Silent Sports Sounds Off

Not since high school, when I self published a little pamphlet of my own teenage angsty prose and less than skillful drawings, have I as eagerly anticipated a reviewer’s take on my work. Back then my photocopied “perzines” (personal amateur publications) were read by no one but my parents, small circle of friends and whoever else I could get to shell out 50 cents for a copy. It wasn’t until I discovered the infamous but long-since defunct zine-about-zines Factsheet 5 and submitted an issue or two to its scrutiny did I start getting mailorders from all over the country. That was my heady introduction to “getting published.”

Silent Sports already had a loyal, if modest, readership well before I took the helm nearly five years ago. Nevertheless, about a year ago when I happened upon Zine World – another compendium of capsule-length write-ups of hundreds of small and independent print publications – I didn’t hesitate to send them an issue.

Well, Zine World No. 26 (with its pages held together with staples AND blue masking tape) just came out and it includes a review of the June 2007 issue of Silent Sports I sent them. The review falls under the heading “notazine,” although I would argue every issue of Silent Sports largely meets Zine World’s definition of a zine:

“Zines are publications done for the love of doing them, not to make a profit or a living. Most zines are photocopied. Some are printed offset like a magazine but with a print run of hundreds or possibly thousands instead of hundreds of thousands or more. In a zine, you might find typos, misspelled words, improper grammar and brilliant or radical or just plain honest ideas that simply arten’t allowed in Time, Newsweek or People magazines.”

That’s Silent Sports! The mag is more of a labor of love than profitable. We print several thousand copies a month with more typos than I’d care to admit. But most importantly, we’re brilliant, radical (to the couch potato majority, anyway) AND honest.

Anyway, here’s the review, written by Zine World’s voluntary reviewer “Stephanie K.” of that 16-month-old issue of Silent Sports:

“I picked this up prepared to be bored silly while reading it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find some interesting articles and a glimpse of a world I know very little about: the world of nonmotorized sports. It focuses on inline skating, mountain biking, canoeing, etc. and has a pronounced conservationist slant. I really enjoyed the article about volksmarching, which is noncompetitive, purposeful walking. A third of the magazine is taken up by a calendar of events, mainly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa. Thick newsstand-magazine size with color covers and some color pictures and ads inside.”

While I could quibble with the omission of running and cross-country skiing or Illinois and Ontario from that summary, it’s pretty dead-on. I just find it interesting to see how the mag is perceived by someone not already inclined toward its subject matter. In this case, Silent Sports held up rather well under the gaze of an outsider.

Whether the review will garner new subscriptions from folks primarily looking to Zine World for new punk rock and anarchist titles remains to be seen. But I wasn’t after a bump in circulation. I was just on a nostalgia trip. Even in this Internet age, it’s great to see forums like Zine World still exist to introduce small print publications to a wider readership.

– Joel Patenaude

The third and final part of the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s investigation of ATV enforcement in Minnesota (see below for a summary and links to the previous stories) deals with the DNR’s ongoing ATV trail designation process.

By the end of this year, the state could have 7,700 miles of ATV trails – closing approximately 1 mile of trail for every 2 miles opened, according to the story.

“Wisconsin, by contrast, has about 180 miles of ATV trails on DNR land, and its state forest system is about one-eighth Minnesota’s size. … (But) most ATV riding in Wisconsin is on county lands. Minnesota also has thousands of miles of trails and roads open to ATVs in county and federal forests,” The Star Trib reports.

Yet there’s this from a sidebar, headlined “Resentment grows as ATV users, others try to share state forests,” that ran in the newspaper yesterday:

“Wisconsin’s DNR, which studied the issue in 2006, concluded ‘it is evident that ATV riding is incompatible with every other land-based activity but snowmobiling.’ The Minnesota DNR surveyed 4,400 people in the state about outdoor recreation in 2004 and found about 10 percent said they used ATVs off road.”

In both states the supply of public ATV trails is far greater than the minority demanding them.

Read Part III of the Star Trib’s story here.

– Joel Patenaude

ATV’ers are mucking up a shocking amount of Minnesota’s forests, wetlands and trails and largely getting away with it. That’s abundantly clear from reading The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s three-part investigation – and watching the accompanying video – published September 14-16.

In addition to finding the DNR’s enforcement of ATVs greatly lacking, the Star Tribune caught on hidden camera illegal riding and ineffective self-policing by ATV Trail Ambassadors.

Since Minnesota enacted laws five years ago intended to keep ATV’ers on designated trails, 1,600 riders have been ticketed or issued warnings “but that’s only a fraction of the violators, most of whom are never caught,” the newspaper reported.

According to DNR records, some 825 Minnesota ATV riders a year are cited for damaging land, riding off-road in public parks, preserves and protected wetlands, riding in ditches during bird-nesting seasons, in restricted hunting areas or trespassing on private land. Since 2005, at least 42 people have been charged with careless or reckless behavior but, despite a state law, none have lost their riding privileges.

And the violators are not just youthful yahoos. They include leaders of local and the state ATV organizations. Ken Irish, president of the ATV Association of Minnesota, which lobbies lawmakers for trail funding and against tougher regulation, was himself ticketed in 1999 for riding an unregistered dirt bike and again in 2003 for illegal ATV riding. Irish is now a so-called Trail Ambassador.

See photos of the damage and video shot by the Star Tribune with a hidden, motion-activated video camera in June. It recorded a man and a woman riding ATVs into the mud and getting stuck. And read Part I and Part II of this maddening story.

– Joel Patenaude

Wisconsin’s first rail-trail, the 32-mile Elroy-Sparta Trail, was just inducted into the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s Rail-Trail Hall of Fame. It is only the seventh trail in the nation to earn this distinction.

The national trails advocacy organization made the announcement Monday and spotlighted the Elroy-Sparta on its website here and in its magazine for members.

“The Elroy Sparta State Trail is really a crown jewel in our extensive system of rail-trails here in Wisconsin,” said state trails coordinator Brigit Brown. “It is the trail that started it all and made us a national leader in rail-trails.”

The Elroy-Sparta State Trail was also one of the first rail-to-trail conversions in the nation. The pathway follows the former Chicago & North Western railway, passing through three rock tunnels built in the early 1900s. Today, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy recognizes the significance of the Elroy-Sparta State Trail as one of the earliest success stories of the rail-trail movement.

RTC has catelogued 1,500 rail-trails and says another 750 more are under development. Hall of Fame inductees are selected based on merits such as scenic value, high use, trail and trailside amenities, historical significance, excellence in management and maintenance of facility, community connections and geographic distribution.

Trails that have previously received the designation include the Illinois Prairie Path in Illinois and the Katy Trail State Park in Missouri.

For more information about

– Joel Patenaude

I’ll admit there’s more interesting and controversial stuff coming out about John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate than the fact she and her husband once owned a snowmobile and ATV dealership. Even Todd Palin’s 1986 DWI is making more headlines than his pleading no contest to illegally operating an off-road vehicle in a game refuge in 2002. Nevertheless, these “lesser” tidbits caught my attention.

The Alaska governor’s public record, thin as it is, raises larger questions about her commitment to the environment and natural resource protection. It has been widely reported that Palin favors drilling the Arctic Refuge and does not believe global warming is man-made. But if we didn’t know that and knew only that the Palin family harbored a love of motorsports for fun as well as profit – public land be damned, apparently – that would tell us more than enough about her values.

– Joel Patenaude