TUNBRIDGE — Town officials are studying whether four stretches of legal trail should be open to bicyclists or only to hikers, snowshoers and cross-country skiers.
The trails, which total around 2.5 miles, are in some cases ancient roads, or Class 4 roads that are no longer in use. The town designated them as trails decades ago, but at the time didn’t specify how they could be used.
In the past year, an effort to ensure access for bicyclists has run into an objection from a landowner who says part of the trails encroach on a home and that the growing sport chews up the trails. The Tunbridge Selectboard has enlisted the town’s Planning Commission to study the issue, take public comment and make a recommendation.
The main point of contention are trails that cross what’s known in town as the Dodge Farm, which has been owned for the past six years by Strafford residents John Echeverria and Carin Pratt. While all but a few acres of the 325-acre farm are conserved by the Upper Valley Land Trust and crisscrossed with trails for pedestrian and snowmobile use, the owners have restricted access to bicyclists.
Last summer, a group of bicyclists approached the town Selectboard asking them to clarify that bicycling was allowed.
The board agreed to study the matter and that study is ongoing. The Planning Commission meets at 6:30 on Wednesday night to resume the discussion.
Both Echeverria, who’s a professor at Vermont Law School, and the bicyclists lay claim to the status quo. Echeverria contends that the town’s lone policy statement on how the trails can be used resides in the Town Plan, which since 2013 has said that the town’s legal trails “can be used by the public for hiking.”
One of the trails that crosses the Dodge Farm, the former Baptist Hill Road, “passes over the front lawn of the farmhouse within a few dozen feet of the house,” Echeverria wrote in a memo to the Planning Commission.
Opening that trail to cyclists would cause erosion “and impair the quality of the adjacent stream,” among other issues.
Opening the other trail, which leads from the Dodge Farm to Landgoes Farm, which belongs to Selectboard member John O’Brien, “would cause a serious invasion of privacy and loss of peace and quiet for those who live at the farm now and in the future,” Echeverria wrote.
He and Pratt, a former longtime executive producer for Face the Nation, still live in Strafford and rent the farmhouse to Paul Harwood, a consulting forester. The trail runs through the farmyard and crosses the farmhouse’s lawn.
Bicyclists, including Tunbridge residents Michael Sacca and Todd Tyson, argue that they have been using the legal trails for years and that neither the town nor the Dodge family restricted the use of the trails.
“The legal trail from the Dodge farm to the O’Brien farm provides a safe route for bicycles, eliminating the need to be on long sections of paved roads, which can be hazardous to bicyclists,” Carol Hall, a Chelsea resident who has been biking on trails in the area since 1995, wrote to the Planning Commission.
The cyclists also contend that riding on the trails is no more damaging than hiking.
Complicating this discussion are larger factors. There’s an effort to develop a network of biking trails in Tunbridge, Strafford, Sharon and Royalton, and off-road biking has picked up in recent years. That includes an annual event in Tunbridge called the Ranger Ride.
It was canceled by the pandemic last year, but the year before, 325 cyclists signed up for the event in the small town. The idea of a big ride being able to access a legal trail, which functions as a legal right of way, barring intervention by the town, is something with which not only Echeverria would take issue.
He, and others, expressed hope that while the two sides are entrenched in the conflict over the legal trails, there might still be a win-win scenario, in which cyclists could work with landowners to get the trails they desire, much as VAST, the statewide snowmobiling organization, does.
“Virtually the entire VAST system operates on private lands, based on voluntary, cooperative arrangements with landowners,” Echeverria wrote, “and this system provides a potential model for how bicycle advocates could establish additional miles of trail.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
Correction
An annual event in Tunbridge called the Ranger Ride drew 325 registrants in 2019, according to the organizer. An earlier version of this article overstated the number.
