ROXBURY — Officials with a logging operation accused Tuesday night of destroying a local all-terrain vehicle trail that underwent a lot of maintenance, told a selectman they would fix the damage.
Selectman Michael Worthley said early Thursday morning via Facebook that he spoke with Wagner Forest Management since Tuesday night’s selectmen meeting and learned that the wood-harvesting operation does have permission to use Hardwood Lane.
“He told me that they are going to fix the road back the way it was when they’re done,” said Worthley, who is also president of the Roxbury ATV Riders Club.
Hardwood Lane is a dead-end ATV trail off Main Street that has what Worthley described as “a lookout with a nice view of the two ponds: Roxbury and Garland.”
The club is a very active family-oriented riding club with 240 members that emphasizes responsible riding while having fun. Through trail rides, raffles and cookouts, they also raise several thousand dollars a year for charities. The club maintains 200 miles of “beautiful, well kept and signed trails,” which their website describes as “the best ATV riding in Western Maine.”
Worthley said the club put about $4,000 into fixing the Hardwood Lane trail, ditching culverts and installing water bars to prevent erosion.
“I thought it was nice that the landowner called just to tell me not to worry, and it will be fixed the way we had it,” Worthley said.
At Tuesday night’s Roxbury selectmen meeting, board Chairman John Sutton, a forester, said two logging operations were causing silt problems at Roxbury Pond and on Hardwood Lane.
He had resolved the problem with the pond situation by calling in the Maine Forest Service to get corrective action taken by the logging crew. But he said that after contacting a Wagner land management employee, he learned that the logging operation using Hardwood Lane didn’t have permission to do so.
However, Worthley said that was his fault. “When I first talked with the landowner about this, he did not know of anyone having permission to use the road,” he said.
Since then, Worthley said the landowner contacted him and told him the logging crew does indeed have permission.
They are “just hauling wood out on the road and skidding wood out of the woods, but we are assured that the road/trail will be fixed,” he said.
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