2019 Year End Report
Dear AMPL supporters,
As the snow falls in the Tetons reminding us we have officially entered winter and 2019 is rapidly coming to an end, I felt it would be a good time to look back on 2019 to see what kind of progress AMPL made in its quest to protect responsible recreational access for all.
First and foremost, our greatest accomplishment this year was hiring our full-time executive director Amy Edmonds. Amy came on board August 1st and during her short period of time with us she has had numerous meetings, and worked to familiarize herself with many of our regional partners such as Teton Freedom Riders, Mountain Bike the Tetons, JH Dirt, Idaho Recreation Council, Wyoming State Trails and the Jackson Hole Snow Devils just to name a few. She has had multiple meetings with representatives from both the Bridger Teton (BTNF) and Caribou Targhee (CTNF) National Forests, always striving to communicate that recreationist are also conservationist and good stewards of the amazing public lands we are so lucky to have surrounding us.
In addition to bringing Amy on board we had our best fundraising year since our inception in both dollars and number of individual donors. We participated in Old Bills Fun Run and then held a separate fundraiser in November, collectively raising over $150,000.
We launched our Adopt-a-Trail program where we are working with the BTNF and the CTNF to help out with much needed trail maintenance on existing historical trails in the Palisades through a combination of grant requests with Wyoming State Trails and raising money through private donations to help fund a trail crew in 2020.
We started an aggressive social media campaign and have grew our user base by over 20% from 3,100 users to 3,750 since August of this year alone. You can check out our Facebook page here.
We are actively following the litigation brought by Mountain Pursuit against the Bridger Teton National Forest over the historical legal use of mountain bikes in the Palisades Wilderness Study Area and ATV/Motorcycle use on historical legal trails in the Shoal Creek WSA and hope to have some positive updates on this in the near future. To that end, we have brought together a strong coalition in opposition to this litigation.
Last but not least we started a blog on teamampl.org where you can get more details about anything going on related to access or recreation in our region. Check it out here.
Now as we move into 2020, we will be continuing to prepare for the Bridger Teton National Forest planning process which is scheduled to start in early 2021 on the entire 3.4-million-acre forest. Forest planning is something that only happens every 15-25 years. In the past there hasn’t been an organization solely focused on protecting recreational access for all and unfortunately this has resulted in access losses for our community. There will still be the same old organizations and some new ones opposed to responsible multi-use recreation of our public lands at the table during this process. However, this will be the first time there has been an organization like AMPL advocating for and aligning our regions recreationist and making sure we all have a voice and a seat at the table.
We will still need your help. There are many ways that you can help out. Number one is by being an ambassador of your sport and practicing responsible use of our public lands. This can be done by leaving no trace, being courteous to other users and user groups on the trail and in the backcountry. Also, if you haven't yet, please consider donating to AMPL so we can continue working to protect access for everyone! Or, use our simple, Text-to-donate platform and text #recreation4all to 44-321!
Encourage everyone you know to visit teamampl.org and join our mailing list so that we can keep them up to date about any threats to access that may come up during Forest Planning or Travel Planning.
Remember we are stronger together!
Hope to see you in the back country soon,
Jesse Combs
President
Advocates for Multi-Use of Public Lands
