by where I don’t see a rider on Idaho Road,” Hilgers said. “It’s a near accident every time.”

To fund such a project, the county would have to secure money from the state. The grants are hard to come by, said Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation Manager Eric Johnson, especially for a small park like Liberty Lake.

“They’re competing against places like the drainage basin in Yakima County where there’s 300 miles of trials and 10,000 people on a weekend,” he said.

Even riders like Close understand why priority is given to places like Yakima. They prefer riding on open swaths of land to circling the tiny Liberty Lake park.

But they’re willing to invest their time up at the Liberty Lake ORV park this summer, in part, to rehabilitate their image.

“I have to volunteer my time,” said Mike White, a PANTRA rider, “because if we don’t they’re just going to shut it down.”