If you were unable to make it, here’s what you missed:

We had a special guest speaker, Kevin Joell (Sierra Trail Works), who is contracted to do the heavy equipment work on the singletrack trails in Peavine, talk to us about his experience with trail building, the importance of user groups taking ownership of their trails, and what to expect as a volunteer during trail work days.  As a volunteer, you will be using some specialty tools to do finishing work (after the tractor has done its job), moving smaller rocks for structural support and pruning plants around the trails.
 
Based on Kevin’s availability for this project, the trail work days will be May 2nd, May 23rd and May 24th.  Due to the more complex nature of logistics, it is important that we identify the number of volunteers who will be present during each work day.  If you would like to help #keeptrailsrad and give some love to the trails you ride on, please
sign up here. 
 
If you received a long sleeve “RAD Volunteer” shirt at February’s clean-up day, please wear this shirt to the trail work day.  When you sign up for a volunteer work day, we will ask you to let us know whether you need a shirt or not.

​We talked about the proposed Washoe County Public Lands Bill, which raises concerns of future access if we do not take the steps to legalize our trails.  I made a separate post explaining the issues and what RAD proposes to do about it here.
 
We also discussed Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship's current venture, the Connected Communities Project, in which they are in the midst of establishing 300 miles of new dirtbike-friendly singletrack trails connecting Truckee to multiple small towns in the Sierras, and Truckee Dirt Riders’ new trail which they are in the process of building to connect to SBTS’s new trail system.  You can read our summary about that here, and more impressive, detailed information from SBTS here.
 
These projects (and their funding) stop at the Nevada border.  RAD would like to make a connection from Reno to these epic new trails and partner with the efforts of SBTS and TDR. We are looking into having our 2021 OHV grant proposal be for funding the necessary NEPA investigations, planning and mapping of a new trail from Verdi to connect to TDR’s new trail.

​According to RAD’s By-Laws, RAD may have no less than 3 and no more than 7 Directors, who serve for a term of 2 years.  Directors are the people legally in charge of the entity, make decisions regarding the forward momentum of the organization, and do all this work for free (and good karma). Each year at the end of May, RAD is required to file a form with the Secretary of State reporting who the Directors are.  
 
There are currently two Director vacancies.  If you are interested in being part of the leadership team and are willing to contribute to #theradmovement, please reach out to a RADmin.  If we have any nominees, we will hold an election open to the general membership in May, in which a majority vote of the membership would elect you to the Board of Directors.
 
If that sounds like too much for you, but you still want to help out, we’ve established three new membership committees:

At the meeting, a handful of people signed up for various committees. By being part of a committee, you can incorporate your own ideas into RAD and help them come to fruition. The RADmins are here to provide support and guidance when needed.  But essentially, this way we can make more things happen for our members and ensure you’re getting what you want. 
 
If you want to be part of a committee, we will put you in touch with the other members who signed up for that committee as well.  With the events committee, you can plan and discuss amongst yourselves the events you want to do. With the projects and outreach committees, you will get some updated information from the RADmins on when and where effort is needed - which will likely be pretty touch-and-go.

As a routine practice, we are going to hold member meetings every other month – on the second Wednesday of every odd number month. 

The next meeting will be on May 13, 2020 at 6:00pm at Mi Casa Too. 

​Within this boundary, Washoe County proposes to acquire only a few handfuls of small parcels from Federal land for various infrastructure purposes, which are not areas of concern to us as dirtbike riders. 
 
What we are concerned about is not an immediate threat – but a future threat (regardless of whether or not this bill passes) to our favorite riding areas (BLM land in North Valleys and Moonrocks) if we do not act now to get ahead of the curve.
 
Let’s say in the future… 2 years from now; 5 years from now; 10 years from now… a developer wants to build near or on what we all commonly recognize as a riding area (or staging area thereto). If public land is transferred to another jurisdiction or private entity, and that public land contains officially mapped/identified public user trails, the transferee will be obligated to preserve access to those publicly designated trails.  
 
Well, this trail has been here for years and you can see it, so it's obviously a public trail... right? Just because a trail physically exists and is commonly known, does not mean the trail is legal or documented.  Transferees have to accept land with its current covenants, conditions and restrictions of record.  If our trails are not of record, then the transferee has no obligation to preserve our access thereto. At that point, it would then become an uphill fight with the developer (or whoever gets the land) to attempt to convince them to preserve an undocumented trail.
 
Currently, the Nevada BLM is decades behind with officially mapping recreational trails, which is referred to as a Travel Management Plan.  If you’ve ridden in some epic places like Moab, that is an excellent example of a travel management plan: trails that are preserved and designated for your braapy pleasure.
 
There’s a popular old-school rhetoric within our dirtbike community which opposes disclosing trails to public land managers, rationalizing “If we point out that trail exists, they will just close it!” and “This is the wild west! We have had all these trails for years without a travel management plan and there’s nothing wrong with it – just leave us alone, we don’t need one.”  We are here to tell you that this is an outdated and misinformed position to take in 2020.  We collaborate with public land managers – in fact, lots of them ride dirtbikes among us on these same trails. They are definitely aware they exist, and are in favor of making as many of them legal as possible.  
 
We are not protecting our trails by attempting to conceal them or by burning them in and assuming they'll always be there.  To the contrary, we are risking the future of our trails by not having them officially designated as “multi-use trails" by the land manager.  It is significantly more difficult to close access an established legal trail than it is to close access to an undocumented trail.  
 
Accordingly, we’ve been in touch with some local BLM managers to try to get this ball rolling and push to prioritize establishing a travel management plan in Reno's backyard and get our every-weekend trails on the map, legally.  If and when, at whatever point in the future they may be threatened, we will have some ground to stand on – literally.
 
This is not a quick process, and frankly it is going to take years to accomplish this with the BLM.  Ultimately, this is a longgggg race of the tortuous vs. the snail … Federal land transfers take forever… BLM mapping takes forever.  We are going to start our race now.