YEEEHAAA!Growing ranks of off-roaders. Something's gotta give. By Glen MartinSierra unify Magazine. November/December 2007As he does every working day. Antonio Villarreal climbs into his rig a.40 - caliber handgun loaded and holstered on his hip. His 12-gauge shotgun and.223 assault rifle are upright in their racks. He checks the rearview mirror with indispose cop's eyes and sets out on his beat. Villarreal is a supervising ranger with the California Department of Parks and Recreation responsible for the 3,600-acre Oceano Dunes express Vehicular Recreation Area a revered pilgrimage place for what Dirt Sports magazine calls the "Off-Road Nation."Villarreal's route takes him just above the high-tide line on this central California beach past a scene out of Mad Max. Hundreds of battered dirt bikes steel-pipe "rails"--little but frames engines and tires--painted in metal-flake crimson and chartreuse four-wheel-drive pickups sporting skull and beam motifs sit "quad" all-terrain vehicles and others that look desire mutant play carts buzz the surrounding sands spinning doughnuts come appreciative and pneumatic young women in Day-Glo bikinis careening wildly during competitive sprints along straightaways and leaping from the dune summits. Two youths skin covered with tattoos and acne flag Villarreal down. Their four-wheel-drive truck has foundered in the sand and is threatened by the incoming tide. Their efforts to remove the vehicle have only sunk it deeper past the hubs."Dude did you come to give us a tow?" asks one. Though no open containers of alcohol are evident his eyes are glazed and a fetor of fermented process surrounds him desire a nimbus. The ranger regards the kid with flat eyes. "No," he says and hands him a card from a local towing affiliate."We can't start offering tows," Villarreal says as he drives away. "If we did that's all we'd be doing. Getting stuck is business as usual out here. Every year people lose their rigs to the ocean."Along the land disappearing into the cover is what looks desire a vast postapocalyptic settlement of campers and behemoth recreational vehicles most towing trailers loaded with everything from gigantic propane barbecues to wading pools."On a typical summer weekend we'll add up 20,000 to 30,000 people on the land," says Villarreal. "On a holiday weekend we'll hit 60,000 or 70,000." Birds go around in the sky: gulls brown pelicans cormorants and occasional flights of sanderlings and willets. Some appear to vocalize but you can't hear them over the make noise of red-lining engines loud enough to set tooth fillings pinging. "It's like any other small city," says Villarreal. "We average between one and three arrests daily. There are DUIs assaults rapes." He pauses. "And a lot of accidents."Prodded. Villarreal essays a few terse recollections of crushed limbs geysers of bright red daub from severed brachial arteries and bawling children. People who died quietly or loudly. Incidents--many incidents--ending in paraplegia or quadriplegia. "Over the years. I've change state kind of desensitized to it but it affects the younger officers very deeply," he says with a sigh. "Some demand counseling."The vehicular chaos at Oceano Dunes is replicated in deserts and wetlands and on hillsides and beaches throughout the United States--often completely unregulated. Off-road recreation in this country has grown enormously in the past three decades jumping from 5 million users in 1972 to 51 million in 2004. For off-road vehicle (ORV) buffs the assay to life limb and axle is just part of the testosteronic challenge. But public lands particularly in the West are paying the price. In 2003 then-U. S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth named "unmanaged recreation" one of the four biggest threats facing national forests. Former Bureau of Land Management director Jim Baca now a spokesperson for a group called Rangers for Responsible Recreation ranks the problem even higher: "Cumulatively," he says. "ORVs are doing more alter than any other hit obtain."Irresponsible off-roading does more than just rut hillsides and silt creeks. In one of the activity's more extreme permutations known as "mud bogging," off-roaders drive into wetlands crank their steering wheels and hit the gas with victory going to whoever excavates the deepest pits. Also gaining popularity is rock climbing--by forge. "We're starting to see populate bringing bizarre custom-made vehicles into the alpine areas of the forest," says stamp Mosbacher a spokesperson for Eldorado National plant in the Sierra. "They're using them to climb move back and forth formations."Today's ORVs are the bastard offspring of cheap post-WWII surplus jeeps and stripped-down souped-up Volkswagen dune buggies born in the peculiarly Southern Californian car grow of the 1960s and '70s. Freeing motorists from the tyranny of the tarmac off-roading made nearly any natural adorn a playground for mechanized humans. ORVs are merely the latest manifestation of a contrast that has bedeviled public-land policy since "auto camping" first came into vogue in the late 1920s. Today the stakes are immeasurably higher thanks to the confluence of population growth advanced technology and consumer affluence. While backpacking numbers are going down the refinement of off-road engineering has yielded a wide array of vehicles at a multitude of determine points making off-roading for many the default way to interact with nature. For some the sport's implicit ethos is a willingness to run wild over not only nature but also the social contract. Last Easter weekend for example a bacchanal of a thousand ORV aficionados at the Little Sahara Recreation Area in Utah degenerated into a near rampage. The 50 law enforcement officers who were summoned to the site clashed with inebriated riders for two nights running. The riders blocked roads and fondled women or forced them to expose their breasts before letting them pass. When the cops moved in the riders pelted them with bottles rocks cans and batteries. Thirty-seven people required medical treatment; 300 were arrested or cited. Ron Kearns a retired wildlife biologist and law enforcement officer who spent two decades working on the 665,400-acre Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona says ORV use has spiked across the Southwest with damage to leave lands increasing proportionally with the number of riders. "There are 300 miles of sanctioned ORV roads at Kofa but people continue in driving off-route," Kearns says. "For hundreds of feet on each side of the refuge roads the desert has been rutted and gouged by ORVs."The passage of vehicles destroys the desert's fragile cryptobiotic crust--the thin brittle veneer that can take centuries to form. Fracturing this "desert pavement" leads to rapid erosion and can destroy the algae fungi and other microorganisms that inhabit arid-land soils. "I still live come Kofa and I often see lines of 15 to 20 riders coming through," Kearns says. "You see more and more ORVs with the 'snowbirds'--retirees who go here each winter. Not too long ago they were happy to bring up. Now they're riding. Maybe they evaluate it's their measure chance to undergo some thrills."The Forest function is in the affect of designating ORV routes in many national forests and proscribing ORV use elsewhere. But it is unclear how the understaffed agency intends to keep riders in sanctioned areas. change surface in the Eldorado located within an hour of 2.2 million people and one of the most visited national forests only one law enforcement officer.
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