in CamRock (Moderator: TheMayor1)

Here's an issue I want to get ahead of before it becomes an issues:

A couple weeks ago some wonderful volunteers made some improvements to the trail, they added some berms and jumps and stuff, to that area, you know, just after where that plank used to be. Is it called Mayor's Playground? Good stuff. Where this bermalicous stuff was put in is fine, its old field, ecologically a waste land.

This old-field at Cam Rock is dominated by a pasture grass called smooth brome, which is from Europe. It ain't no 'Merican prairie! Also, the other plant you see a lot in old fields is Canadian goldenrod which is just starting to bloom.

But just down the trail a bit is a pretty good prairie restoration. Recently the trail was rerouted through here due to rutting. With this later trail work event, a few areas of prairie were 'dozed in', I assume to provide a drainage area for water off the trail?

A prairie has dozens or even hundreds of species of plants with lots of different kinds of flowers and forms of plants, often dominated by very tall grasses in late-summer.

There are only 2 areas of prairie at Cam-Rock (at least in the MTB trail area) (see attached map), both are pretty good and need to be respected because some people obviously put in a lot of hard work to recreate a really special habitat that used to cover this entire region.


So basically I just want to say, please don't do any trail building in the prairies. I'm thinking the work that was done so far this summer had to be done for erosion control issues, but I just don't want anyone thinking that area is a good spot for the next set of berms, jumps ect. I'm not sure what the point of the lumps in the trail there are now? Water control features or are they supposed to be jumps (on a mild uphill?) Lets stabilize the are and try to leave it alone as much as possible.

Thanks.

Hope you guys have fun at CORP-Fest/Pitch-Black this weekend. With a 1-month old little girl at home, its pretty hard for me to get excited about the idea of intentionally missing out on sleep.

The organizer of the endurance event I am currently participating in.

[attachment deleted by admin]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that CamRock is a recreation area not a prairie restoration area. There is enough pressure on recreation that to say that without official declarations from the land manager CORP will proceed with trail building/maintenance in accordance with our agreement with Dane County Parks.

I will respond to this before it gets too far out of hand. I think I have authority to do so from a couple of angles. I will go through what happened here in chronological order:
First I worked with Dane County Parks to get this property acquired for the park. I then worked for seven years on developing the Master Plan for this park and getting it approved through public hearings, board meetings, etc. The Master Plan now defines CamRock Parks as primarily a recreation park. Some ares are designated as suitable for prairie restoration, both upland and lowland, and some areas for Oak Savannah restoration. Only some of this work has been done as the "Friends of CamRock Park" is a splintered and disorganized group. In the early years CORP put in 10 times the work toward these efforts as the Friends group did. These days the Friends primarily work on water monitoring of the creek. Other individuals are working on restoring the Oak Savannah's, which we see on our trails. There is not an organized effort of restoration in the park as there is not an organized group to lead it.
But I digress. Following approval of the Master Plan, I was then the one who initially laid out the bike trail through this area, an old soybean field, once getting approval from Dane County Parks. Then the trail was constructed in 2007. This was the very first sanctioned activity on this property after it was acquired. Then I was a member of the group that did the restoration of the prairie. And I have to say, restoring prairie is held in such high esteem, and I really enjoy the prairies myself, but that is easy work compared to building and maintaining a bike trail! We mowed the weeds down. Spread some expensive prairie seed over the snow in the winter. And viola, prairie!
And for two years I have been the one pushing to get the highly eroded, rutted, and unsustainable trail reconstructed into a sustainable trail.
Yes the "bumps" as you call them serve a purpose for trail sustainability. Yes the trail needed to be re-routed in order to make it as sustainable as possible. Yes we scarified the old trail and spread some more of that expensive prairie seed in the old trail bed to restore those areas.
Believe it or not this is one of the hardest areas of the park to build a sustainable trail. It is basically too flat. And if that does not make sense then I recommend the great book put out by IMBA called "Trail Solutions: IMBA's Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack". It is 272 ages of what it takes to properly design, build, and maintain sustainable singletrack mountain bike trails.
So basically what I am saying is that as a person who both built the initial trail and then worked on the restoration, nothing was done lightly. It needed to be done and was done with a purpose. If you want to get involved in those decisions the opportunities are there. And if you have the passion, there are many more opportunities to restore more of that beautiful prairie in the park. Like the new area you mentioned with the berms and rollers.
But from my opinion I don't think once an area is restored that makes it sacred. It can be modified. It can be moved. Just like it was created more can be created.

Oh and I forgot to say Frank, congratulations on your new life as a dad. It will be a completely new life, full of challenges and many rewards.

And I am available to discuss these issues any time. The amount of variables that go into these decisions are too numerous to list. It might be a better method than a public lashing in a forum. You have my number or you can PM me here. 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that CamRock is a recreation area not a prairie restoration area. There is enough pressure on recreation that to say that without official declarations from the land manager CORP will proceed with trail building/maintenance in accordance with our agreement with Dane County Parks.

We've lost 99% of our prairie in Wisconsin and 99.97% of the savanna. As such, most of the plants and animals that are dependent on these habitats have lost over 99% of their populations. I think conservation has a little more pressure on it than recreation.

Look at the map I posted, we're talking about less than 5% of the park here. There's plenty of former cropland and grazed-out woods to put trails in.

If mountain bikers want to be respected as users of public land, they need to have respect for conservation.

Chuck, I'm not complaining about the trail re-route, those ruts were getting worse and worse every year and clearly something had to be done. I'm just saying looking at how much earth was moved and vegetation was torn up rebuilding/building up that section before the prairie, it would be pretty catastrophic to do that in the prairie. These tiny postage stamp prairies are surrounded by a matrix of weeds, they don't recover well from disturbance, especially a lower-diversity recreation like this. All I'm saying lets leave these tiny patches the way they are and focus on building additional trail elsewhere.

As for how the prairie was established, I'm sure you are underestimating the amount of effort it took to get that prairie in the state it is in today. Its not perfect by any means, but I do this for a living and I can tell you that prairies like that don't just happen without good site preparation and several years of focused maintenance as they are starting out. In fact, the city of Madison engineering folks have failed to establish prairie at every attempt I have seen over the past 5 years.

Last, I'd like to thank you again for all your hard work at Cam-Rock over the years. I didn't realized you and Cam-Rock went that far back.

We mowed the weeds down. Spread some expensive prairie seed over the snow in the winter. And viola, prairie!

Seem private land I manage with trails on it was a former corn field.  The season after the corn was harvested, we planted soy.  After the soy was harvested, we tilled the soil. That winter a seed mix created by the Leopoldo Foundation was spread over the snow. The next spring we had the start of a prairie; the third spring we had our first controlled burn. The first year I built some trail in the prairie that was not ridden much b/c prairie trail is boring.  I shortened it so that users get form one point to another in it. Less than a year later, you could not tell a trail was even there. We have no mow the trail corridor frequently b/c the grasses want to close it in really quickly. This summer the grasses and Forbes are phenomenal! Maybe our soil is different a few miles north of Camrock.  Our prairie management company is EC3, btw.

D