Save the vanishing trails

Los Angeles is one of the ten largest urban centers in the world, but many residents manage to escape its crowded streets and enjoy the outdoors by hiking, jogging, or biking on nearby hillside trails or fire roads.

Some of these trails are on national forest or public park land, but many are on undeveloped private land. In those areas, hikers may assume that because they can access these trails today, they will be able to access them in the future as well. But this is not the case.

Most vacant land in L.A. is owned by investors who are just waiting for the right time to sell it to a developer. These private owners may tolerate public use of trails and fire roads until they're ready to develop their land. But once the land is ready to be developed, trail users will unexpectedly will find a gate or a bulldozer blocking 'their' trail.

Development soon follows in the form of large tracts, minor lot splits, or individual homes, and trails and fire roads are usually obliterated, gated off, or turned into private driveways for hillside estates. When new residents move in, they sometimes block or gate off remaining trails, including former fire roads, out of concern for security or to protect their privacy.

Increasingly, hillside communities are putting up guard gates, barring the public from formerly public streets and trailheads. When there is no gate, hillside residents often lobby elected officials to post 'no parking' signs on streets near trailheads, effectively discouraging public access even if the trail does lead into public park or forest land.

As a result, some local trails that were used frequently by Sierra Club groups a generation or more ago are now closed or blocked, and are no longer listed in the Sierra Club schedule.

Southern California is going to continue its explosive growth, and more and more of that growth is likely to be projected into foothills and canyons, where it will continue to threaten existing trails and public access to isolated mountain areas. Club members need to be more proactive in preserving access to their favorite local trails in the face of the rapid, sprawling growth of Southern California.

A first step toward preserving a trail is to find out who owns the land on which it sits. Is there a single owner, or does the trail pass through several patches owned by different parties?

The ideal way to preserve a trail is to buy a corridor of natural land along it, as is being done with the Santa Monica Mountains Backbone Trail. However, this is very costly and is probably not a financially viable option for preserving most trails on private land in the L.A. area.

If a trail can't be purchased outright, the next best strategy is to try to get the trail dedicated to a public agency.

The first step to getting a trail dedicated is to get your local city or county to adopt a master plan of trails and see that your favorite trails are on it. If a trail is part of an already-adopted local trail plan, the local government is on much more solid legal ground in requiring a developer to record an offer to dedicate the trail as a condition of development approval. If the trail is not on any adopted plan, the developer may have grounds to mount a legal challenge to the dedication.

While they are waiting for final approval, developers and sub-dividers are like politicians before an election; they are anxious to get public support and placate potential opposition. That is the best time to get them to agree to a trail dedication. Once the developer gets his approvals and picks up his permits, he no longer has any incentive to make concessions.

Don't rely on verbal promises by the developer. Make sure the trail dedication is a condition written into the development approval. This makes the dedication enforceable even in case of a change of ownership.

Since it is common practice for developers to market an approved tract to other developers, you will often find the developer who made the original promise is long gone by the time the development begins to build out. Unless the offer to dedicate the trail is made a condition of approval that runs with the land, you may not be able to enforce those 'campaign promises' by the original developer.

The dedication needs to be mapped in some way. If the trail is on an existing dirt road or fire road, mapping should not be difficult. If the location of the trail is not specified in the offer to dedicate, developers or inexperienced planners may route the trail along an alignment that is too rugged or unsafe for general use. Trail supporters should be involved in determining the exact trail alignment to be dedicated.

There is another, very narrowly circumscribed way to get a trail dedicated for public use. It is called 'implied dedication.'

Under California law, if a trail was 'openly and notoriously' used by the public for at least five years prior to 1972, it may be possible to collect affidavits from former users and persuade a court to recognize the public's right to use that trail by 'implied dedication.'

California does not recognize claims of implied dedication based on trail use after 1972, and pre-1972 trail users aren't getting any younger. If you know of a trail that could be preserved by establishing a right of implied dedication, start circulating those affidavits immediately.

Los Angeles County fire officials have claimed that their fire roads are emergency easements over private land in favor of the fire department, not the general public, and that their contracts with landowners specifically exempt implied dedication over fire road easements. That issue will have to be resolved by the courts. Until the courts make that decision, there is no reason a fire road cannot be dedicated to public use as a condition of development approval.

Once an offer to dedicate a trail has been recorded, the next step is to find a public agency or a private land trust that is willing to accept the dedication and manage the trail before the offer to dedicate expires. Offers to dedicate are often lost at this stage when no agency steps forward to accept them. Once an offer to dedicate is required by the local government, trail supporters need to follow through to ensure that the dedication is accepted and that the trail is opened and maintained.

Mapping trails, circulating affidavits, meeting with landowners, going to public hearings, and trying to persuade public agencies to manage trails takes some time and effort, but the financial cost is minimal.

On the other hand, if the land for your favorite local trail has to be bought in the open market, the financial cost is staggering. Raw foothill land in Southern California runs into five and six figures per acre nowadays, and it isn't getting any cheaper.

So, if you have a local trail you enjoy and would like to continue to enjoy, get to work protecting it now.