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Trail Days is June 2

From Horsetrader staff reports - May 1st, 2018 - General News

According to the American Hiking Society, there are 2,802 miles of trail across the nation, and it’s aiming to improve them on June 2.

That first Saturday in June is the organization’s annual National Trails Day, a day set aside for all types of trail enthusiasts — hikers, equestrians, bike riders and others — to participate in planned activities, ranging from just having fun to helping with maintenance.

For Bill Krzyston, Manager of Rancho Oso in Santa Barbara, it’s a chance to open the door to his resort’s 310 acres, surrounded by the Los Padres National Forest, to share and engage with those who use his facility and the popular trails it touches.

“We want to thank people for working on the trails and their time,” said Krzyston, who’ll provide free overnight camping to registered Trails Day participants. “In recent eyars, with the fires in our area and the drought too, there has been trail damage. The forest service’s resources are stretched and they cannot maintain as much as they would like to or as much as we would like to see them maintained.”

Rancho Oso is one of four California sites to date that feature horseback activities on the National Trails Day website with registration information, although more are expected. (Info: https://americanhiking.org/national-trails-day)

Other locations will include the City of San Marcos, which has an outstanding municipal trail system that accommodates horses, Idyllwild, and Burney, in Northern California.

All of them offer rides that vary according to the location, from two miles at Rancho Oso to 10 at the new Burney Trailhead. Krzyston also points out that work being done is mostly light.

“It won’t be heavy work,” he said. “It will be brushing back trails, mostly, and maybe on a couple trails we will trim a tree or two. Becasue of heavy rains, we may have to look at reestablishing some trails that suffered from erosion, but it will all be hand work.”

He said the damage caused by fires can be direct — a result of the burn through — or by resulting erosion and slides. ALso, there’s the fact that trail use lessens after a fire passes through.

“When you have fires in the area, and the less people use trails, and the more maintenance they require,” he said. “Horses, generally, when trails are built well, are great for maintaining trails just naturally by using them. As you go by, the brush gets brushed back a little bit. Brush doesn’t grow because of the overall use of the trail.”

MORE ONLINE: Http://bit.ly/805A_Trails

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