http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,3...2783099,00.html

Jeep creepers overwhelm Moab

Annual Safari of four-wheel drives delights some residents and horrifies others

By Nancy Lofholm
Denver Post Staff Writer
Moab - They are crawling all over the red rocks around Moab.
They clog the drive-up lanes of banks and burger joints. They have turned Main Street into a willy-nilly thoroughfare where anything not jacked up and sporting a roll bar looks puny and out of place.

They have chased the mountain bikes, for which Moab is so well known, out of town.

Depending on whose eyes are taking this spectacle in, the Jeeps and rock crawlers and four-wheel drives of every stripe that have taken over this town have either remade Moab into the set for an Easter weekend horror flick or raised it to the epicenter of the grandest jeeping event in the country.

"I loathe it. I despise it," Laura Roy said as she whirred healthy drinks in a blender at the Peace Train Juice Café while hulking vehicles growled by outside the window.


"It's huge. It's great," Matt Mottern of Parker said as he waited in line for his shot at powering his souped-up pickup up a steep notch at a popular test-your-mettle patch of mounded slick rock called Potato Salad Hill.

An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 four-wheel-drive enthusiasts have crowded into and around Moab this weekend for some communing with slick rock and sand in a event that is taxing for law enforcement and has county officials scratching their heads over ways to protect their beautiful backyard and divvy it up among disparate users.

"That's been a real hassle," Grand County Council Chairman Jerry McNeely said.

It all began 38 years ago with a few folks getting together for a Jeep Safari trail ride in their three-speed Jeeps.
McNeely remembers that the big excitement at the inaugural event was a plane dropping ice cream bars on the Jeeps.

Now, it includes an extravaganza of extreme four- wheeling, a jaw-dropping parade of Jeeps, and a crush of vendors from across the country.

The transition began in the 1980s when the event was taken over by the Red Rock 4-Wheelers club.

The Wheelers formalized the Safari with registration and a menu of organized tours and gradually expanded it into a week-long event.

But the family-oriented Boy Scout barbecue dinners and the responsible four-wheeling seminars that are part and parcel of the Safari have been overshadowed in recent years by youngsters on spring break. They make the pilgrimage to Moab in all manner of tricked-out four- wheel drives. They come to party and to cheer on the "rock crawlers" group that comes in beetle-like buggies made for climbing over rocks that would stop your average tank.

For a town that is just emerging at Easter from its sleepy winter downtime, "it's a financial boon," said Marian DeLay with the Grand County Travel Council.

The event now overshadows mountain-biking and marathon-running weekends that are also big draws for Moab.

But it comes with a cost. The Grand County Sheriff's Office spends nearly a year planning for the event and organizing extra officers from other agencies to beef up the normal weekend patrol of about 10 officers to 60, as well as adding a helicopter, police canines and patrol ATVs.

Chief Deputy Curt Brewer said cool and rainy weather has tempered the mayhem this year, but just in case, they once again have set up an overflow holding cell in the county council chambers.

Brewer said even with the hassles, he enjoys the event that he first took part in as a child.

Moab resident Janet Lowe, who came to Moab 20 years ago to commune with nature - but to her horror ended up here on Jeep Safari weekend - said she has learned also to commune with Jeeps.

"I have made peace with it," she said.

Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com .