Letter to the Editor - The Truth about Trails

My name is Jesse Reyerson and I love this community and our parks. I came to Decorah in 1999 to wrestle for Luther College. I live on River Street, I work from home, I'm a volunteer Firefighter, and I am currently serving as the Vice President for Decorah Human Powered Trails. Who is DHPT Decorah Human Powered Trails is a volunteer 501c3 non-profit organization that is focused on providing access to the Decorah Parks by building and maintaining trails for human powered user groups. Our membership includes runners, hikers, cross country skiers, dog walkers and mountain bikers among others. We work closely with the City of Decorah's Parks and Recreation department to plan, build, maintain and fund the pedestrian use trails in Van Peenen Park, Palisades Park, Twin Springs, Ice Cave and Dunning's Springs. We have a $2 million liability insurance policy on file with the City of Decorah along with a Memorandum of Understanding and Liability Waivers for the work that we do. On top of the roughly 1000 hours of volunteer labor that we organize each year, we also pay the hourly wages for 3 to 4 trail maintenance staff each summer and we groom singletrack in the winter. When the weather doesn't allow for trail maintenance, we collaborate with Park staff to organize invasive species removal. Horses in Van Peenen The trails that horses rode in Van Peenen Park 50 years ago are still there. When DHPT was asked about creating a map for sustainable horse use in Van Peenen Park, we provided what we call the 5 of 8 proposal which allowed horse traffic on 5 of the 8 miles of trail. This includes the approximate 3.5 miles of trails that horses always had access to plus approximately 1.5 miles known as the Pines East and Pines West that was built and has been maintained by DHPT. We determined these trails can sustain horse traffic and are wide enough to allow horses to safely share the trail with other user groups and horses can have access if the Winneshiek Saddle Club would take over the cost and maintenance. Equestrian trails are outside the scope of DHPT's mission statement and would require maintenance and costs above and beyond that of a human powered trail. While individuals may have opinions, DHPT as an organization has not asked for horses to be banned. Horses were never kicked off of any trails that they've previously had access to. Technically, the Park and Rec rules and regulations state that horses are only allowed on trails where they are specifically designated for such use, but that appears to have been rarely enforced. The majority of single track in Van Peenen, Ice Cave and Dunning's Springs has been built in the last 20 years by DHPT. These trails did not exist previously and horse users were not kicked off these trails, because they were never allowed on them in the first place. These are pedestrian and bike specific trails that are not built to sustain horse traffic. A standard shared use horse trail must be 5 feet wider than a pedestrian trail and the impact of a hiker's boot or a bicycle tire is much more manageable than a 1,000+ pound horse and rider's hoof. The only knowledge I have of a request to ban a user group is when a Winneshiek Saddle Club representative included banning bikes from Van Peenen in their list of demands at the joint Park and Rec hearing sessions. If there is confusion as to horse access being removed from certain trails, as a park board member pointed out, it is likely due to the Wellmark grant project to update wayfinding signage in the parks in 2021. All sign posts were replaced and some did not include the No Horse placards that were originally included on the previous sign posts. Those placards were added back sometime in 2023. Bikes in Van Peenen Dr. Van Peenen had no issue with bikes in Van Peenen park. Mountain Biking was not yet a thing when Dr. Van Peenen gifted the land to the City of Decorah in October of 1976. In November of 2005, as the sport of mountain biking was growing, the Park Board did their due diligence and asked the Park and Rec director to reach out to Dr. Van Peenen to inquire how he felt about biking in Van Peenen Park. The director talked with him about this new thing "Mountain Biking" and asked if he had any issue with this user group being added to Van Peenen park. His response was that the City of Decorah is now the stewards of the park and that he personally had no issue with mountain bikes as long as the trails could be built sustainably and responsibly. DHPT has been building sustainable trails in all the park systems for over 20 years. We have members that are certified in trail design, planning and building. We consider user access, traffic flow, erosion, elevation and the surrounding vegetation in our projects. We work in close collaboration with the Park and Rec director, the Parks Supervisor and Trail Supervisor on all of our projects. We develop and present plans to the Board each time we have a new project or if we are requested to complete a project for the City. We also provide the tools, equipment, funding and perform the maintenance and upkeep of the trail once completed. DHPT regularly leads efforts to clean up Decorah's park lands including Ice Cave, Van Peenen, and Palisades Park. Thousands of pounds of trash have been collected, staged, recovered, and disposed of properly, including junk appliances, multiple toilets, mattresses, and televisions that are dumped off of Quarry Road each year into the ravines below. The trail named Iowa Public Television (IPTV) was named for the many old tube TV sets that were discarded along that trail. We hold clean up days regularly and have partnered with Decorah High School classes, other outdoor groups, and Luther College service groups in the past to help us remove junk. Finally, A Winneshiek Saddle Club representative has referred several times to "standard" rules for horse parks across the country, which are what you might expect in an equestrian specific County or State park, but not in a city park which is what Van Peenen is. There are no city parks in Iowa (or nearby surrounding states) that allow horses on their city trails. In city parks, patrons are expected to clean up after their animals, among other things. Allowing equestrian access to Decorah's single track trail system - built entirely on the volunteer hours of human powered trail users, would do irreparable damage to one of Decorah's greatest assets for local taxpayers and visiting tourists. If you would like more information about DHPT, please find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DecorahHPT