Off-Roaders Tossed Out of Anza-Borrego Park : Unlicensed Vehicles Taking a Heavy Toll on Fragile Environment, Wildlife, Officials Say

Drivers of unlicensed off-road vehicles will be banned from the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park because they have destroyed animal habitat and tender desert flora, damaged sensitive mud flats and archeological sites, and contributed to the death of bighorn lambs, officials announced Wednesday.

Off-roaders constitute about a quarter of the park’s million visitors annually, but they have caused so many headaches to park rangers and such damage to the area’s fragile ecosystem that they are now unwelcome and will have to go elsewhere, said Ken Smith, chief ranger at Anza-Borrego.

“Some of the damage may take a thousand years to repair,” Smith said. “Most people have no idea how fragile the desert is. They think that after the first windstorm or the first rain, the damage will disappear, but that’s not true.”

Smith said park rangers will begin issuing misdemeanor citations to the operators of unlicensed vehicles on Sept. 1. Beginning Friday, they will use the summer months--when the desert park is generally unvisited because of the heat--to put the word out and issue warnings.

Legal Vehicles Still Permitted

The amount of the fine that will accompany the citations hasn’t yet been decided, Smith said.

The ban does not preclude people from operating licensed, “street-legal” vehicles--including four-wheel-drive trucks, cars and motorcycles--on the 500 miles of marked dirt roads in the 600,000-acre park.

Rather, the target of the rangers’ crackdown is so-called dirt bikes, three- and four-wheel all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and dune buggies, Smith said. Such vehicles, since they lack such equipment as rear-view mirrors, lights and fenders, are illegal to operate on state highways and are generally used exclusively for rough-and-tumble, off-road recreation.

Operators of such vehicles pay $20 for a biannual “green sticker” issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles allowing their use in designated off-road areas.

The only two such areas in San Diego County are the Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area, just east of Anza-Borrego, and a small area in the Cleveland National Forest near Lake Morena, known as Corral Canyon. Off-road vehicle driving is legal in much of Imperial County, in generally sandy areas.

The announcement that Anza-Borrego is now off-limits brought a harsh reaction from off-road enthusiasts, who said they were being punished for the actions of a relative few.

“We admit they do have a problem with some off-road vehicles in the park. We’re not denying that. But what they’re doing is a knee-jerk reaction,” said Lynn Brown, a land-use and legislative consultant to the San Diego Off-Road Coalition, which represents individual off-road enthusiasts and other organizations that in turn represent off-road interests.

“They’re forgetting about the 90% of the people who don’t cause a problem, who are now being punished because of the 10% who will continue to be a problem, no matter what,” Brown said.

The San Diego Off-Road Coalition had previously proposed to the state that it be allowed to help coordinate a public education and information campaign designed to teach off-road enthusiasts the manners and protocol of desert driving, Brown said. Such a campaign would have been financed with proceeds from the sale of the green stickers.

“We think that could have taken care of the majority of the problem through peer pressure, in which we would stop the troublemakers,” Brown said. “We would become the eyes and ears for the rangers and tell people, ‘If you don’t get out of here, we’ll wring your neck.’ ”

Most off-road enthusiasts are drawn to Anza-Borrego instead of Ocotillo Wells because of the natural beauty of the region, he said.

“We go there for the same reason people go there to ride horses or hike--to view the natural wonders of the desert. Some of the canyons are breathtaking--and it’s as beautiful to off-road vehicle users as it is to hikers,” Brown said.

But Smith said his rangers have been so overwhelmed by troublesome off-road enthusiasts that they’ve finally had to put their foot down altogether.

In fact, he noted, unlicensed vehicles have never been legal within the state park’s boundaries, but rangers historically looked the other way, because the drivers usually stayed on roads approved for vehicular use.

“For years, the only off-road vehicles out here were little dune buggies that some of our retired citizens would use to enjoy the park--paleontologists or artists or photographers or bird-watchers,” Smith said.

But an explosion in the popularity of ATVs in recent years has taken its toll, not only on the environment but also on campers bothered by the noise and disruption caused by some off-roaders.

Fewer Nesting Hawks

“A large number of private citizens and conservation groups have been putting pressure on us to stop allowing these illegal vehicles,” Smith said. “Campers are finding the experiences they use to enjoy--the quietness of the canyons--being marred by ATVs.”

He said some off-road drivers have broken the thin, tender crust of the mud hills and badlands, “damaging forever some of the areas that are most special to Borrego.”

Smith said rangers and naturalists have noted a sharp decline in the number of nesting hawks in the canyons visited by off-roaders. “Now, instead of seeing hawk nests, we just see ATV tracks,” he said.

Rangers also have documented an increase in the number of carcasses of bighorn lambs and young bighorn sheep, a trend that he blames at least in part on off-road drivers.

“The bighorn sheep are very stressful animals who will come down for water, and almost get to the creek when they’ll hear a noise and be spooked back into the hills,” Smith said. “Some of them apparently don’t come back down at all, and if they have young lambs with them, they’ll die.”

Other damage includes destruction of slow-growing cactus and archeological sites in the park that were once frequented by mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, camels and prehistoric horses.

Smith estimated that 85% of all the citations issued by rangers over the years have been to off-road drivers. “Forty percent of a ranger’s day is spent on these vehicles, either in issuing citations, raking up the tire tracks, putting up signs and barbed-wire fencing, dealing with accidents, writing reports and going to court. That’s unacceptable,” he said.

He said rangers have been reluctant to use barbed wire because “it’s not very aesthetic.”

“Once, we put up some dunes to block their travel, and they turned them into hill climbs,” he said. “They like to go off the road and go wherever they can. That’s part of the challenge. But when they do that, they blaze their own trails and damage thousands of plants.”

Largest State Park

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is the largest state park in the continental United States and constitutes more than half of California’s entire state park acreage.

Smith said the only other state park in California with roads for off-highway driving is Red Rock Canyon State Recreation Area near Mojave.

The Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area has 14,000 acres, and is being expanded to 40,000 acres with the purchase of additional desert land from private and government land holdings.

“People can still come to Borrego if they drive a Subaru or a Jeep or some other licensed vehicle or motorcycle, and stay on our marked roads,” Smith said.