Trail lover walks the walk

Sarah Bennett Alley spent much of her childhood exploring the trails and canyons just behind her Olympus Cove neighborhood in Salt Lake City.

"My street was a wonderland," she said. "There were trails branching off everywhere going up into the mountains."

As an adult, she has continued to make the outdoors a significant part of her life. She has been an avid hiker and mountain biker for years and has written four guidebooks about mountain biking in the West.

She even remained a devout mountain biker during her eight-month battle with breast cancer in 1997. She said being active outdoors helped her to emotionally and physically deal with the hardships of the disease.

Now, when she revisits her old Olympus Cove neighborhood, she sees the access points to what was once her childhood have been blocked by chain-link fences.

Bennett Alley, 42, said the quickly diminishing access to public lands is a conflict being felt in communities throughout the Wasatch Front and the West, as rapid urban development pushes neighborhoods up against public lands.

"Along the Wasatch Front there are so many great peaks and trails that we can't access because you have to go through somebody's back yard," she said.

Her concern about that has brought her to the center of a highly contentious debate over plans for trails in Emigration Canyon.

Bennett Alley and her husband, Tim, moved into the canyon five years ago, just before the birth of their daughter, Blair. They built a chic but modest home on the hillside, decked out with an interior full of woodwork and windows that overlook the canyon floor below.

Their home sits just downhill from the affluent Emigration Oaks development, where many opponents of her trail plans live. The debate over trail proposals in the canyon started five years ago, after Bennett Alley said she realized the canyon was in need of more and better maintained trails.

Sitting at her dining room table in sandals and biking clothes, Alley described how she fell into the role of activist.

"It was just this thing that happened because I cared," she explained as River, her chocolate lab, repeatedly interrupted her, shoving her nose onto Bennett Alley's lap.