Friends of Hope Valley


	Friends of Hope Valley Important Issues

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Severn Williams, Friends of Hope Valley
June 8, 2010 (510) 336-9566 severn@publicgoodpr.com

LAWSUIT FILED, WITNESSES SOUGHT TO RESTORE
PLEASANT VALLEY TRAIL ACCESS
Former Pleasant Valley trail users asked to come forward

South Lake Tahoe, CA – A lawsuit has been filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California on behalf of the Friends of Hope Valley (FOHV) in an effort to reassert the public’s right to access Pleasant Valley in Alpine County, CA. Past trail users are being sought to appear as witnesses in the case against a private landowner who has shut off access to Pleasant Valley’s trails since 1999.

Pleasant Valley is a beautiful meadow south of Lake Tahoe that for more than 100 years had served as a primary access point into Alpine County’s high country, including the Pacific Crest Trail and the Mokelumne Wilderness Area. Access to Pleasant Valley was gated shut in 1999 by private land owners who no longer wished to have hikers, anglers, and other recreationalists cross their land in order to reach the federal public lands beyond.

In the years that followed, Friends of Hope Valley (FOHV) worked to persuade the Dressler family to voluntarily reopen access to the Pleasant Valley trails for public use, but despite years of attempts to find a resolution, this gateway to public lands remains closed. With no other corrective recourse available, the FOHV has engaged San Francisco law firms Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP (SMW) and Kerr & Wagstaffe LLP and has filed a lawsuit to reopen the trail.

Says Matthew Zinn of Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, ”This case represents a clear violation of the public’s right to have access to trails where there is a long history of use by the public.”

The public’s right to access public trails, even where they pass through otherwise private land, is firmly established in California state law. Any land in California that was open to public access for five continuous years before 1972 cannot lawfully be closed to public access. There is ample evidence demonstrating many decades of public use of the trails, according to the Friends of Hope Valley.