*  In attendance at this meeting.

Minutes 12-1-09: 

TRĀL Board Meeting Summary 

We elected Ken Refner as treasurer of TRĀL.  Welcome to the organization, Ken.   

Patrick Frawley has found a fund raiser for TRĀL.  He has a contact, Steve Papp, who has gumball machines to set up.  If TRĀL members find locations and get approval from the management of the establishment to place a gumball machine, Steve will place and service the machine.   He will put a sign on the machine stating that a portion of the proceeds go to TRĀL and will briefly describe TRĀL's mission.  TRĀL will get 30% to 50% of the proceeds (percentage to be decided). 

Mesquite Area - Rod Jackson 

There are people camping in the creek bed at Mesquite almost every weekend.  This is illegal.  Sharon will get us the right contact information for Game and Fish who are the right enforcement agency for this. 

Pobrecito Project - Rich Smith 

A small group of us are going to meet Allen Cross at Pobrecito on Tuesday 12/15 to measure and dig post holes with the Bobcat.  This will set us up so that we can get volunteer teams out to install posts any time we can get a group together without having to bother Allen.

Watch the TRĀL website for dates for post installation.

BulldogCanyon - Patrick Frawley & Bret Marchant 

Patrick and Allen Cross still working to set up a project to remove the graffiti paint.

Bret reported east Bulldog has been pretty quiet.

Updates from Forest Service - Sharon Wallace 

Art Wirtz and Louise are back from their other assignments and will be back in their real jobs after the holidays. 

Volunteer Program Update - Rich Smith 

The first Volunteer Orientation Session will be held Wednesday, December 16th from 7-9PM in the conference room at the Mesa Ranger District building.  We are expecting at least 15 people. 

Travel Management Maps 

TRĀL spent a lot of time this month reviewing the travel management maps looking for items we consider to be issues.

One of the biggest we found was several routes missing from the Cave Creek district map that connect to routes on the Mesa side in the Sycamore Creek area.  Rich Smith had a meeting the Tonto Forest Planner and GIS expert and all agreed that the routes should be on the map.  They will work to get them restored.  The next problem with the issue is that the information from discussions between Cave Creek and Mesa about these routes is not in the database and must be found.  They will work on that as well.

Another issue is that many routes wide enough for full sized vehicles on the Mesa map are shown as Motorized Trails which by definition are for vehicles 50" wide or less.  We are asking that Mesa review these and open more routes to full sized vehicles using the recommendations that came from the Friends of Sycamore route analysis.

Several other issues were identified and can be found in the full version of TRĀL's comments to the Forest Service on the TRĀL website.