Off-road fans and environmentalists clash on Imperial County battlefield
12:45 AM PST on Saturday, November 15, 2003
By DAVID HERMANN / The Press-Enterprise
GLAMIS - Adrenaline. Beauty. Community.
They're the ABC's of off-roading -- the three things that many riders say they come to the sand dunes near the tiny community of Glamis in Imperial County to experience.
"I don't go to the (Colorado) River and I don't go to the beach. I don't take trips to Hawaii. This is where I come," said John Baker as he sat inside a 450-horsepower sand buggy Friday. "It's the ultimate E-ticket ride."
The 35-year-old salesman from Chino Hills said he's been coming to Glamis since he was an infant and recalls that it was the only place where his police officer father could relax and let his guard down.
"This was the one place that we could all come as a family and get along and have a good time," Baker said, looking out to a 150-foot-tall sandy ridge. "Now I have a family and this is what they like to do."
Silvia Flores/The Press-Enterprise
Larry Jowdy, 55, right, of Ontario
drives a buggy with passenger Tim
Bebieff, left, during a tour at
Imperial Sand Dunes. Off-roaders
contend that wide-open spaces
available to riders have shrunk too
much.
But while more off-roaders come to Glamis each year, the wide-open spaces available to riders when Baker was a child have shrunk in recent years, thanks in large part to efforts to protect a plant found only among the area's towering wind-sculpted mounds.
The federal Bureau of Land Management closed nearly one-third of the dunes in November 2000 after environmentalists sued, claiming that the bureau was failing to protect threatened species, including the Pierson's milk-vetch -- a spindly flowering plant that grows only in the area known as the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area.
Silvia Flores/The Press-Enterprise
American Sand Association president
Grant George, 42, of Rancho
Cucamonga drives next to a
restricted area at Imperial Sand
Dunes. The area is closed to protect
an endangered plant.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued an opinion earlier this year that said allowing off-roaders back into the 49,000 acres that were closed would not push the milk-vetch and other threatened species to extinction.
Off-roaders had hoped the closed area would reopen for the fall riding season that kicks off on Halloween and routinely draws more than 100,000 riders to the dunes on Thanksgiving weekend.
But when environmentalists challenged the opinion in court, the service agreed to hold off on reopening the area while it revisited the issue.
Grant George said the environmentalists will never be satisfied.
"Their agenda is to have it all closed," he said.
The 42-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga said the most recent closure took half of a pie that had already been sliced up years earlier when the federal government designated 32,000 sandy acres north of Highway 78 a wilderness area and off-limits to off-roaders.
"It's half of half," George said.
Political clash
Off-roaders didn't take the closure lying down. It inspired them to organize politically. George, who owns a sand buggy-building business in Rialto, is now the president of the American Sand Association.
The group, composed of more than 15,000 members nationwide, has big-name sponsors such as Budweiser and Fleetwood motor homes, and has developed some political clout.
Too much clout, according to Daniel Peterson, a desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Silvia Flores/The Press-Enterprise
John Box, 39, and his wife, Mary
Box, 38, of Orange ride their sand
buggy at the Imperial Sand Dunes.
Patterson said the off-road industry has exerted political pressure on federal agencies such as the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service to make management decisions that are not in the best interest of the environment.
"You have an industry pushing BLM managers to give them everything they want, an industry that contributes a lot to political candidates and clearly has ties to the Bush administration," Patterson said. "That doesn't mean they should be able to hijack public lands."
Hikers vs. off-roaders
Patterson said the approximately 100 square miles of dunes that are open to off-roaders are enough. Hikers and others who would like to explore the dunes without off-road vehicles are already at a disadvantage, he said, and would be totally pushed out of the recreation area if off-roaders were allowed back into the restricted zones.
"The closures are in place to protect endangered species that occur nowhere else in the world," Patterson said. "(The off-roaders) want it all. I think it's kind of a greedy position."
Jim Haynes said he considers himself a friend of the environment.
"I think there should be areas that nobody is allowed into except on foot," said the 47-year-old construction worker from Moreno Valley.
"But they already have more of this area than we have," he said.
He said that off-roaders aren't seeking to reopen the 32,000 acres that have been designated as wilderness.
Haynes, who has brought his family to the dunes with him since the mid-1980s, said more off-roaders and less space means the area is more dangerous than when he started coming to Glamis in the mid-1980s.
"Accidents out here have skyrocketed," he said. "We need to have more area."
Reach David Hermann at (760) 837-4415 or dhermann@pe.com
