LOS ANGELES’ BACKBONE TRAIL MOVES CLOSER TO COMPLETION. SoCal is home to a greater concentration of mountain bikers and hikers than anywhere in the U.S. But there aren’t always good trail options without a lot of car travel. Now there’ll be one more, as the National Park Service has acquired one of the three remaining pieces of land needed to complete the 65-mile Backbone Trail, which previously was only an out-and-back, rather than a point-to-point. It took the NPS 25 years to acquire the additional land, and not without significant, tenacious prodding of public officials. Via Malibu Times.

DRILLING IN A NATIONAL FOREST IS JUST FINE says a U.S. appeals court. The ruling is a setback for the U.S. Forest Service, which wanted to force an environmental impact statement before fracking could be allowed in the Allegheny National Forest in western Pennsylvania. But the court ruled the USFS has no control over the mineral rights in this national forest as private licenses are held throughout its 512,000 acres, which could be precedent setting. Amazingly, while fracking will now be permitted to go forward, it is still illegal to mountain bike in many parts of the Allegheny. Via Houston Chronicle.

FORMER WORLD CHAMPION BODY BOARDER KILLED IN SHARK ATTACK. A tiger shark struck Mathieu Schiller, 32, off Reunion Island, east of Madagascar. Schiller won his title in 1994 and had retired to Reunion to run his own surfing business. He was dragged off his surfboard on Boucan Canot beach in the Indian Ocean. Fellow surfers briefly managed to retrieve his body but it then drifted off to sea. Schiller is the second person to be killed by a shark on the island this year while three further people have been injured — including one man who had his leg bitten off. Via Eurosport.

FEDS SUPPORT CYCLING INFRASTRUCTURE AGAIN, but Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn has lobbied repeatedly to strip dollars from federal highway funding, even though the cycling and other pedestrian-purposed dough amount to just 1.5 percent of the annual transportation budget. The argument that cyclists and walkers don’t pay the freight on this infrastructure is a fallacy. There’s hardly a cyclist or jogger in America who doesn’t also own a car, and gas taxes pay only for federally built infrastructure — way more dollars (from other taxes) support the vast majority of the pavement cyclists, joggers, and walkers ply anyway. Via NPR.