Trail torn up in Green Mountain National Forest!

"Deerfield Ridge Trail closed - the Deerfield Ridge Trail within the Green Mountain National Forest in the Towns of Wilmington and Dover(VT) has been subject to significant unauthorized excavation and sub-standard alterations. According to the US Forest Service, these trail modifications, near Haystack Mountain and Haystack Pond, represent a significant threat of damage to the surrounding public lands and resources by increasing erosion compromising the health of existing wet lands, wildlife habitat and unique biological communities. As a result, the Deerfield Ridge Trail has been closed to all motorized vehicles until further notice. Although the trail is still open to hikers, people using the trail should exercise caution and expect changed and degraded trail conditions. Anyone with information concerning these illegal activites is asked to contact the US Forest Service at 802-747-6797."

The above is from local paper. I've attached a picture I took 11-21-12. If anyone knows anything about this please let the forest service know. Thanks!!!

What's the backstory?

Is the old Haystack Mtn resort doing a bit of backcountry ski trail creation, a la Jay Peak?

Looks like Haystack is too blame.

Apparently Hermitage Inn Real Estate and millionaire owner James Barnes like to ignore environmental laws. That is a seriously arrogant attitude.

of note:

"Hermitage Inn Real Estate kept working for almost two months despite being told to stop."

"ignored state environmental officials, their concerns and violated conditions of the permits it did have and had undertaken other work knowing they didn’t have the required permits."


Thank you for posting this so we can be aware - by skirting the permitting process, companies can make a lot of progress without permission. This puts pressure on politicians to allow the permits to go through well after the fact as excuses like, "we've already invested millions- we didn't know we needed a permit" or some such nonsense is used.

The same strategy is being used on Northern Pass and the Keystone Pipeline which both have absolutely key components that have not been approved yet but construction and/or investment in both has been ongoing.

If I'm a lucky boy, maybe Santa will bring me a new monkey wrench this year.

Vermont has several significant regulations that provide control over development including the infamous act 250 where large scale development permitting can be stretched for years. This is offset by a very poor rural population outside of the major population centers that are desperate for jobs and revenue of any type. Most rural towns have weak local government with no staff (and sometimes a disinterest)to enforce regulations so the state ends up doing most of it with a very small poorly funded staff. Generally the approach is to try to work with developers rather than an adversarial approach which can lead to abuse by well funded developers. The USFS also has staffing limitations and also prefers not to use the "big stick" approach but once an issue rises to prominence, the developer is generally in a world of hurt. If the violations are egregious as stated and the developer does not have some very deep political connections, the resolution of this may take years.

I don't advocate monkey wrenching as the people doing the site work are generally local contractors who bear the brunt of the damages and it really doesn't get at the source of the problem. A far more effective approach given current technology is for someone with web savvy is to get extensive documentation on the damage and ongoing issues and set up a webpage and get links to it distributed extensively. Of great importance is to get it in the face of where the developer lives and works. Given the state of the news business, a well written press release with supporting documentation about an "evil" high profile developer in CT might be of great interest to the "local" desk of the developer hometown newspaper. There also seems to be methods of getting google search results to get high ratings so that whenever someone searches for this particular developer, a prominent website about his practices would appear.