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I wonder if the BLM will ignore my questions for a full month? Not exactly what you would call superior customer service. When I was on the Resource Advisory Council the BLM once sent me a copy of their customer service policy, i.e. how quickly they would respond to a customer request. I can't find that document in the stacks but I seem to remember them advertising a goal of 3-5 days to respond to a letter or e-mail and even quicker to a phone message. This instance is going to drag down their average but then, hey, it's just an e-mail that asshole Tobin!

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I'm sure you seen or heard the saying before, usually in relationship to an injury from doing something stupid. Well it also applies to the actions of a few riders who frequent Clear Creek and who don't seem to give a damn about the rest of the OHV community. I talking about the guys who cut fences and ride in closed area.

I have observed the handiwork of a very good rider who recently decided to carve up the hills in the Natural Area and the barrens above Staging Area 3. Went out of his way to find gaps in the fences to trespass. Another reader wrote: "I was riding with some of the (name deleted) and was surprised at the self serving reckless attitudes that rationalized fence cutting. I heard one of them say "They're gonna close this place down anyway, so I'm gettin mine right now". WTF are they thinking?" Exactly! A self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever heard one. It is bad enough that we have to fight the radical enviros every step of the way, but to have the hard work of the organizations that have stepped up to the challenge undermined by people like this is a tragedy.

I believe there is a future for OHV use in Clear Creek or else I would not be investing my time. There are going to be more closures, in fact the current management plan calls for half or more of the barrens that are currently open to be closed. If the BLM had done their job over the past five years this would be the case today. Unfortunately, with trespass like the reader observed, the restrictions and closures will be even greater in the future.

It is incumbent on everyone reading this blog to be proactive and try to educate these idiots, if that is possible. If not, turn them in. I will write more on this subject another time and hopefully recruit some of you to help with the education and monitoring efforts this fall when the riding season starts again at the Creek.

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Didn't check the email yesterday when I got home. I was tired. Today I found four messages in the Inbox from Jim, John, Carl and Brian. Thanks guys for the supportive comments and a couple of ideas for this forum.

John asked whether I wore a mask during summer and I told him that I was so fast that I outran any dust I might create even with a strong wind at my back (yeah, right, in my dreams!). Back in my enduro riding days, Eric, Grant and I were a D-36 team named "Team to Beat" and we were on a regular basis. I think the only trophy we won as a team was at the Cowbell. I had to push my Can-Am with a broken countershaft the last half mile (at least it felt like a half mile, and uphill too!) to the finish. When the bike broke, my score card was completely filled out but I just knew that Buffalo (Trail Boss for the Cowbell) would have a final check that would get written in the spot for the observation checks (at least that's what I would do) and he did and I finished and we got 2nd place B team. In fact it was the only trophy I ever got at the Cowbell in all the tries I gave it.

No. I don't wear a mask, never have. yesterday I led all of the day and there were only two of us. Matt is a good rider so the rule was that I wait at turns, if he came to an intersection and I wasn't there, keep going straight. If you play follow the leader and there is any kind of breeze like we had yesterday, there is no dust. I didn't see his face dirty all day. Of course, the bigger the group, the harder it is to control and keep spacing. people just have to be patient if they don't want to suck dust.

I ride there all year long and have for 30 years. I avoid the place when we have really hot days and little wind. I can kind of tell from the weather forecast. yesterday was a perfect summer day. Unfortunately we have had so little rain that the swimming hole will be dry soon as the San Benito river is almost dry.

I don't encourage people to ride Clear Creek in dry conditions unless they are ready to assume the risk that the asbestos dust could be harmful. I don't believe it is, but then that's me. Make your own decision and be prepared to live with it. If you do ride in dry conditions, be smart and keep a good distance from the rider in front of you. Remember, no dust is good for lungs, regardless of the source. If I am riding with a bunch of Ramblers, most of whom are faster than I am, I usually ride last and we usually have pre-arranged meeting places or destinations.

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Matt and I took a 50 mile ride around the Creek today and had a good ol' time. Didn't make it to the lower staging areas. Only saw five vehicles, all pick-ups between Staging Area 3 and Staging Area 6. Two groups of three riders on the trails but don't know where they came from. Saw no one once we left the Clear Creek drainage.

Got to see the wreck of a Land Rover. Some guy drove a 2004 off the side of the hill into Larious Canyon and I understand that the car is two feet shorter now after the impact at the bottom. Didn't walk down to inspect but the only way to get it out will probably be to drag it out with a bulldozer. Maybe they can fix the contour trail in the area while they are in there. (NOT!) It is an area that Julie Anne Delgado has recommended for closure and the management in the Hollister Field Office is so afraid of her and her lobby that they won't stand up to her, tell her to shut up and take a hike.

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Now I am not saying that my good friends at the BLM are liars but I suspect they may be challenged by math and logic. How else could they come up with a figure of almost 50,000 visitor use days during the fall and winter months of 2003/2004, a number recently reported in the San Francisco Chronicle article on Clear Creek?

Perhaps it is as simple as as they forgot to divide by 2. You see, a traffic counter is located just before Oak Flat campgrounds. You drive over it entering and leaving the staging areas. If you don't divide by 2, then your vehicle count will be double the actual usage.

If we assume that they did divide by 2, then what else would contribute to such an outrageous number? more

Day 19 and counting for a response from the BLM - but is it really fair to count weekend days?

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I was talking to a colleague at work today about the SF Giants and their climb to first place in their division and his comment was "They finally got their shit together." The comment sort of stuck with me today and during the evening walk it coalesced into the following. Unlike the Giants, the Hollister field office can't seem to get their shit together and sometimes can't manage to clean it up either.

Imagine that you manage a branch office of a company and you are given several weeks warning that members of headquarters staff are coming down to inspect your operation. What would you do? I know what I would do. I would make sure the place was clean and presentable for starters, regardless the purpose of the visit.

So, how did the Hollister BLM office handle a similar situation? After the Kum Ba Yah, can't we all just get along, feel good meeting last November, the state office team had a field trip to Clear Creek scheduled to learn first hand about the management challenges. Did they ever get a nose full! I arrived early that morning at Oak Flat campground as did William, the BLM dirt ranger. While we were waiting for the tour to start, we proceeded to pick up trash around the campgrounds.

As I was working around the toilet I came across a pile of shit with some toilet paper on top of it right outside the outhouse. Boy, was it disgusting and it made me I mad that someone would be so crude as to take a dump within smelling distance of the toilet. That was until I opened the door to the toilet and was repelled by the stench and sight I beheld. It looked like someone had sprayed the floor from entrance to toilet with liquid crap that had now turned into dried crap. Now it was clear why someone would have taken a dump outside the toilet.

Going back to my example above, would not a reasonable person in charge of a facility or branch want to make sure that the place was presentable in advance of a visit by headquarters personnel? I would surely think so! After all, they have four people responsible for the crappers in Clear Creek. Our tax dollars and green sticker funds are paying for a Area Manager, an Assistant Field Manager, a Project Coordinator and a Park Ranger. You would think that one of them would have thought to make sure the toilet in Oak Flat was clean.

I made sure to take Tony Dana, the Deputy State Director, over to the toilet before the tour started so he could see first hand how well prepared the Hollister Field Office (HFO) was for their visit. I later learned from my metal jousting partner from the CNPS, Brian LeNeve, that the toilet had been in the same condition the previous Sunday when he tried to use it.

So, how can we expect the HFO to manage a 50,000 acre management area when they can't even manage to clean the toilets before a visit from HQ??? I wonder if Tony Dana reported this incident to Mike Pool? Well?

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Just got back from a hour long walk and I had a chance to think back over the events of the last nine months. It was about that long ago that I called the BLM State Director, Mike Pool and asked him to become involved in the Clear Creek process. At about the same time the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) also met with Mike to complain about the process, and Mike got personally involved in the process. Since then, things have gone from bad to worse.

First, the BLM organized a "feel good" working session to try to bring all of the parties together. They invited groups who had no historical interest in Clear Creek and asked "Can't we all just get along? The next day the CNPS issued their first lawsuit threat.

Next, with state office oversight, the Hollister office started a fencing project that closed one open OHV route and part of another without consulting the OHV community and without doing the legal paperwork that the law requires before they commenced work on the fence. Around the same time they released an "Interim Strategy for the Protection of the Primrose" that reads like an environmentalist wish list of closures for Clear Creek.

In April, the Hollister office submitted a grant request document that is full of untruths. This of course was reviewed and approved by the state office OHV coordinator. Finally, they announced that they were not going to do an environmental assessment to designate routes, barrens and the natural area and instead do a full Environmental Impact Statement. This latest action will probably delay an plan implementation for another year and likely reverse all of the OHV favorable decisions in the current management plan that the BLM refuses to implement.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the OHV community to issue their own Notice of Intent to sue.

Now I get word from OHV contacts in Sacramento that the "word on the street", no doubted planted by the state office, is that the BLM is now going to "punish" the OHV community for daring to threaten a lawsuit.

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OK, I know I said that I wasn't going to do this every day but since I have been waiting two weeks for a reply from the BLM to an e-mail with some very basic questions, I thought I would share them with you. To their credit, George Hill, the Assistant Field Manager did call me last Thursday to say they were working on a reply. Here are the questions I addressed to Bob Beehler on Monday, June 7:

- What is the status of the new plan for the entire area? I saw a note back in April that you were starting a new

- I understand that the EPA is working on a "new" risk assessment. What can you tell me about that?

- Your OHMVR grant request mentioned a June fencing project on R002. Has an EA been started for this project?

- Are there any other NEPA actions planned or started in Clear Creek that are not listed on your web site.

- I would like to get a copy of all of the data that you used to come up with the 2003/2004 visitor count that you listed

- We are working on the routes for our 2005 national enduro. What constraints are we going to be faced with this year?

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Back in mid-April, the BLM announced that they were going to do a new Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Clear Creek instead of doing the environmental assessment (EA) to designate routes barrens and the natural area that they published in the federal register in April of 2003. Why an EIS instead of an EA? While they will pontificate about how controversial the issues are and how much public concern there is regarding the designations, the bottom line is that they could not throw out the OHV favorable decisions rendered in the 1998 Record of Decision (ROD) with a simple EA.

If you read through the Salinas Rambler's web site for Clear Creek you will see that this has clearly been their stated goal for the past two years http://salinasramblersmc.org/back_to_the_future.htm. The fact is that the Hollister Field Office has never accepted the last minute changes that former State Director Ed Hastey inserted into the ROD and have been dragging their feet on completing the route, barren and natural area designations for five years. The ROD called for these designations to have been completed one year after the ROD was approved. Now the EIS process will drag out the process another year.

I decided to divorce myself from the BLM in late April after I recommended to the Blue Ribbon Coalition that we start a legal process against the BLM.. This was not an easy decision, you see, as I have worked with the BLM now for twenty years on land use plans and was appointed by the Secretary of the Interior in 1995 to the BLM's Central California Resource Advisory Council. I served on the RAC for five years representing the motorized recreation community. It was a very rewarding experience, I learned a lot and I met a number of very good people who work (or worked) for the BLM. Unfortunately, times and people have changed and, IMO, the BLM management in Hollister and Sacramento are out to screw the OHV community at Clear Creek and it came to a point where I had to mentally divorce myself from the BLM so that I could start to really "tell it like it is".

I announced our divorce by sending a letter to the current Secretary of the Interior. I considered burning the thank you letter I received for my service on the RAC and including the ashes along with the divorce letter but decided against it given how sensitive they are in Washington about receiving foreign substances in the mail.

I did not expect to get a reply, figuring that my letter would end up in some clerk's in-box in some windowless office in DC. Surprisingly, I did get a response, but not from the Secretary of the Interior's office or even the Director of the BLM's office. Instead, the response came from Mike Pool, the BLM State Director in Sacramento, who could not find the time to sign it personally and who is unfortunately is a part of the problem, as I see it (more on this another day).

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Well, here goes! I decided to create this forum to separate my comments from the official Clear Creek page hosted by the Salinas Rambler's on their web site. I did not want my ramblings construed to be the official position of the Salinas Ramblers or any other group that I am affiliated with. I hope to add to this blog on a regular basis, but probably not daily, as is the nature of some web logs.

Here is a little background information to help you better understand my comments and perspective. I have ridden a dirt bike in Clear Creek for the past thirty years and have had a hand in the layout of the Quicksilver enduro for twenty six of those years. I probably have more time on the ground in Clear creek than everyone who presently works for the BLM combined, except for the Clear Creek Ranger William Schwarz. Of course that was not that difficult to do since most of the BLM folks rarely venture out of their office in Hollister, and certainly not their management.

- participating in the EPA's environmental workshops that they conducted in the early to middle 1990s and once was even

invited to participate in a panel discussion on recreational exposure to asbestos.

- leading work parties to clean trash, repair trails and construct fencing to protect sensitive habitat and the natural area

This winter AMA District 36 presented me with their highest award for land use work. Thank you very much, D36! This award and other Clear Creek issues have been documented on the Blue Ribbon Coalition on their web site:

I have also been interviewed for articles that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and The Pinnacle:

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Comments? If you love this forum or hate it, let me know. No middle of the road comments, please

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Panorama photo by ed from the top of SB Mtn. on a route that the BLM proposes to close to the public. ed's photo by Bill, The_Blue-One.