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For years, CSERC staff has encountered rutted, eroding OHV trails while out doing grazing or wildlife-related fieldwork. Most of these trails were not created by the Forest Service, but by OHV enthusiasts who built hundred miles of unauthorized trails without consideration for the surrounding biological resources. As a result, trails were created in sensitive areas, or the OHV riders did things—like use a creek bed as a trail—that were clearly environmentally damaging. Our Center documented many problem areas over the years, but could get little traction with the Forest Service even when trails directly threatened sensitive plants or wildlife.
There is new hope. In the last year, the Stanislaus National Forest—along with all the national forests in California—has begun the process of establishing an official OHV trail network, analyzing the impacts of the existing OHV trails, and determining which routes should be closed. This summer, CSERC seized this important opportunity and began conducting fieldwork to identify and walk problematic OHV trails. The results of these surveys were complied into a very detailed photo report and presented to the Forest Supervisor on August 29th.
Here is one sample experience from my fieldwork leading these OHV surveys:
It was mid-April, and the streams in the Deer Creek area were still flush with springtime runoff. The Deer Creek area is well-known habitat for rare plant species and is an important winter foraging area for the Stanislaus deer herd. GPS in hand and digital camera in another, I started climbing the OHV trail through the buck brush. The trail we were surveying was a hill-climb that connected lower elevation trails to the top of Grant Ridge. Back in the office, I had concluded it needed to be surveyed since any trail heading steeply uphill on volcanic soils was likely to have serious erosion problems. Sure enough, as the trail steepened, its entire width became entrenched in the hillside as a 100ft long, 12-inch rut. I stopped, recorded the GPS coordinates, placed a yardstick on the trail (to help establish perspective), and took a photograph of the problem. The lava-cap soil that had taken thousands of years to develop had been eroded down to bare rock. The soil had provided habitat for numerous rare plants and annual wildflower displays. The highly visible rut I identified would be the first of many ruts discovered along this trail.
Continuing on, we came upon a section of trail where water from a spring ran onto the OHV route and was “captured.” Flowing down the trail for 50ft, the water eroded the route’s surface until it left the trail in a newly formed, down-slope gully. The impact described above is known as “stream capture” and is a serious issue that is surprisingly common on the Forest’s OHV routes. At many stream crossings, water is diverted out of natural drainages, depriving downstream riparian vegetation of water and degrading in-stream wildlife habitat with sediment-laden water. As with all our surveys, we photographed the site and took the most accurate information possible. Based on our observations of problems along this route, CSERC is recommending to the Forest Service that this trail be closed due to resource damage.
This trail was just one of the 37 routes that were surveyed by CSERC staff this summer. We will be doing more such field surveys in the coming months in between other important fieldwork demands. |
