Happy Trails have no tar on them

John Andrews, Eastern Trail Alliance president, masters the July 1 ceremony in Old Orchard Beach.

A new trail section was dedicated yesterday linking Scarborough and Old Orchard Beach, yet another section of the East Coast Greenway that aims to connect Calais, Maine, to Key West, Florida, with an alternative off-road bike/pedestrian throughway.

Nice to see that this new section is tarmac-free and has been designed as a hard-packed dirt path about the width of a large SUV (not that there will be any allowed on there!). This new section runs through the woods along the straightaway that consists of Portland Avenue and Milliken Mills Road, connecting at Old Blue Point Road to an existing Eastern Trail section that traverses Scarborough Marsh, jumps back to the road for a bit, and then continues into South Portland behind the Fickett Fields off Highland Avenue to Broadway, where the route ties together with the SP bike path and goes all the way to Spring Point. Another along-the-road section brings you across the Casco Bay Bridge to the "trail" head (it's mostly tar) at the end of Commercial Street in Portland, which is now partially a new road and cruise ship facility along the Eastern Promenade.

This section has for decades been used by snowmobilers and dirt bikers and was known for its muddy conditions, rarely ever drying up over the hot summer months. Lots of landfill must have been added to the soggy area and it will be interesting what Mother nature has to say about the new trail construction over time.

This is a spectacular route and just an awesome way to get to Old Orchard Beach from Portland by bicycle. You will experience by cutting across the marshes of Scarborough and taking the off-road way, that the route is a lot shorter and faster than you would probably have imagined. I've made the trip in not much more than 30 minutes at a very good pace, by mountain bike, and I highly recommend you try this out as an alternative to driving to OOB for your annual Pier Fries and Bill's Pizza slices. Bring your shorts and towel for the beach: parking the bike in the front row, beach-side, is a nice amenity and will make you glad you didn't drive...

Trail: Dangerous Redefinition of Reality

You Call This Trail? No wonder nature has gone down the tubes...

photo © Lewiston Sun Journal / Daryn Slover

Look no further than how warped today's society has redefined everyday words and you will understand easily how we have created this mess we are now calling our home planet.

The photo caption reads:

"Rail enthusiasts walk along the 3/4 mile Ricker Farm Trail during a dedication ceremony in Lisbon on Wednesday. Work on the trail began one year ago and the trail head is located at the Lisbon Community School. The Ricker Farm Trail begins where the Papermill Trail ends, for a combined length of one and a half miles. Ricker Farm has been in the Ricker Family since 1860. Members of the family attended the ceremony with 96-year-old Alice Ricker cutting the ribbon. Plans are already in the works to continue the trail on both ends, said Justin Liudvinaitis, chair of Lisbon Trails."

As someone who has worked closely on"trail" issues for mountain biking access, I have seen first hand how this definition of trail has been redefined for the benefit of real estate developers and opportunists of all walks to suck up federal money for preserving nature and churn it into business for sand & gravel companies and their associated mafias of legal thievery. It has become a big joke, and the grant takers are truly rotten wolves with big capitalist sheep smiles on their faces as they rip down your favorite nature spot and pave a "trail" through it, all to get access to and permission to develop these areas in the first place. Add a trail, and all of a sudden you are eligible for federal funding for your go-nowhere cul-de-sac disconnected development of future disconnected Americans who haven't a clue growing up in some fantasy land isolated in a section of woods.

I wonder if they will someday name a development (oops, almost used the Olde American English 'neighborhood') after Ms. Ricker? Alice Ricker Way. I wonder if she really thought it would turn out that way? Developers really have a peculiar sense of humor... especially around the dinner table when they're serving glazed old lady.

Nobody seems to notice, or to care about, or to be able to stop, this outright fraud of man and nature enabled by a semantic metamorphosis, and popularized by hippie-do-gooders operating from the back pocket of Joe Steamshovel.

Can't you see what they are doing to our world, to our lives, re-defining the meaning of what was once a secluded dirt shortcut through a wooded area? Have you not seen the condos stacked three-deep in the woods behind everybody's back yards? No, those weren't always there.

This is worse than a dude in a suit who at least makes no pretenses about wanting to eat you for dinner. Are we headed for a pre-corrupted, out-of-the-box future government of Ecocrats, Republi-Greens and Hipsterpendents? Or are we already there?