Apparently they are losing all of their grant from Surrey CC and possibly the Guildford grant might also be lost or reduced again.

They are introducing a tiered membership scheme (gold for £250+ p.a. donations, silver for £100-250, bronze for < £100 and annual for single donations – whatever that means). Gold and silver memberships get listed on the annual report.

There are a few mentions for mtbs in the current newsletter, including some donations for trail damage repair from some local mtb groups.

It also mentions that some of the mtb pressure on holmbury and pitch is being relieved as people go over to winterfold, where there are fewer walkers and horse riders – in a tone that suggests the writer is pleased about this.

They are also planning a dualthon in 2013, limited to 200 competitors with a 7k run/25k bike ride/7k run.

They were handing out flyers on Saturday with no mention of that, v odd!

Was up there 2 weeks ago & a guy was handing out flyers in the Sandy Bottom car park asking people to become friends of Hurtwood and make a donation as their funding had been reduced.

Basically if everyone who rode the area paid £10 pa i bet it would go a long way to making up the shortfall!

Yes I got the members news letter. Ranger seems happy about the bking moving towards Winterfold area – got to be a good thing.

I think the ranger got the idea for the car park blitz from the big recent thread about the hurtwood on here 🙂
he reports member numbers are up because of it.

Maybe ask mbr/whatmtb mag etc for a donation? They seem to post a feature/route up every so often which of course brings new riders into the area.

Its not cheeky but would be a fair ask. They could also run a piece?

Thanks for the reminder
despite my differences with the Hurtwood, I want something there so have rejoined

I will see how many more I can get too

I have become a convert to the “need to know” concept. I wish everyone would keep quiet about W. Just keep talking about BKB/TR etc and keep the crowds over there!!! Hopefully, the real semi hidden bits will remain relatively unknown.

Nice to see the club whip round/donation for the reggae reggae sauce demo gets a mention.

That should give us some positive PR.

On balance though I’d rather we’d made the donation before as baksheesh to keep it open 🙂

Teamhurtmore – glad to see you’re getting it – the genuinely curious and adventurous will be rewarded the lazy are quite happy with what they already know – if we keep quiet some trails everyone is happy and noond loses out.

It’s a perfect example of Rumsfeldian logic 🙂

The perils of multiple tabs have been exposed

Wrong thread scu98rkr – methinks you should be posting here.

Eh?!

+100 regarding W

Suggested annual donation was around £25 but up to you. Considering Swinley is £20 and you get infinitely better trails round the Hurtwood, fantastic views and easier to park, it’s not too bad. Though their newsletters are few and far between.

Anyway, P&S in Peaslake has a donation tin now also for the Hurtwood for the odd coins if you pop in and get a free fix from them, and apparently it’s raising loads. Think the village store may have one as well.

As for Winterfold, whilst it may be good to relieve the pressure, it’s bad for Winterfold. It depends where as part of Winterfold is Hurtwood so not much of an issue but many go onto the parts that aren’t Hurtwood and Jim McAllister won’t be happy if more people ride there. He’s not happy as it is.

On another note – since I have rejoined i was able to log in to the friends area again, I was surprised to find that 2 of the bottons on there Re planning an event and donations linked to an Ahem “gentlemans Hotel” in Bournemouth! it seemed to have a very lax dress code too

I sent an outraged Email to Ben Bray and he has fixed it 🙂

I see the friends forum has gone though

Did Pitch and Winterfold today saw no riders on Pitch and a handful on Winterfold.

It was local traffic on Winterfold though – I bet they all did the new F****er gap.

Considering Swinley is £20 and you get infinitely better trails round the Hurtwood, fantastic views and easier to park, it’s not too bad

Does your £20 give you liability insurance like the Swinley one does ?

I tend to avoid crashing into other people and the chances of doing that are very remote, and that’s all the insurance covers aside from their own protection against getting sued by “injury lawyers” representing people who made stupid mistakes.

An issue I have with the Swinley permit is the majority goes towards the liability insurance and little towards trail maintenance and building. Sure they build good trails anyway, but is the insurance really required? Don’t need it at trail centres in Wales.

Hurtwood money is more about just ensuring we have open access to the land at all. For big open woodlands it’s fairly rare to have such open access, and it’s entirely voluntary to pay anything. It’s a donation, not a permit.

but is the insurance really required?

It’s a condition that the Crown Estate impose in order to allow MTB use on “their” land.

As deadkenny says “. It’s a donation, not a permit.”

Last years £25 was the best £25 I spent.

I’ll donate more this year.

For landed gentry the Brays are pretty cool – definitely cooler than the new money who’ve acquired bits of the Hurtwood and will shit all over SE England given half a chance…