• 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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!

Maybe there is still hope for those who ride on public land!

Dirtdame

Dirtdame

Administrator
Staff member
At least the bad economy has ONE desirable effect....

Sierra Club and Wilderness Society cutback staff
Not since the radical departure of Dr. Patrick Moore from Greenpeace in the mid 1980s has the green lobby been rocked by two large seismic events. Last week, Carl Pope, resigned from the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society cut their staff by 31 percent as reported by Trail PAC.

According to the LA Times, the departure of Carl Pope, 66, chairman of the club and a member for more than 40 years, comes as the nonprofit group faces declining membership, internal dissent, well-organized opponents, a weak economy and hostile forces in Congress trying to take the teeth out of environmental regulations.

An E&E News article stated The Wilderness Society has reduced its workforce over the last year from 224 to 155. In addition, the Washington, D.C.-based group, which currently runs on a $26.7 million annual budget, cited reduced donations amid a sluggish economy as one reason for the cuts.
 
Now if PEER could go through the same thing, that would be ideal. Oh wait, we pay their salaries.
 
About 3 years ago in a pub in rural Victoria (Bright) after a fine day riding I was mildly accosted by a forrestry ranger (I was wearing a Husky shirt) who said it was people like me who defiled the bush and its natural beauty. Slightly taken aback I responded with a glib one liner (not that one) to the effect that we dont cut trail so whats the issue. Fortunately a local country fireman bought into the discussion and said that if the dirt bikes had not kept the single trail open then the previous years fires would have devestated Myrtleford (next country town). Apparently the firemen we able to access spot fires by using the trails. He basically told the forestry guy to go jump. In our country there is a need for the Green movement. However they do not seem to understand the concept of sharing-its there way or the highway.
Another issue is our ski resorts. In Australia by area we have more snow than the Swiss Alps, unfortunately not nearly as high. Our ski fields occupy less than 5% of the snow bearing ranges. Given the need to attract patronage in our short 3 months ski season there has been a need to develop larger resorts. The Greens fundamentaly and totally oppose this commercial notion and seem to hold sway over the local beaurocrats.
I feel that in this world of divided interests all reasonable attempts need to be made to accommodate differing views and requirements. Isn't that what a democracy is all about after all (non nobus solum).
 
So the siera club is loosing some wind in their sails due to the economy.... Consequently, so are many many poor rural areas that would benifit from people who go there to spend money on activities they cannot do in urban areas: such as ride OHV trails, parks, and roads. Unfortunately, depending on where you live.... you have to go very far to spend money on activities such as this and those areas benifit rather than more local areas. Some states seemed to figure this out- like UTAH/ Michigan it seems but everyone sees their own strugles and sees land usage decrease. Also, the US Forest Service has eliminated the use of alot of land and "roads" from use since the 2005 MVUM. Since then more and more roads have been lost as they are forgotten and unused. MOST of the roads on the MVUM are dead ends- so using them for OHV is less than desireable. The damage has been done and continues to get worse. Soon old trails and roads will be grown in as they are left off maps and forgotten (I think that was the plan... less to manage- it worked...to well if you ask me). I think that's a economic/ tax issue moreso than an interestgroup thing- although the interest groups would have been the ones that defined "managing roads and forests" which may have driven the costs up- leading to having to decrease what they manage. Curious where we'll be in 10 years...
 
Unfortunately, Deputy Director of the OHMVR for California is being terminated so that Governor Moonbeam can put some greenie tree hugger in her place.
 
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