If any of the more than 5,000 Oat Hill Mine Road Trail visitors veer too far north or south on their way from their cars at Highway 29 and Silverado Trail near Calistoga to the trailhead, they aren’t visitors anymore. They’re trespassers.

The way to the seven mile trail lies along a county easement that crosses private lands. It’s a 60-foot easement closed off to the recreational public since 1978, when off-roaders trashed the environment with litter, vandalism and sometimes crashes.

Now the county has a plan to reopen the easement to hikers, mountain bicyclists and horseback riders, peppering the route through private lands with signs warning them not to leave the trail.

Helping visitors stay in line is a plan to use a group of volunteers to fill potholes, label the trail and establish erosion control devices along the route, making the task of keeping to the trail less of a guessing game at points. A contractor would work on more eroded portions of the trail near its start at Calistoga.

The mission to reopen the trail in coming months is in many ways the first major accomplishment of the new Napa County Parks and Open Space District, which has been eyeing projects on a basis of whatever it can do first and cheap since the district’s inception.

Principal Planner John Woodbury wrote a report to the Napa County Board of Supervisors estimating the trail could need up to $50,000 in state grant money available to Napa County through a parks bond. That essentially means it will have no foreseen impact on either the budget of the county or the parks district.

Much of any controversy surrounding last week’s 3-2 decision by the Board of Supervisors was how fast the county is moving toward reopening the easement, not whether the county should reopen it.

Supervisors Harold Moskowite and Bill Dodd voted against approval last week in favor of continuing the matter for another month or two. That time would allow property owners to come forward and weigh in on the matter, the better to make sure the county heard from everyone involved in the process.

“There’s some legal problems coming up on it, and extending it for 30 days would not hurt anything,” Moskowite said. “It would just show that we’re giving everyone a chance to talk about it. It just seemed like they were trying to rush things through.”

Supervisor Mark Luce, who joined supervisors Diane Dillon and Brad Wagenknecht in voting to move forward, didn’t see any purpose to waiting.

“I guess I was reluctant to do that because the issue has been out there for a couple years,” he said.

Wagenknecht said the county was well-covered legally.

“It has been a public road and a public access for a hundred years so we should be able to rely on that,” he said.

It’s uncertain what property owners near the trail will do.

Edgar Lantz, who owns land that surrounds that first quarter mile of the trail, did not respond to phone calls seeking comment before press time. However, in a 2006 interview when Woodbury revealed the Oat Hill trail as a possible completed project for the then-nascent parks district, Lantz indicated he was willing to negotiate with the government, provided it was willing to talk to him.

“Generally I support everyone’s goal here,” he said.