Giving riders a bad name

While I don't condone the construction of illegal trails in a NP, far from it. I do feel this brings us to the issue of social need and responsible management.

If trails are being created, there is obviously a need to cater for that use in the area. I've had this discussion with a Local Council up this way after they found illegal north shore structures. They conceded the fact that there is a social need to provide for this sort of thing, they just didn't want to be the ones to do it (much like the NPWS seems to be down your way).

Fact is, if there is a social need for something and not providing it is leading to illegal trails and potential destruction of habitat, then surely the sensible thing from a conservation and management point of view is to allow a use, but control it through appropriate management. Find the tipping point that will result in a marked drop in trail construction.

On one hand you can manage through exclusion.. this results in closed trails that just get rebuilt and pop up elsewhere in an ad-hoc fashion. This cycle repeats on an infinite loop and no one wins. The park gets vandalised, the land manager has to divert resources to rehabilitation and compliance and in this case the riders ride substandard trails that are poorly built.

Allow a use and manage it correctly and you can majorly limit any impacts. The drain on resources of the land manager goes down and everyone (except the anti mtb lobby) wins.

Unfortunately, as you say wanton vandalism of park infrastructure will mean we are not taken seriously as a group and the move towards management, not exclusion, will be a slow process. I don't know here if you can attribute the gold spray paint to mtb use, but certainly the illegal construction and nailing of signs to trees don't look good. But, if there were a few legal trails, properly managed, would this scenario occur?

Not many of my friends carry gold spray paint or a hammer on their rides. This is almost certainly not "serious" bikers but local resident kids, who are the hardest group to control . On reading the article again the paint is not actually bike related , but is now giving us all a bad name