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Village Votes: Do mountain bikers deter hikers from accessing the trail system?

A trail way finding sign in Snowmass Village.
File photo/Snowmass Sun

This is Village Voices, the community page anchored on locals and their stories. The third week of every month, the Page 2 section will ask readers to weigh in on a relevant local issue or topic, and will publish the results of the previous poll with a short story to accompany it.

The fourth week of every month, Village Voices will highlight a village resident as part of the “Local Spotlight” series. Know someone who should be featured? Email your suggestions to mvincent@aspentimes.com.

The flower logo you see in print was designed by Los Angeles graphic artist Ken Parkhurst for Snowmass in the late 1960’s, and a handful of his village designs will be featured as part of the community page.

This week’s Village Voices takes place off the page with a five-minute survey asking locals and visitors to weigh in on whether mountain bikers deter hikers from accessing Snowmass area trails.

Although summer is getting further and further in the rearview as the winter season kicks off this weekend, this topic has come up in a few of the most recent Town Council meetings.

During the budget discussions and a joint meeting with the Parks, Open Space, Trails and Recreation Board, council members questioned whether extra enforcement was needed on the village trails, what sort of complaints about trail use have been submitted to town staff over the peak 2019 seasons, and how the increase in mountain biking has affected hikers.



“I’d be interested to know how many people are no longer hiking on the trails because of the bikes because that wasn’t a part of the community survey,” Mayor Markey Butler said at the Oct. 14 special council meeting.

Before winter officially settles in, the Snowmass Sun wants to get a better idea of how mountain bikers and hikers interact on the local trails over the year’s other three seasons — and we need your help.




Go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6K9QHLN to take the short, eight-question survey before Dec. 11. You can find the link on the Snowmass Sun Facebook page, and our staff will post reminders to participate.

And if you’re up for it, share the link with your Snowmass friends and family. The more people who participate, the better the community can understand the mountain biker-hiker relationship on Snowmass trails.

Once the results are in, Snowmass Sun staff will analyze them and write a follow-up story, which will run with the next survey in the Dec. 18 edition.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Please email mvincent@aspentimes.com.