Dumping, ATV use may curb road access

Retiring this week after 16 years as Carlton County land commissioner, Greg Bernu noted a pair of unfortunate trends on county lands: more people are illegally dumping items which ought to go to transfer stations, and recreational four-wheeling is ripping up forest roads too frequently.

“It’s all recreational use causing this problem,” Bernu said.

It leads to more maintenance work for county workers. “Between that and the garbage, you might be seeing more gates going up on our forest roads in Carlton County. It’s coming,” Bernu said.

Bernu, in an interview earlier this month about his retirement, said he spent a lot of time this winter on forest roads: picking up tires, auto body parts and furniture. Any time he does so, he brings the haul to the transfer station.

“It’s a pain to clean up,” he said.

It costs taxpayers, too, because while the users of the transfer station pay fees per item or load, the illegal dumpers don’t. When their waste is ultimately moved through the transfer stations anyway, it means the system absorbs the losses.

“The taxpayers are paying for it,” Bernu said.

Regarding four-wheel enthusiasts making a mess of forest roads, “they’re going out when the ground is soft,” Bernu said, resulting in rutted forest roads found across 73,000 acres of county land.

“When they haven’t healed up, it doesn’t take much to rut them,” Bernu said of the roads.

Favored by ATV users and 4-by-4 drivers, horseback riders, hunters and for activities such as berry picking and forest gathering, the forest roads are generally solid come summer and most of fall and winter. Bernu said a common sedan could pass forest roads in the summer.

But some recreational users in recent years are taking to the roads before they have a chance to set up.

“They rip up the road and the first user group to get blamed is the loggers,” Bernu said. “They end up fixing it. And they’re only 10 percent of our forest road users.”

He described encountering torn up areas that require up to five truckloads of gravel to fill. Loggers, who need to be able to pass over the roads, invest the time to fix the bad spots and the land department provides the gravel.

“They’re my contractor for doing the road,” Bernu said.

He said he understands spring fever setting in among trail users, and pointed ATV, UTV and 4-by-4 users to the Soo Pits area off the Soo Line Trail outside Moose Lake. It’s a former gravel pit, still owned by the county, that’s set aside for the purpose of mudding and four-wheeling.

“I get it, ‘If the mud ain’t flying, you’re not trying,’” Bernu said, reciting a popular notion in the mudding and ATV community.

He described the Soo pit: “It’s about 600 acres and it’s completely fine to go there and have all the fun you want. It’s marked. It’s big and open and there are hills you can climb.”