I'm hot under the collar. I'm perturbed. I'm just plain miffed.
It's like when you were a kid riding the bus to a cool field trip and there were a couple of misbehaved classmates on the bus. Most of us were behaving fine, but those couple of bad apples would make the bus driver stop the bus on the side of the road and we'd all sit and have to wait until they straightened up their act. We all looked bad because of the two twits.
Such is the case with the two twits who unleashed their chainsaws on a swath of trees on Big Jay mountain, next to Jay Peak. The backcountry skiers were cutting their own trail on somebody else's land. It happened to be managed by the Green Mountain Club, which does so much work to protect a gorgeous green corridor through Vermont for hiking and winter pursuits. When the GMC got the tip this summer, they went up and checked it out themselves and were appalled at the damage that had been done.
I just received the Green Mountain Club's Long Trail News and they have a rather lengthy article dedicated to this sorry story.
"The scar ranged from 20 to 60 feet wide, and was about 2,000 feet long," said GMC's Rebecca Washburn. "There were dozens of stumps everywhere, and slash piles on both sides of the opening. Signs of erosion were already visible as there had been heavy rains earlier that week."
These guys were cutting 20-inch trees—some with rings that aged them at 70 to 90 years old. Check out Washburn's photo, above.
Thank heavens that these guys were caught, albeit quite late, and they are being prosecuted. I hope it sends a message to others that this behavior will not be tolerated.
As one skier said in the GMC article:
"If you're not a good enough skier to ski natural glades without cutting, stick to the ski resorts' maintained trails."
Twits like these make all of us backcountry skiers look bad. And that does not please the Skimaven.
