LINDON — It's been an uphill battle — literally — but after three years of hard work, the U.S. Forest Service is starting to see progress in repairing the hills above Pleasant Grove and Lindon.

There, the scars left by rampant, illegal off-road vehicle use in the Dry Canyon trail area of the Uinta Forest are slowly being erased and replaced with erosion blankets and freshly sprouted native grasses.

The fading dirt tracks — which previously sprawled 13 miles across the mountainside — and the efforts to restore the area are the result of a collaborative effort among volunteers, the Uinta National Forest, neighboring cities, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and other governmental agencies.

It's taken boulders, barricades and at least $200,000 to have an impact on this ground, and the battle is not over yet, says Pam Gardner, Pleasant Grove District Ranger.

"I think a lot of (people who illegally ride off-road with their vehicles) don't realize the impacts they have," Gardner said. "A lot of people think (the vegetation) will grow right back, but this is a really fragile environment, and it's not very resilient to impacts. The scars just open the door for weeds."

Weeds can be poisonous to the area's wildlife and often overtake Utah's native flora and fauna, Gardner says.

To combat the weeds — which include Dalmatian toadflax, hound's-tongue and yellow star thistle — volunteers for the Forest Service map areas where they grow. The organization also contracts with Gordon Edwards, who owns and operates High Country Sprayers, a weed-removing company based in Elba, Idaho. His job is to annihilate the foreign plants.

"We've been able to reclaim a lot of our wild areas and put it back to the way it was before the introduction of the noxious weeds," Edwards said. "If we do nothing, (the weeds) are going to take over our ecosystems and change (them), and we're not going to get (them) back."

Edwards uses a horse-and-donkey system that allows him to spray large areas of weeds and reclaim specific areas that would otherwise be sprayed en mass by an airplane.

So far, about six miles of the Dry Canyon trail — located off of 200 South in Lindon — have been reclaimed to the Grove Creek trailhead in Pleasant Grove. The Forest Service now plans to start its next phase and reclaim about 22 miles of illegal trails from Grove Creek to American Fork Canyon.

The service won't be working alone. Representatives from the Bureau of Land Management, the Utah County Coordinated Weed Management Association, the National Forest Foundation, Lindon, Pleasant Grove and the Uinta Headwaters Resource Conservation and Development visited the rehabilitated trails on Thursday morning and said the effort could not be completed by only one entity.

The next phase is expected to take three or four years and a few hundred thousand dollars more, Gardner said.

"These are difficult issues to deal with, and in the past we tried to tackle these things ourselves," said Ashley Green, habitat manager for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. "Now that we're partnering, I think we're making a lot more of a difference."

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