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stick trail exits
Monday, June 16 2003
[REDACTED]
I walked down the stick trail today and found that someone had come through and added a few branches to it, including one place where I didn't even know a side trail existed. I know that the stick trail serves as a mountain bike path for one of the brothers of our house's former owner, and he's probably the guy who added the branches. They're not well-developed branches, mind you. They're really just exits, if something so primitive can actually have exits. But if you take the exits you find evidence of repeated traffic, though it's not clear that it came from the riding of mountain bikes.
In this part of the Catskills (which happens to lie within the State Park boundaries), it seems to be common practice for people to make use of forested property - both public and private - as "commons." Nobody pays much attention to no-trespassing signs, and its possible to encounter people on paths who are not the people who own the land through which the paths run. This is particularly true of our uphill neighbor's long driveway. The stick path, on the other hand, though it runs for over a mile, is fairly inaccessible from any place except our back yard, and one almost never finds anyone else on it. It runs along a narrow flatland at the base of an escarpment and the only way the mountain biking dude can get to it is via a steep trail down the bed of an intermittent creek running from our uphill neighbor's driveway.
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