Bad news in Santa Cruz

Well, I must say that I was out of the loop on this one. Apparently over the last couple of months the Ranger Staff in Santa Cruz has gone from 1FT+1HT to 5 full time officers. They aim at cleaning up the joint. On the record UCSC trails dropping to Hwy9 are hot on their radar. Riders seen entering, exiting, or stumbled upon on the trail will be cited. Brings back memories of the good old days. I remember having to dodge, duck, and ditch rangers back in the days. Seems that the local mountain biking community has gotten a bit spoiled with how sparse the patrol has been over the last 4-5 years. Well, no longer.

Check out these discussion threads:
Number2
Number1

Sounds like it will be necessary to get involved now. There is no ignoring it. So how to get involved???
Mountain Bikers of SC site
MBOSC Blog

Rumor is that first offense will run about $300. If they see you with a shovel or tool they can stick you with an additional $1400 for destruction of public lands. Either way, penalty is steep for getting tagged by the man right now. Tickets are rumored to have started flowing February 18th (happy birthday to me).

In other riding news...



Sneek a peek at the new ride. Well, new to me. Weather has been awesome here. I have been disturbed at the ever expanding waistline. So I started looking for a bike. It had to be realatively inexpensive. But I wanted to keep riding full suspension, too rocky here not to. At any rate, when looking for a deal I usually find one. Stumbled on this demo heckler from one of the touring companies in Moab for under $1K. Since purchasing I have been selling off anything that isn't bolted down so that Erin doesn't have my head. So far I have raised near $400 towards paying it off. Hopefully that buys me some grace time :)

So I am back on a heckler. Now I get to find out how much of the 29er deal was real and how much was placebo. I will have to do a write-up on that in a month or two.

That's all I got at the moment, hope everyone is doing well. Thanks for reading.