In Other News

Discussion in 'Free Zone' started by -ROCKY-, Nov 26, 2018.


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  1. Faust29

    Faust29 Moderator

    Location:
    irgendwo
    Name:
    B. Bunny
    Current Bike:
    I gots some bikes.
    :facepalm:

    https://www.adventure-journal.com/2...NnqebSHLXd3uc9u_FutZahPRNLmrJy-nDI-lPv7M4QfWk

    BLM Proposes Oil and Gas Drilling Beneath Moab’s Cherished Slickrock Trail

    6449555513_7e37bfbae4_k.jpg
    Utah’s Slickrock Trail covers 10.5 miles of rolling Navajo sandstone, wind-sculpted, hardened sand dunes that look like something like layers of caramel frosting. The Moab-adjacent trail has been a world-renowned draw for desert-loving mountain bikers for decades now. Nearby campgrounds offer dozens of sites to pull up on your bike, pitch a tent, refuel, and plan the next day’s ride. The trail lies with the Sand Flats Recreation Area, which also contains the popular Porcupine Rim bike trail. More than 160,000 people visit the area annually for riding, hiking, off-highway driving, and camping.

    But now the BLM is proposing opening the majority of the area to oil and gas drilling. Sand Flats is 9,000 acres. The BLM’s proposal would lease 5,000 acres for drilling. A full two-thirds of the Slickrock Trail is in a proposed drilling parcel.

    The proposal is partially the result of a drilling-friendly resource management plan for the area put in place by the BLM back in 2008. These days, nearly any parcel can be nominated by the BLM for drilling if asked by drilling or mining interests. The party that requested these parcels opened remains anonymous.

    In addition to potential conflicts with the recreation community, the proposed leases lie within Moab’s watershed. That watershed is part of an EPA-designated “sole source aquifer,” meaning that it’s the only viable drinking water for the Moab area. Any contamination of that aquifer from oil and gas drilling would be potentially disastrous.

    “My concern is always that we maintain a balance in our valley and county and surrounding public lands. We know oil and gas are part of the makeup of our economy,” Moab Mayor Emily Niehaus told the Salt Lake Tribune. “We have done a good job of saying where recreation goes and where extraction goes. My question is: Are the recreation areas going to be negatively impacted?”

    The BLM will be opening a public comment period on February 20.

    This link contains information about how to comment when the period opens, as well as information about how parcel leases are requested and approved.

    *This post has been updated to reflect that the lease proposals would allow for horizontal drilling beneath the Slickrock Trail.

    Photo: Trailsource.com
     
  2. mountaingirl sara

    mountaingirl sara iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    So Cal
    Name:
    Sara
    Current Bike:
    Ibis Ripley
    So yeah..we’ve already noticed more ticks than usual!:confused::ninja:
     
  3. mountaingirl sara

    mountaingirl sara iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    So Cal
    Name:
    Sara
    Current Bike:
    Ibis Ripley
    Disgusting :(
     
  4. SnakeCharmer

    SnakeCharmer iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Front Range, San Gabes
    Name:
    Mike, aka "Ssnake"
    Current Bike:
    YT Izzo
    Them's fightin' words to the Mormons!
     
  5. buggravy

    buggravy iMTB Addict

    Location:
    Calabasas
    Name:
    Matt
    Current Bike:
    Transition Sentinel
  6. SnakeCharmer

    SnakeCharmer iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Front Range, San Gabes
    Name:
    Mike, aka "Ssnake"
    Current Bike:
    YT Izzo
  7. deesalsa25

    deesalsa25 Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Name:
    Dee
    Not a Laker fan, but I fed off Kobe's will to win and relentlessness. I trembling to type these words. Rest in peace mamba.
     
  8. Danimal

    Danimal iMTB Addict

    Location:
    Mission Viejo
    Name:
    Dan
    Current Bike:
    Epic Evo
    So sad. That's a shock to read...RIP Kobe.
     
  9. Luis

    Luis iMTB Addict

    Location:
    Sylmar
    Name:
    Luis
    Current Bike:
    La Diabla
    Heart breaking news :cry:
     
  10. Fueledbyex8

    Fueledbyex8 Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Whittier
    Name:
    Albert
    Current Bike:
    Santa Cruz Hightower
  11. buggravy

    buggravy iMTB Addict

    Location:
    Calabasas
    Name:
    Matt
    Current Bike:
    Transition Sentinel
    Looks like the crash is actually ON New Millenium.
     
  12. ndocpjf

    ndocpjf Member

    Location:
    Agoura
    Name:
    Nick
    Current Bike:
    Giant Trance X
    Whoah that's crazy. I knew from the description it's right near the bark park but I didn't realize it was that close. I'm pretty sure that pic that Evdog posted a few weeks ago from New Millennium (the one with the tree at the switchback) is just about where the crash happened.
     
  13. herzalot

    herzalot iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Laguna Beach
    Name:
    Chris
    Current Bike:
    2020 Revel Rail,Yeti SB 130 LR
    This sucks immensely. So horrible for his family. :( :( :(
     
  14. mike

    mike iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Western US
    Name:
    Mike O
    Current Bike:
    HT, FS
  15. herzalot

    herzalot iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Laguna Beach
    Name:
    Chris
    Current Bike:
    2020 Revel Rail,Yeti SB 130 LR
    Sheriff just said nine people on board.
     
    Danmtchl, mike, Mikie and 3 others like this.
  16. BonsaiNut

    BonsaiNut iMTB Rockstah

    Location:
    Troutman, NC
    Name:
    Greg P
    Current Bike:
    Santa Cruz Hightower CC XX1
    So sad... I heard his daughter was with him :(
     
    Danmtchl, mike, Mikie and 3 others like this.
  17. SnakeCharmer

    SnakeCharmer iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Front Range, San Gabes
    Name:
    Mike, aka "Ssnake"
    Current Bike:
    YT Izzo
    Orange Coast College baseball head coach also on board as was his wife and their daughter. :(
     
    Danmtchl, mike, Mikie and 3 others like this.
  18. deesalsa25

    deesalsa25 Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Name:
    Dee
    Damn. Just damn.
     
    Danmtchl, mike, Mikie and 2 others like this.
  19. herzalot

    herzalot iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Laguna Beach
    Name:
    Chris
    Current Bike:
    2020 Revel Rail,Yeti SB 130 LR
    Yeah... I'm in touch with the assistant coach. He is floored. Just says "unbelieveable." Didn't know about his wife and daughter. Sh!t...
     
    Danmtchl, mike, DangerDirtyD and 3 others like this.
  20. Rumpled

    Rumpled Well-Known Member

    Location:
    OC
    Name:
    Jim Martin
    Current Bike:
    2018 Specialized Epic Carbon C
    Also saw that a 13 yr old OC girl and her mother were on board. As well as one of the Tijuana Dogs. By my count, that identifies 8 of the 9 souls lost.
    RIP to all and condolences to all that knew them.
     
  21. Faust29

    Faust29 Moderator

    Location:
    irgendwo
    Name:
    B. Bunny
    Current Bike:
    I gots some bikes.
    https://www.bikemag.com/news/mounta...xgxssi2k1xsRf07FJAWbJYEozOkuqsMmQda8jmDETH7z8

    Mountain Biker Recounts Witnessing the Kobe Bryant Crash
    Tess Weaver Strokes
    At 9 a.m. on January 26th, Michael Dyer and Sam Gaglani met at Pedalers Fork in Calabasas, a boutique bike shop, restaurant and coffee spot, just like they do most Sunday mornings. Dyer, 47, a Hollywood Hills-based private chef whose past gigs include professional snowboarding and Oakley R&D, and Gaglani, 50, VP of Global Business Development at Xsolla, had coffee and morning biscuits while chatting with their mechanic, then headed to the Bark Park trailhead on Las Virgenes Road.

    They pedaled up a singletrack leading from the northern end of the dog park to climb up to the New Millennium Loop Trail—a 12-mile loop that Los Angeles mountain bikers tout for its continuous, buff singletrack, challenging switchback climbs and scenic views of the Malibu Creek Watershed and its surrounding peaks and hills. The extra credit Las Virgenes section offers a classic SoCal descent—rocky, loose, steep and fast. Dyer and Gaglani chose Millennium that day because they’d heard some locals had cleared the post-burn overgrowth and added a downhill flow section they had yet to ride. That decision led them to the most traumatic bike ride of their lives, when they heard the helicopter basketball star Kobe Bryant was riding in crash into the hillside and saw the immediate aftermath and emergency response.

    Dyer recounts the ride that put him second on the scene of the Sikorsky S-76 private helicopter crash that killed all nine adults and children onboard.

    Can you tell us a little about the trail?
    Millennium is a pretty well-known cross-country trail here. I’ve been riding it for about four years. It loops through fancy neighborhoods where the Kardashians live and all that crap. It was all overgrown after the fires, but some local guys came in and weedwacked it, and it was rideable again.

    You and your friends ride every Sunday?
    It’s kind of a standing group ride with guys from all over LA—everyone’s in their 40s and 50s and has kids. Normally four or five of us meet up at Pedalers Fork. It’s a brew pub that serves good food and it has this really cool bike shop in the back that’s housed in a rustic cabin and sells all the high-end stuff. It’s one of the better bike shops in LA. We meet at 9 a.m., get coffee and a biscuit, and chat with the guys in the bike shop who work on our bikes. Then we figure out what trails we’re going to ride. Between here and the Santa Monica Mountains, there are a lot of choices.

    BarkPartTrailhead.jpg
    Photo Credit: Michael Dyer

    Michael and Sam started at the Bark Park Trailhead in a zone that was burned in last year’s fires.
    How did the ride start off?
    It felt just like any other day, but it was cold and foggy. I hadn’t ridden in three weeks, and I was feeling a bit out of shape. We had just taken off and started up the trail. We were about a quarter of the way up the switchback climb, when we heard a helicopter right over the top of our heads. We thought it was unusual, as foggy as it was. It was about 9:40 a.m. We knew the heli was going really fast and flying very low, because it was very loud. It really caught our attention and just felt ‘off.’ Sam and I were both like, ‘What the F@ck? Why is he so low?’ The cloud cover seemed like it wasn’t more than 50 feet above us at the time. I’ve been in helicopters before—I’ve never seen a heli fly into a fog bank like that. They say he was traveling between 125 and 150 miles per hour right over our heads.

    About 30 seconds later, I had to stop because my hip pack fell off. Sam was heckling me, and about a minute later we started pedaling again. About another minute went by and Sam, who was a couple hundred feet ahead of me, yelled: ‘Did you hear that?!’ I looked up and all off a sudden saw smoke and fire. The first thing that came across my mind was that somehow we made a wrong turn and were near the freeway … or a wildfire. We rode around the corner and saw total devastation. As we got closer, Sam started pointing and saying: ‘It was that heli! It was that heli!.’

    What did you see?
    You could see helicopter parts everywhere. We dismounted and ran to the wreckage. The debris field was so crazy—it’s unfathomable how something as big as a helicopter could end up in so many small pieces. Papers were still flying. There was a 4-foot part of the tail laying right on the trail. The fuselage of the heli was on the other side of trail on fire. There were two other mountain bikers on the trail beyond the crash. We yelled, ‘Is anyone alive?’ and they said they didn’t think so. We got closer and started seeing things too gruesome to say. The smoke was blowing our direction and you had to put your shirt over your mouth to breathe. The smell of burning fuel was something I’d never experienced and will never forget.

    StravaMap-scaled.jpg
    Photo Credit: Michael Dyer

    Michael Dyer’s Strava map from the morning of the crash, showing where on the trail the heli went down.
    Who made the call?
    The other riders arrived at 9:45 and called 911. We showed up at approximately 9:50 and we could already hear the rescue helicopter. I texted my wife at 10:09 and said there had been a helicopter crash. We had no idea how many people were onboard. When the rescue heli arrived, we signaled to them that we didn’t find anyone alive. They lowered a guy down on a line. He checked the scene and immediately started roping stuff off. There was nothing to do but ride back.

    Did you experience any physical symptoms from what you saw?
    I was more or less scatter brained, and we kept talking about what we saw. It didn’t hit me until I got to parking lot. There was a reporter in the lot gathering equipment who asked us if we were at the scene. We said, ‘Yeah, we saw the whole thing.’ He offered to buy all our photos and video, but we declined. [The other mountain bikers’ photos were posted to TMZ on Wednesday.]

    He interviewed me and filmed me, and mid-interview, he dropped the bomb and told me that Kobe Bryant was on that helicopter. My first question was whether there were any children or families on board. He nodded, and that’s when I lost it. I had to drive home. All I knew was that I wanted to go hug my 6-year-old son and my wife and tell them I loved them.


    KobeCrash1-scaled.jpg
    Photo Credit: Michael Dyer was riding the New Millennium trail in Calabasas when the helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant crashed and was one of the first people on-scene.

    How are you doing now?
    Taking it day by day. Today, I was in the yard and heard helicopters flying over. Every time, I look up. I can’t turn on the TV. Sam and I talk a lot about it. My brain’s kind of noodled on the whole thing. For me, it’s not so much the Kobe Bryant story, but the collective loss of life—the tragedy of losing children and parents.

    Have you been back on your bike?
    No, but I want to get out soon.
     
  22. rossage

    rossage iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    East Sacramento
    Name:
    Ross Lawson
    Current Bike:
    Highball
    Harrowing story. I posted the link in another thread...still sucks
     
  23. mike

    mike iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Western US
    Name:
    Mike O
    Current Bike:
    HT, FS
    Not selling your photos to the media sounds like good moral character. Props to you, Michael Dyer.
     
  24. herzalot

    herzalot iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Laguna Beach
    Name:
    Chris
    Current Bike:
    2020 Revel Rail,Yeti SB 130 LR
  25. Mikie

    Mikie Admin/iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    NW Arkansas
    Name:
    Mikie Watson
    Current Bike:
    Ibis DV9 / SC Hightower
    Recently Bicycle Retailer Magazine, and Salt Lake Tribune ran stories about Drilling for Oil in Moab. There is no risk to trails or any of the parks, or recreation area's.

    The Moab Field Office has 6 parcels that were nominated by expression of interest (EOI) for the June 2020 lease sale. The 2 proposed parcels located in the Sand Flats Recreation Management Area are managed with a No Surface Occupancy (NSO) stipulation under the Moab Resource Management Plan (RMP) to protect the recreation and scenic values of the area. No exceptions, modifications or waivers are allowed for oil and gas leasing under the terms of this NSO designation. Areas identified as NSO are open to fluid mineral leasing, but surface-disturbing activities cannot be conducted on the lease; however, the lease may potentially be developed by directionally or horizontally drilling from nearby lands that do not have NSO limitations. In the case of these 2 parcels, the lessee would need to secure a suitable location to directionally or horizontally drill to minerals from nearby State or private land as all BLM managed land in the surrounding area is designated as NSO. An Environmental Assessment analyzing the proposed lease locations will be posted for public comment beginning February 20, 2020 on ePlanning.

    Not all lands that are leased on federal lands are developed. Leasing enables companies to secure rights to mineral resources before investing in geophysical testing and other kinds of exploratory techniques to determine first, if resources are present, and second, if development is economically feasible. If a lessee chooses to submit an Application for Permit to Drill (APD), additional environmental review would take place with public input. Through this process, site-specific Conditions of Approval will be developed and placed on the permit in addition to the stipulations attached to the lease.

    Background Information:

    • This area is exploratory and its potential of oil and gas is not known. More information can be found in the 2005 BLM Mineral Potential Report for the RMP.
    • The closest well to these parcels was Burholder Unit 1-G-1 drilled in 1971. They drilled to 12,000 ft and it was a dry hole. More information can be found on the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining website through UDOGM Live Data Search or their Data Explorer.
    • Please visit the BLM’s ePlanning website for information on what is considered a substantive comment.
     
    Faust29, mike, Danmtchl and 2 others like this.
  26. DangerDirtyD

    DangerDirtyD iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    CA
    Name:
    Chicken Nugget
    Current Bike:
    2018 Guerrilla Gravity SMASH
    The story of Bears Ears is short but tumultuous. Following the failure of an almost four-year effort by conservative Utah congressman Rob Bishop to facilitate a compromise that would have preserved parts of the land in question, President Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016. Environmentalists and Native American tribes, who initiated the idea for Bears Ears, hailed the action, while conservative politicians and mining industry execs decried it as overreach. After President Donald Trump took office, he slashed the size of Bears Ears by 84 percent on December 4, 2017. The decision came after, and in spite of, a public comment period that saw more than 685,000 responses, 98 percent of which were in favor of preserving it.
     
    SingleTrackJB, Faust29, mike and 5 others like this.
  27. DangerDirtyD

    DangerDirtyD iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    CA
    Name:
    Chicken Nugget
    Current Bike:
    2018 Guerrilla Gravity SMASH
    I lost track of my commuter bike chain. I’m afraid to change it now. I figure I’ll just ride the drivetrain as is until I need to do something.
     
    Danmtchl, Faust29, Mikie and 2 others like this.
  28. herzalot

    herzalot iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Laguna Beach
    Name:
    Chris
    Current Bike:
    2020 Revel Rail,Yeti SB 130 LR
    In other news...


    Spolier Alert:





    Kansas City Chiefs won a football game tonight.
     
  29. UPSed

    UPSed iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    Simi Valley
    Name:
    Ed
    Current Bike:
    Niner Jet 9 RDO
  30. mountaingirl sara

    mountaingirl sara iMTB Hooligan

    Location:
    So Cal
    Name:
    Sara
    Current Bike:
    Ibis Ripley
    Que que??:geek:
     
    Danmtchl and UPSed like this.
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As a former Amazon Associate I continue to get screwed trying to stay qualified as an Amazon Affiliate. So I quit!


Want to donate to imtbtrails?