For decades the goal of finding a path to a peace process in the Middle East has remained elusive. So has the goal of finding a peace process on the trails in the Marin County Open Space District.

Hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians have been locked in a grip of entrenched values, mistrust and suspicion of "the other" that has resulted in a stalemate of perception on all sides. But a review of the management practices in the Marin County Open Space District offers at least an opportunity to break that stalemate and find a path to cooperation on the trails in the district.

That's a lot of hooey, say hikers, who blame mountain bikers for blasting by them on narrow trails, breaking the calm of a pristine environment with the rush of rubber and metal. Equestrians have joined the hikers in decrying the bikers. The machines, and the people who ride them, are just not suited to be on the same trails as horses. The struggle, of course, is over who gets to use which trails, and if they must share them.

The mountain bikers say the charge that they are inconsiderate and harm the environment comes from a small minority of trail users. Small but vocal. And mountain biking, born in Marin, has as much right to exist as an activity as do hiking and riding horses.

In the first week of February, the Marin County Board of Supervisors will hold a meeting to begin a process to review management practices in the Open Space District. The process will include an environmental assessment of management alternatives.

"Our board is going to have a joint workshop with parks and open space commissioners," says Supervisor Steve Kinsey. "There will be policy choices presented. We will take public comment, and commissioners will speak. Then, about a month later, the county [Board of Supervisors acting as the board of the Open Space District will take final action on policy direction." Kinsey says the joint meeting will take place Feb. 1.

Although the issue of conflict on the trails in the Open Space District attracts the most heat, says Kinsey, "The essential part of the plan is to manage our preserves for eternity. That is really the purpose of the plan." But the issue of trail use, which is part of the plan, is inescapably inflammatory.

"I personally believe that what's happened is that for 20 years, extremists on both sides of the issue have tried to undermine the other side's point of view, and we've been locked in this pitched battle in which there has been no real effort to listen to both sides and see where you can have a gray solution instead of black or white." Sound familiar?

Kinsey and others hold a hope that during consideration of the Road and Management Plan the board can "make it clear that it is committed to reducing conflict." Bouncing that attitude back to Open Space District staff can give valuable direction to rangers and others in the district, whose principal job is stewardship of the environment, not acting as trail cops.

The real tussle on the trails is whether single-track trails should be opened up for multi-use recreation. Allowing mountain bikers on more single-track trails isn't even a consideration among the militant hiking and equestrian community. The mountain bikers are a hazard. Period. They also tear up trails. But, say the mountain bikers once again, those complaints come from a minority of actual trail users.

The Road and Management Plan process could provide the Open Space District with a framework in which to unfold a peace process based on investigation and objective reality. Kinsey says the district should be open to "creative trail solutions," but "if we really have science that says something's not right, then we want to deal with it."

Kinsey says he's spending a lot of time on the issue and has been walking the trails, "and I see there's so much room for improvement on the environmental side [to preserve existing trails." He also sees room "to protect tranquility for some and create new opportunities for others, and still do a better job of managing the ecology."

That attitude is quite a distance from a stalemate in 2007, when mountain bikers mounted perhaps their most sophisticated political push to open up trails in the district for their use. The rhetoric was the same, but those who opposed giving mountain bikers greater access to the trails pulled out a 2005 study of the county's open space policies. That study concluded that a majority of county residents agreed with regulations current at the time, which have remained essentially in force.

Although the opponents of greater access for mountain bikers conceded that the bikers should have trails on which to ride, they remained firm that bikers shouldn't be allowed on more trails shared with hikers and equestrians. But, said the mountain bikers, the number of trails on which they are allowed to ride are insufficient for their numbers. Stalemate.

The Open Space District is a relatively modern invention, newer than mountain biking, which bike riders pioneered on the slopes of Mount Tam in the late 1960s. County residents voted to create the district in 1971 to purchase and protect undeveloped land. Today, the district oversees 33 open-space preserves. In a November workshop, the Marin County Department of Parks and Open Space presented a trail workshop document titled "Protect Grow Restore Connect."

Kinsey and Supervisor Susan Adams serve on a subcommittee that helped create the report, which is aimed at reviewing the county's "trail-related management plan" and offers, among other things, alternatives for environmental maintenance and "trail conflict resolutions."

The Open Space District has about 156 miles of what it calls "system" trails. About 47.5 miles of "nonsystem" trails criss-cross the patchwork of open-space preserves. Hikers can legally use all the trails. Equestrians may use a combined 97 percent of the district's single-track (narrow) trails and shared-use trails. Mountain bikers may use 24 percent of the single-track trails and shared-use trails. The mountain bikers maintain that their numbers warrant access to a greater percentage of the trails.

But hikers and equestrians maintain their objections to expanding mountain-bike access. They base their objections on largely anecdotal evidence that mountain bikers are fast, furious and inconsiderate. Although the mountain-bike community has its fair share of outlaws, the number of citations compiled at the Open Space District shows that the objections to mountain biking may be exaggerated.

According to the citation history included in the workshop material, district personnel issued far more citations for violations relating to dogs than mountain bikes. And the number of mountain-bike citations actually has declined during the last few years.

A survey of the complaints the district has received shows a similar history. That overview, however, does not diminish the anxiety some people feel on the trails when confronted with renegade and runaway mountain bikers. The district, the supervisors--and most of the mountain-biking community--understand the situation. The big question remains: Is there a reasonable solution to break the stalemate?

A glimmer of opportunity exists in the statistics about the types of trails that criss-cross the district's preserves. Twenty-three percent of the trails are "nonsystem" trails. In other words, they are unofficial trails, sometimes called social trails. Sometimes people walking the same path over decades create an impromptu trail, and while it's technically not a "legal" trail, its general use raises it above the level of totally "illegal."

Renegade mountain bikers have received bad press after hacking totally illegal trails for themselves, but social trails existed since long before the mountain bike. Equestrians created some trails simply by riding their horses with no real intention of blazing a new path. The social trails might form the groundwork for breaking the peace-process stalemate. "Those trails that are not within our system, that have not been recognized, that is the real area to mine," says Kinsey.

The district can look at the social trails to determine whether they are sustainable and whether they do no harm to the environment, "or whether they can be improved." When an opportunity arises for improvement, Kinsey adds, "They can present an opportunity to offer different use regulations much more easily than either on the existing trails or on new trails." Kinsey also thinks there's an opportunity to create new trails "in proximity to existing ones if they contribute to reducing conflicts."

Creating a parallel trail to separate mountain bikes from hikers is one creative option, in essence creating a mountain-bike lane in the open space. Other options include equally innovative solutions, for Marin at least. Making sections of trails one-way for bikers can help calm trail trauma for hikers and equestrians, especially if that one-way section is uphill. The speed of the bikers automatically reduces.

Another option calls for setting up an alternate-day use pattern for trails in which bikers can ride on one day and hikers get the next. The idea behind the separation strategies is to increase the miles mountain bikers can access without exacerbating the distress hikers and equestrians say they encounter.

Those creative solutions hold potential, says Jim Jacobsen, president of the Bicycle Trails Council of Marin. "The alternate-day solution is a better way to go than the one-way solution. They do that on the Tahoe Rim Trail. It works. It doesn't solve 100 percent of the problem, there always will be a few who ride on the wrong day, but it does reduce the conflict and seems to satisfy people without really changing the reality on the ground."

But instituting creative solutions to a conflict among entrenched principals isn't easy. Jacobsen is wary that the Open Space District workshop process will result in more of the same old status quo. Kinsey recognizes the difficulty of getting the opposing forces to the bargaining table. He says every opportunity for creative solutions should stay on the table, "but I think there is so much frustration in the hiker/equestrian community about the lack of respect for existing rules that until we really re-establish that we have some authority over our lands, these kinds of innovative approaches won't have a chance to be tested because people just have no confidence."

Regaining that confidence and authority needs to be a cooperative effort, and it won't come from a massive program for increased enforcement. The district has 12 rangers and two deputy sheriffs. On a typical day, between two and eight rangers and one deputy sheriff are in the field. Rangers spend about 25 percent of their time on enforcement and the rest of their time dealing with open-space maintenance, fire protection, habitat reclamation and education, among other duties. No funds exist to increase staff.

The education arena holds some promise. The Bicycle Trails Council has run a program at trailheads that disseminates educational information about fair use and civility on the trails, and Kinsey says the mountain-bike community often fails to get credit for efforts such as that. Using a combined and boosted cooperative effort, including some focused enforcement, might push the peace process into gear--at least that's the hope.

The heat this trails issue generates is evident in the massive amount of e-mail supervisors have received from the various stakeholder groups. "It reaches a stage where it's ridiculous," says Supervisor Hal Brown I'm getting e-mails from Pacifica, from Oakland. After a while we just have to say, 'no more,' because it becomes meaningless."

On that point, Jacobsen agrees with Brown. "They don't make decisions based on the weight of the e-mails they receive."

Contact the writer at peter@pseidman.com.

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