1. This is a natural segway into everyone taking a
Tread Lightly awareness class, I've offered them in the past (in AF Canyon no less and we spoke a bit about Forest Lake) and I would be happy to host one again and I'm sure my partner in crime skylinerider would help out again too. The classes don't teach you how to read a sign or interpret a map so much as use some common sense to treading on public lands. Its easy to think "hey its just a mud hole" lets give it a go, I've owned up to the fact I've done it before and I have my own ignorance to blame. The reality is we need to sit back and think about why we shouldn't get in the water and in this case Forest Lake(s) are home to an endangered specie of salamander. I had actually never seen them up there until the recent years just to give you an idea how rare they seemingly can be. Beyond that FL is a majoring watering spot for wildlife. Not only do they not want to taste oil water, the sound of trucks bogging through the mud and water is a bit more extreme than a calm drive to the lake with picnic baskets in hand
Somebody brought up the point of 'why the river but not the lake', that is actually a very good questions. I hope my notes above have helped answer that a bit but beyond the Forest Lake Trail (Shaffer Fork) is under scrutiny for the amount of sediment/contamination introduced into the North Fork & Tibble. I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the least to see a culvert at what is now the trail head river crossing in the years to come. Groups such as U4WDA, RME and U4x4C, etc have worked thousands of hours up there to divert the route from the stream flow on the trail proper but I fear a time will come when that alone is not enough.
2. I'm honestly a bit more disappointed in the shear number of users that watched it happen versus the one user that did it out of the shear ignorance I myself exhibited before I knew better. We need to learn to police our own at the incident not as the pictures show up on the internet. This brings up a second opportunity to learn and educate oneself and fellow enthusiasts, the
Utah Trail Patrol . Trail Patrol takes the ethics you learned in your Tread Lightly class and gives you some proactive ways to apply them in the field with users. If 1 in 10 users did the TL course and 1 in 50 did the TP course, we would be 10x better off than we are today... how is that for a statistic
ColoRam, your appology flies with me, it was seemingly an honest mistake and you have owned up to it and furthermore offered to step up and help in the futurer. Look into TL and TP classes and see if you can't help us have a more proactive approach in the years to come.
