It’s important to preserve historical areas and keep them as you found them.

This includes hiking trails in historical areas.

Do the same rules apply for mountain bikers?

That’s the question in today’s story where a hiker is unhappy with the way the mountain bikers have changed the landscape of the hiking trails.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

AITA for starting a petition that got mountain biking banned from a local park?

I live in a small town with some pretty popular hiking trails.

On these trails is a specific site that was significant in the conflict between the settlers and the Native Americans pre-revolution.

For about 5 years or so now there has been a mountain biking club that had an agreement with the town to take care of the trails upkeep if they were allowed to build jumps and obstacles.

This wasn’t a problem at first, except in recent years they have been creating new trails and building more and more jumps.

Here are some of the problems the mountain bikers have caused…

This caused several problems because:

The trails are now near impossible to navigate on foot, which is a problem because its not a short trail.

Its several miles long and very very easy to get lost and stuck in there after dark if you don’t know where you’re going.

I’ve hiked those trails for years and now its impossible to tell the main trail vs side trails that the bikers use which can lead you in circles.

When they build the jumps they dig small deep holes right next to the trail and don’t fill them in.

Or they fill them with sticks so that it looks like a triggered Burmese tiger trap.

Again, these trails are officially listed as an archaeological site so in reality no one should be allowed to dig recreationally.

The police got involved.

Some of the trails are not publicly owned but landowners allowed the trails for recreation.

A large part of the trails were cut off from the public after the mountain bike club began cutting down the landowners trees and then threw a tantrum when told to stop to the point the cops had to be called.

This of course upset many people in the town, including me and my hiking buddies as well as my colleagues from the local historical society.

They got 1000 signatures on a petition.

We started a petition and passed it around our circles before we had about 1,000 signatures and then turned it into the town hall.

We also included it in the petition that it was acceptable for the group to stay as long as they didn’t alter the landscape to build more jumps.

Well within several weeks the town announced that mountain biking on the trails was now banned.

It wasn’t the way they wanted things to turn out.

This wasn’t the outcome that we wanted, as we didn’t want all mountain biking banned, just for the unnecessary building to stop.

Well this caused an uproar within the community mainly among those that were mountain bikers and I can’t help but feel guilty that I made everything worse for everyone.

AITA?

It seems like the mountain bikers were the ones in the wrong.

Let’s see how Reddit responded…

This reader thinks the reasons for the petition were valid.

Here’s the perspective of someone who builds hiking trailing professionally…

Someone else made this rule.

This reader thinks the ban makes sense.

Another reader thinks they should ride their bikes somewhere else.

If the mountain bikers hadn’t created so many problems, there never would’ve been a petition!

They brought it on themselves.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.