Guys- not JUST an SA topic!  
(1 comments)  Tuesday, 1-June-2010  11:26 AM - by scratchy 
(poached from the Trails forum)

The Department of Environment and Heritage currently have a draft trail strategy document for public consultation (until June 25 2010) called "linking Adelaide with Nature". For those of you not familar with Adelaide, the Adelaide hills are an amazing area of riding close to the city, but currently so much of it is DEH land which is not legally open to riders.

The idea of this document is to consider general approaches to manage and move forward with the running of the Adelaide Hills DEH parks, including Cleland, Morialta, Shepherds Hill, Blackhill and more. Whilst previously these areas were considered individually, this document sets an overall direction for improving these parks and allowing cyclists in.

A big part of it is that the DEH are now keen to consider allowing mountain biking to occur in parks- if correctly managed and with trails designed with safety and the environment in mind. Currently riding is not allowed in most parks in SA except on some bitumen roads. This is a huge step forward and will hopefully open up parks to riders, whilst reducing the illegal riding in other environmentally sensitive areas.

Also, one of the biggest plans is to look into developing a North-South long-distance cycling trail through the hills from Gorge Road to Sturt Gorge- we are talking roughly a 60km trail across the Adelaide hillsface incorporating many areas of native bush, conservation and national parks which would be an amazing ride, and potentially an awesome tourist attraction too.

It is really important that cyclists get behind this- it is a good plan- there is nothing in the plan that is negative as far as we can see.

More information can be found here. http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/par...or/latest.html
The plan is here- be warned, lots of reading!:- http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/par...l-strategy.pdf

But the most important thing you can do (and the simplest) is to send an email to kain.gardner@sa.gov.au saying you support the plan- and maybe if you are from interstate say how cool it would be to have a long distance track in the Adelaide hills, and that you'd love to come visit Adelaide if it happened ;-)

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