Wednesday night, the DCR held a public meeting presenting their Draft Resource Management Plan. They didn't go into very much detail on the plan. It was more of a brief overview, with encouragement to read the full plan on their website one it's posted.

So within the next few days, I'll review the plan in full and comment on it. There does seem to be a definitely retraction of bike access between what was put in the Trail Plan before, and what is in the Resource Management Plan now.

The audience question and answer period at the end was more interesting than I expected, despite the small size of the crowd. The Fells Dog group definitely came out as the "winner" there. All of their commenters were well spoken, rational, and logical. The nemba folks had good arguments, but they seemed more interested in grinding their axe against the "friends" of the fells, than making valid points about biking in the Fells. And of course the "friends" of the fells commenters were off their rockers as usual, actually heckling everyone else that spoke, including the DCR. The two funniest audience quotes of the night come from "friends" of the fells members:

"has anyone interviewed the foxes?"
Regarding changes to DCR policy

"[mountain biking] is like cigarette smoking"
The attempted point was supposed to be that 20+ years of mountain biking wasn't enough, and that biking was still new and the research isn't there yet on biking trail impact. If there was an award for worst metaphor of the year, this guy would have won hands down!

Not to overstate things, but the future of mountain biking in the Fells is again going to depend heavily on everyone reading the RMP, and sending comments to the DCR. More info on doing that will be posted soon.