HELENA — An administrative meeting will be held at the City/County Building on Wednesday to discuss the relocation of sections of a couple of widely used trails on Mt. Ascension.
“The trails aren't going away. The trails are gonna still be open to the public to use. They'll just be now on city-owned lands rather than on private property,” says Project and Trails Director for Prickly Pear Land Trust, Nate Kopp.
The Easy Rider Trail and Mt. Ascension Loop Trail are both going to be slightly repositioned this year in order to no longer cross private property.
The decision to do so has come years after the trails were carved into the mountain. Each new section of trail will only be a few hundred feet each.
Brad Langsather, Open Lands Manager for the City of Helena, says that the city plans to put a fence up delineating the public and private property.
“I think opportunities like this to clarify and clean up the system will pay dividends long into the future. There will be an impact this year and then we’ll probably forget about it by next year,” says Kopp.
Kopp says they plan to have a new trail map coming out to reflect such changes.
