EOATVA Home

Welcome!

Eastern Oregon

All Terrain Vehicle Association, Inc

P.O. Box 571

La Grande, Oregon 97850

Email: mbarber@eoni.com

Message Phone: 541-805-0172

EOATVA OFFICERS AND BOARD MEMBERS

President– Chris Hedden 963-4300

Vice President– Larry Cribbs 963-4521

Sec/Treas– Mark Barber 963-8147 mbarber@eoni.com

Ray Clements 963-9837

Art Chase 963-2585

Don Proffit 963-3297

George Aldrich

Next meeting: To be announced, 7 P.M., Island City, City Hall

Announcements:

UPDATES

I will be updating the website less often through the winter. I will post updates to facebook when I need to. When the Travel Management Plan comes out, I will update things here also, and we may try to have a meeting to discuss how we want to respond. Check back here on occasion, just in case I have changed something.

YOUTH MOTORCYCLE TRAINING

April 22, 2012 there will be a youth hands-on motorcycle training held at the Union County Fairgrounds. This course, as well as the on-line Safety Education Course will be required for all motorcycle riders between the ages of 7 and 15, starting in 2012.

Oregon Motorcycle Riders Association (OMRA) is the coordinating organization for this course, but it the responsibility of the local clubs to provide the actual training. OMRA will be working with EOATVA, as well as individuals in Wallowa and Baker Counties to provide this training on an ongoing basis. This first training session will also be to train evaluators for future training sessions. We would like to see several evaluators trained, so that we would have more flexibility in scheduling training.

I will post more information in the near future. For now you can go to

http://www.omraoffroad.com/training.htm for information on the course, and for on-line Safety Training go to http://www.oregon.gov/OPRD/ATV/safety.shtml

MERA

The new ATV trail (#11) is signed and is OK to ride, from the parking lot up to road 13. This looks like it will be a fun trail, once it has been ridden a little to get it broke in.

They have installed new vaulted toilets at the Fox Hill parking lot. They aren’t quite finished with them yet, but they will be a big improvement over the port-a-potties.

We have had trouble getting new trail approved to be built, due to the need for a “cultural study” in most of the areas we are ready to start building trail, or as in one case have already built a trail. The County is applying for a grant to fund a study of all the high probability areas on MERA. If they get the funding and have the study done, we won’t have to wait around for a study to be completed on each piece of trail. That will really speed the trail approval process up. Even if they get the grant, I don’t see where they can have the study done and the paper work completed before late next summer or fall. So, we (EOATVA) are pursuing having a study done for the area where we have already laid out a motorcycle trail.

If everything works out, and the study is completed when we hope, we will be able to open this new section of trail next spring. It would also allow us to extend the ATV trail from Rd 13, across to Rd 3 next spring. We have been playing games with getting approval for building trails for too long now. I don’t want to have to wait another year to get more trail opened up to ride.

Facebook

EOATVA is now on facebook. If you are already on facebook please “like” our page. It just makes it easy to stay in contact with other club members. You can then find out if someone is going on a ride, or let others know that you are going. You can also share photos of your ride. I’m trying to post trail updates the day I find out about them. That is sooner than my weekly update here. We have 32“LIKES”. Can we get more?

I have put together a photo album of all the trail work we have done on MERA on MERA over the last three years and posted it on facebook. There a some big gaps in what I have photos of, as I didn’t always take my camera, but it gives you an idea of how much work we have done and redone over that time.