7am Saturday, June 21 2014, at the Palmer Lake Trailhead the Colorado Mountain Club (CMC) is organizing a BioBlitz of Ice Cave Creek in through Butler Canyon NW of Palmer Lake in Pike National Forest. This activity is specifically meant to find unique and rare plant and animal species to help drive a Wilderness designation for much of Pike National Forest North of Balanced Rock Road. This is worded on their website (https://www.cmc.org/Conservation/RampartRangeWildlandsProject.aspx)
as such:
as such:
“Your participation is critical to ensuring our campaign has a good understanding and reliable documentation of the biological resources of this unique and special area. A report will be compiled and used for future protection of this area. We hope/expect to find several rare plants and animal species.”
If you are able to, please attend this BioBlitz and politely voice your opposition to Josh Kuhn with the CMC and other members. Please do so with respect for the CMC members and in a professional manner, but our opposition to this must organize and grow to the point where their effort stops.
FOMP has met with members of CMC, and have had members work on the Ice Cave Creek trail reroute. Both were very negative experiences in that CMC does not advocate responsible multi-use of our national forests, and seeks to exclude all motorized and mechanized use in the proposed Rampart Wildlands area. Although FOMP’s main volunteer work is in non-motorized areas of Pike, we respect and encourage all responsible multi-use of the forest resources and will work against any organization that tries to exclude user groups. Your FOMP elected board members and members at large consists of hikers, runners, mountain bikers, horseback riders, birders, motorcycle riders, and OHV enthusiasts. To represent our membership best, we feel it best to oppose the CMC initiative.
More info on the CMC can be found here: (https://www.cmc.org)
FOMP is organizing a separate website for all information we have dealing with this subject, we’ll send the information out soon, but we have interfaced with several groups, the town of Palmer Lake, USFS personnel, and many concerned individuals.