Too many new Angel Fire home builders are blocking access to our network of Fire Control Access trails.
It's just as easy, when designing and building your driveway, to include access to the trails if your driveways crosses them.
New home owners, unfortunately, can't depend on local builders or village construction inspectors to advise them of this issue. It's up to you as the new home builder to educate yourself on important safety issues when building a home in the forest.
Aside from the obvious safety value of these trails they are also a valuable Angel Fire hiking, snow shoeing and cross counrty skiiing resource. Please do your part to protect them!
“The 192 million acre National Forest system contains over 383,000 miles of roads — eight times the mileage of the interstate highway system. Most of the forest road network was built to facilitate timber harvesting. However, recreational forest users quickly adopted the roads as did the forest service itself for fire prevention and wildlife management. Recreational users alone make some 850 million visits per year to the national forests to camp, motorbike, ride horse back, hunt and hike.
In the last decade, the government has reduced logging in national forests. Timber harvests have plunged 75 percent from 12 billion to less than 4 billion board feet per year. Road building has declined from 2,000 miles in the 1980s to less than 500 miles per year in the late 1990s.
Wildfires that destroy 1,000 acres or more have increased from 25 in
1984 to 89 per year in 1996. This spring alone, excluding Los Alamos, New Mexico has lost 200,000 acres to flames four times more than in 1999. Only 38 out of 3,700 prescribed fires set since 1968 have gone out of con-
trol, but the losses in terms of human life and property damage have been enormous.”
Please pitch in and help educate your new neighbors to the importance of preserving Angel Fire's fire control access trails.
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