Posted by Don in Missouri on Monday, January 05, 2004 at 2:24PM :
New York Times
Driving: Making Tracks, Making Enemies
January 2, 2004
By JASON TANZ
IN her two years as chief ranger at the Wharton State
Forest, a stretch of more than 115,000 acres of the New
Jersey Pine Barrens, Carmel Capoferri has seen her share of
illegal activity. She has stumbled upon dead bodies and
recovered stolen cars. But one group of criminals plagues
her most: drivers of all-terrain vehicles.
Driving A.T.V.'s, the lightweight, heavy-horsepower thrill
machines that have exploded in popularity the last decade,
is forbidden on any state-owned land in New Jersey. Still,
Ms. Capoferri said one drizzly afternoon, "I've probably
caught an A.T.V. on every road in this park." A quick pass
through the preserve revealed a hill riddled with beer cans
and A.T.V. tracks, the deep ruts digging into the soil and
exposing the fragile roots of white and scrub pines.
Nearby, a strip of barren land had been cleared with a type
of high-powered lawn mower to make a new path. "Look at
this," Ms. Capoferri said as she surveyed the damage. "This
is horrible."
She is not the only one who thinks so. Ed Waldheim refers
to scofflaw off-roaders as "idiots" and "morons." But Mr.
Waldheim isn't a park ranger. He is president of the
California Off-Road Vehicle Association, a man who has
delighted in riding dirt bikes the last 30 years and who
continues to tool his Honda X400 in the Mojave Desert near
California City, Calif., two or three times a week.
Nevertheless, he has had it with the law breakers, he said.
"I talk to law enforcement and say, `Let me shoot 'em.' "
Another front has opened in the land-use war. For more than
four decades, greenies and gearheads have been battling in
parks, courts and state houses across the country over
off-roading on public lands. But factions among
off-roaders, a group that includes A.T.V. riders,
four-by-four enthusiasts, snowmobilers and motorcyclists,
are also squaring off.
On one side are self-styled responsible off-roaders,
usually members of local clubs that promote following
existing land-use rules and minimizing environmental
impact. On the other are the renegades, who see such an
approach as environmental appeasement.
Loren Shirk, for example, a networking engineer in Duarte,
Calif., doesn't keep to the designated trails when he
drives his Chevy Blazer over the sand dunes near Barstow,
Calif., he said. "I think my right to go where I want
should not be hampered by the whims of somebody else that
wants to leave the world looking like it was 40,000 years
ago," he said. "If I'm out there just playing around, and
I'm not hurting anybody or anything, I don't care what the
sign says." Of the argument that he should play by the
rules, he said, "The way you succeed in life is to go
outside the lines."
Thrill-seeking Americans have been driving motorized
vehicles through wilderness areas since the end of World
War II, when jeeps and dirt bikes first became available to
general consumers. But it wasn't until 1972, when President
Richard Nixon signed an executive order requiring federal
agencies to regulate the activity, that the government took
an active role in managing its impact. Today, a hodgepodge
of agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, the
Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Fish and
Wildlife Service, determine which of their lands are off
limits to off-roaders, creating a byzantine system of
restrictions that vary from state to state and even from
park to park.
Indeed, off-roading is now among the most politically
volatile land-use issues in the country. Off-roaders and
environmentalists have been arguing for decades, for
instance, whether the presence of an endangered tortoise
justifies restricting millions of acres of the Mojave
Desert in California, Utah, Nevada and Arizona. The Bush
administration has been trying to undo limits on
snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park that were put in
place by President Bill Clinton. In Florida, drivers of
swamp buggies have sued to overturn a plan by the National
Park Service to restrict access to the Big Cypress National
Preserve.
Meanwhile, over the last few decades the popularity of
off-roading has exploded. According to the Motorcycle
Industry Council, a trade organization, sales of
off-highway motorcycles increased 146 percent from 1998 to
2002, while Americans bought 847,000 A.T.V.'s in 2002, up
from 447,000 four years before. According to the latest
estimates by the Forest Service, almost 36 million
Americans use off-highway vehicles, a figure that does not
include sport utility vehicles.
And with that increase in numbers, many officials said, has
come a related increase in illegal activity - fences
demolished, signs torn down, off-limit areas traversed and
public drunkenness. While some of this may be because of
ignorance, some law enforcement officials say a growing
rebelliousness among off-roaders is the chief culprit.
"We've got a lot more of a lawless element," said Barry
Nelson, chief ranger for the Bureau of Land Management in
Barstow. "There's a total mindset and mentality of
defiance. And it's growing." While many off-roaders argue
that the law-breakers comprise a tiny minority of their
ranks - Don Amador, the western representative for the
BlueRibbon Coalition, an off-road advocacy group, said
illegal riders accounted for "1 or 2 percent" of all
off-road activity - some law enforcement officials, most
environmentalists and even some off-roading fans said that
the figure was much higher. Mr. Nelson put it somewhere
from 15 to 20 percent in his jurisdiction.
And the land isn't the only victim. This May, Tracy Stites,
a conservation officer for the Division of Fish and
Wildlife of the New Jersey Environmental Protection
Department, responded to a complaint by a farmer in
Fairfield Township that A.T.V.-ers were driving through his
hay fields. When Mr. Stites stepped out of his car and
signaled to one A.T.V.-er to stop, he said, the driver
plowed into him, breaking one of his legs and tearing two
ligaments. The Cumberland County prosecutor, Ronald
Casella, said he planned to file charges. Kevin McCann, a
lawyer for the driver, said it was an accident.
"When it's an A.T.V. issue, we've learned that we can't go
out alone," said Ms. Capoferri, the New Jersey ranger.
"Many of us have been assaulted."
Harald Pietschmann, who has led off-road expeditions on the
Rubicon Trail in Northern California for 20 years, said
that he worried that a small band of ne'er-do-wells was
threatening the sport he loved. "They drive over bushes and
kill parts of nature. They also tend to break down, so that
spills oil. And then of course there's drinking and loud
music involved," he said. "It's not pretty."
Many off-roaders say that the obnoxious behavior had
overshadowed efforts by off-road clubs to organize cleanups
of popular trails and teach their members techniques -
moving fallen trees off the trails instead of driving
around them, for instance - to minimize ecological impact.
In 1990, Tread Lightly, a program formed by the Forest
Service to promote responsible off-roading, became a
private nonprofit organization, managed and financed by
companies like Ford Motor and Toyota. Today, Tread Lightly
leads awareness workshops and restores trails. "Our mission
is to empower people to enjoy the outdoors responsibly,"
said Lori Davis, the president.
"I think the majority of people who use motorized vehicles
believe in the concept and the ethic of Tread Lightly," Ms.
Davis said.
Clearly, she hasn't been talking to the sport's more
libertarian fans. "I think Tread Lightly is just a veiled
form of extreme environmentalism," said Brad Lark,
publisher of extreme4x4.com, a Web site devoted to
off-roading. "They spend more time supporting the land
closures than they do keeping the land open and opening up
closed lands," he said.
A writer on the Web site off-road .com, writing as "Davey
the Endangered Desert Tortoise," expressed a similar view
with less subtlety in a February 2002 column: "I don't
Tread Lightly. I trample. From tree-huggers to their
totalitarian signage that follows. I trample all in the
path of freedom's future."
The writer continued, "I don't tread lightly on treason,
and that's exactly what the Greenies are hereby accused of
when they take a stab at our America's freedom - my
family's freedom - to enjoy the outdoors." (Brad Ullrich,
the site's land-use editor, described the column as "tongue
in cheek.")
THE renegade riders draw on a rich legacy of what Mr.
Shirk, the Barstow sand-dune off-roader, referred to as
"civil disobedience" to inspire their activities. One of
the best-loved characters in off-road folklore is the
Phantom Duck of the Desert, a motorcycle fanatic (real
name: Louis McKey) who from the mid-1970's to 2000 was the
host of protest rides through the Mojave Desert after the
Bureau of Land Management stopped approving permits for a
popular dirt bike race from Barstow to Las Vegas. And in
2000, two years after the Forest Service declared the South
Canyon Road outside of Elko, Nev., off limits, outraged
off-roaders and other land-use activists nationwide
descended on the town to participate in what they called a
shovel brigade, chanting "freedom" as they removed a
10,000-pound boulder blocking the path's entrance. (The
Forest Service has prepared an environmental impact
statement and should determine the fate of the road by
March.)
But the renegades don't always restrict their fire to
government officials. Mr. Pietschmann said that two years
ago he confronted a fellow driver who had left the
designated trail to go around a stalled vehicle.
"I approached him and said, `This is not a good idea.
You're trampling the area, and this will lead possibly to
its closure,' " Mr. Pietschmann said. In response, he said,
the man pulled out a handgun and demanded that Mr.
Pietschmann step away from his car. Mr. Pietschmann said
that he backed up but continued to talk to him.
"That's when he shot at me," Mr. Pietschmann said. The
bullet missed, he said, and he decided to end the
conversation. But Mr. Waldheim of the California
off-roaders association said that he doubted whether the
continuing skirmish within the off-road community will end
so bloodlessly.
"It's a rebellion against the continued erosion of our
off-road opportunities on public land," he said. "We are
getting very close to the point where anarchy will take
over."
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