• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

my single-track got blown out and I'm pi$$ed

colemanapp

colemanapp

Husqvarna
AA Class
My mom owns 240 acres of mostly hilly woods and a coulpe (10 and 20 acre) lakes just outside St. Louis and I've been riding out there for the last 30 years. Most that have been out there know its one of the best pieces of ground in the area. Adjoins a state conservation area on 2 sides. Lets face it, single-track is hard to come by and I've got (had) plenty out there. Its my own personal mecca that I've shared with many conscientous riders. I had about an 8 mile loop of awesome trail and a couple side trails, not all single track but alot of it.

Last year my 22 yr old nephew picked up riding again, bought a 4 speed KX450f from a local mega dealer and after taking some of the 'kids' out from the dealership to this property, they are now his new riding buddies, most have race quads and are track riders. They've got him convinced that things like hand guards look ugly and won't be needed if you ride wider trails. They just talked him into a 2012 RMZ 250 and he's been riding it alot out there. I've noticed some new trails and that some of my pristine single track is blown out by his quad buddies. WTF, went out yesterday its gotten way out of hand. As my nephew put it, they honeycombed in a bunch of new stuff. Well, to me, its just a bunch of crap like they do to our local riding areas and will be a huge erosion mess shortly.

Right now would be a bad time for the phone call cause I lost alot of sleep over it and have generally been one to wait before blowing up on someone. Its not my land so technically, I have no right to how its used. I want to make my point clear to my nephew and his friends and need some points that would hit home to this younger crown aside from grabbing them by their f'n necks and barking in their faces. Its my sisters boy and he's a good kid but I know she'll side with him or have us all run off the farm if we can't come to some resolution. She constantly tells my mom how someones gonna get hurt and she'll be sued so her arguments are easily understoof by my mom. Thats a whole nother topic.

I need some good points to drive home to them this weekend so I'm open to suggestion.
I don't want this to become an ATV park.

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Good points would be that singletrack makes a lower impact on the land, good point for erosion and also dust control. Singletrack is safer, because speeds are generally lower.
 
Tell him all the girls on cafehusky thinks he's a sissy for having to widen the trails so he didn't have to scratch his pretty motocrosser. I hate it when good singletrack gets ruined by quads. :(
 
I've been through the same thing with a piece of land I have access to..... Landowner befriended a young quad rider and singletrack we've built up, is being blown out. It's not my land, so I don't really have much say and the landowner is an ex MX guy, who really prefers wider trails. At least they aren't getting nervous about liability issues, but quad kids are more likely to get injured and have their parents sue the landowner......
 
That sucks. As it is family you have to make a concessions but also must stand your ground to some extent to keep the trails nice. Thats a tough one, good luck.
 
Why not divide the trails and have a quad only area and a single track area. The land owner will soon see the difference.

It's just plain crazy to let anyone ride on your property without signing a release form.
 
If it were me (being selfish) in your situation, I would tell my mom it is a liability to have people riding out there. FAM ONLY****************************************... That'll keep the quads out.
 
Bummer about the single track. Appreciate you sharing it with me last year for no other reason than i live in STL and owning a Husky. Might talk to the quad guys and requesting that they leave you certain amounts of single track since you enjoy it. Don't know them but, might be worth a shot. Good luck, just remember you got a great spread to ride on that most would dream of.
 
Blakelpd5 said:
If it were me (being selfish) in your situation, I would tell my mom it is a liability to have people riding out there. FAM ONLY... That'll keep the quads out.
Click to expand...

Your probably hosed but I'd play up the safety aspect also saying having criss-crossed trails is asking for head-on collisions ... Your sister is safety aware and correct on the liability issue ... Tell her you do not want any of that issue on your shoulders (or your moms) and she needs to help get the quads in a differnt area or out totally ... Adults rule!

From what I've read in the past, you cannot sign away your liabilities in most cases ... signing papers help but is not the bottom line ...
 
I have 15 acres west of St Louis and have a small area where my sons Quadtard friends can ride around in circles but I leave the trees in the trails to make it impossible for 4 wheelers to pass. Off road riding is all good to me but on my land it's my rules, that goes for all activities. I have been on the pheasants end of the deal on some hunting land and it really comes down to who's name is on the deed makes the rules. If you don't like it get your name on the deed.

When i go to places like St Joes, my main concern is colliding with a quad so I vowed to only go to places like that on weekdays when it's not jammed with people.
 
Good points. I'm sure a liability waiver will be in the works if only offering some piece of mind to my mom. There's always been some quad trails mainly to access areas of the property. Utility quad usage is necessary. The big difference is its one racing quad doing all this in one months riding. The quad trails will be here forever now. I'm going to let my nephew know how rare the singletrack is and Why I like riding it. He's asked for a lot of bike advice from me but with his recent choice in bikes, he's obviously listening to the mega dealer boys. I'm going to press for separate trails. At least he's not into quads so were on same page there. Just hate losing what I had and having to make more trails. He, my son and I are only Ones riding but we all have freinds that we like to ride with. Just wish his rode 2 wheeler. I'm out here now and gonna suit up and check how bad it's gotten. My comments on trail condition so far are base on just the few trails by where I stay. Afraid it's everywhere though.
 
It's to bad they don't make 3 wheelers anymore, those deth traps were on their way to ridding the world of the types that seem to be attracted to quads. Most of my riding areas have been destroyed by quads and now they are getting even worse with all the sport utv's that are around now.

I spent six hours cutting in a new mile of single track today. I think it's gnarly enough that quad riders will break their f##king necks if they try it, one can hope anyways.
 
Leave lots of off camber logs and step ups with narrow launch pads, at least then quads will have to go around and leave some of you single track alone. I'm starting to like trials riding more and more... You definately get that all to yourself.
 
man what a pain in the ass, i had a kid stop by a while back and told me how much he liked my track etc. ok come by and ride with us (me and a buddy) friday evening. he did and he seemed cool i told him if he wanted to bring a friend or two out and ride thatd be fine with me. fast forward to sunday i get done with my afternoon nap go down to the garage and my dad told me there was somebody out there with a dune buggy lol wtf. so i go down to the track theres like 4 trucks 6 bikes and a razor. i go up to the guy hes liek ya i brought a few friends by hope you dont care... i effin said 1-2 of your buds dude. and kinda jumped his ass but nothing too bad but i guess i hurt his feelings since he hasnt been back since oh well my point was made and the problem was stopped before it got out of hand. its a little different from your situation but heres the thing tell your nephew its like a small fishing pond. you start bringing a bunch of idiots out there and its going to go to shit really fast and you wont have anymore (fish to catch) trails to ride. besides that has he ridin with 4 wheelers when its been dusty out jesus they stir that shit up....ok rant over dunno if i help you any but hope ya get the situation taken care of.
 
Unfortunately ATV's have become a virulent form of cancer & seem to attract the dumbest humans, which is just a bad combination. Probably the easiest way to get rid of them is to go back in time and blow up Honda & Suzuki's engineering labs where the stupid things were developed in the first place............
 
Briggs,
Thanks and I will. Wish our trees were as tight as yours or I don't think we'd be having this problem. After riding your place, I did make all the entrances to single track off camber but it seems this guy is intent on hitting the trail so he just blows in somewhere else. Seems like the forest by you is choking us out of riding too.

My ride yesterday was so disappointing. Theres some single track left however we have very few sections of creek due to those lakes. The one section we do have is not only blown out by the ATV but now my cousin with a side by side UTV has been going through the creek and you guessed it, truck width now. This sure didn't take long. I think there's just too many people with what they consider 'rights' to use the farm. Hell, even I don't own anything so 'MY singletrack' isn't really mine as I'm finding out. I made the single track by walking through the woods with a leafblower and then riding the stuff. Works really well but it was work. I guess nowadays just might as well grab a quad and run through the woods blowing stuff down.

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Luckily, we have a lot of steep hills and big rocks out here, along with thick brush. We try to engineer trails to be as technical and narrow access as possible, when we can build them. I remember about thirty years ago, at most public trail areas, the riding trails were truly along the lines of singletrack, but as quads got more prevalent in the 90s and public riding opportunities became more and more scarce, the singletrack trails began to be widened out. Then the 4X4s came a long and wanted to drive on the trails too, so the trails got even wider. There is the desert, which is perfect for quads, but people don't want to drive that far, and in the summertime, the desert is just too hot. I sort of hate to profile certain groups, but it seems to me that quad riders like to goof around and party more than trail riders do. They also seem to disregard rules and regulations more too.
 
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