The County of El Dorado, with help from the US Forest Service, Eldorado National Forest, applied demolitions to the Rubicon Trail Gatekeeper for several reasons. Primarily, the Gatekeeper had become an area of serious resource damage. The surrounding dirt banks and treed areas were becoming more and more eroded by vehicle traffic trying to get "around" the Gatekeeper rather than negotiate it.

Second, there was a natural spring that surfaced in that area that kept pushing the water and sediment downstream, towards Gerle Creek, causing possible pollution to the water way. Vehicle fluids were likely to get into the creek if this continued. FOTR has tried for three years to correct this problem, with work being done every year. It was not helping. We could find no fix for the problem. The County was forced to do something more drastic.

Third, traffic jams at the Gatekeeper were getting worse and worse.  It is right at the trail head. More and more people, anxious to get on to the trail, were bypassing the Gatekeeper and finding user-created routes to get around it -- mostly illegally crossing US Forest Service and private property.

The Rubicon Trail is a county-owned road. El Dorado County and the Rubicon Oversight Committee had little choice but to modify the Gatekeeper in order to keep the trail open and accessible to all of us.

You can see pics and read more about this on many bulletin boards and blogs around the country. I take no responsibility, nor does FOTR, for what you will read. I have lost faith in most bulletin boards (BBS systems) as the information is more often than not wrong, and for sure bloated or distorted. But you can learn a lot if you take things with a grain of salt.

If you are easily offended by bad language and don't like to see folks get slammed (flamed) , I don't suggest going to the boards.

Del