The Playground Becomes the Battleground

OUT IN THE middle of nowhere, due east of Brawley in the bosom of the Imperial Sand Dunes, it is plain to see. This is what the battle is all about.

A two-lane ribbon of asphalt known as California 78 slices through the towering dunes, forming a line of unmistakable demarcation. North of the roadway is seamless sand, stretching in undulating, dun-colored swells. Closed to vehicles, the terrain is graced with clumps of green and gold dune grass, creosote bush and an occasional silver-leafed sunflower. The only marks are the boot prints of desert wanderers and the faint tracks of a coyote or kangaroo rat. A silence broken gently by the wind cloaks this empty place, a stillness perfect for reflection.

The picture changes markedly just south of the highway. Here, all manner of vehicles are welcome, and the land is mostly barren. With the dunes’ fertile mantle of soil churned loose by the fat, knobby tires of off-road vehicles, the only plant survivors are lonesome tufts of bursage and Mormon tea, which cling to hummocks carved by spinning wheels. There is not a pocket mouse in sight, but human life abounds. Helmeted riders astride two-, three- and four-wheeled machines zigzag across the dunes in a dizzying dance, kicking up thick wakes of sand as they go.

The north side is protected as wilderness and treasured by hikers, photographers and others eager to explore it on foot. The south is a playground, treasured by thousands of weekend dune jockeys seeking a tonic for the stresses of the urban world. The contrast forms the grist for an unusually nasty and colorful war--the struggle for control of the California desert.

With most of the West’s mountains and coasts and river valleys claimed and carved up, Southern Californians have come to covet the nearby desert’s vast landscape of extremes. Imported water and air conditioning have made the desert habitable in comfort, even luxury. Reliable vehicles have made its most forbidding corners safe to explore.

Since 1984, preservationists and off-road vehicle users have faced off in Congress, where U. S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) have introduced--and reintroduced--the California Desert Protection Act. The bill would answer environmentalists’ worries about threats to desert plants and wildlife by tightening restrictions on the use of about 12 million acres of public lands that are neither controlled by the U. S. military nor protected in existing parks and preserves. Off-roaders, however, view the proposed restrictions as an infringement on their right to explore and enjoy this last Western frontier.

The outcome of past wilderness battles in Congress suggests a logical pattern for compromise. So the preservationists want to set aside 4 million acres as wilderness? The user groups argue for 2 million? Strike a bargain and settle on 3 million. This fight, however, is so entrenched and so infused with anger that no such resolution is on the horizon. It is a struggle framed in terms that seem, at times, as stark as the landscape.

EVEN 15 YEARS ago, few people went to the desert for recreation, and when they did, recalls Gerry Hillier, district director for the U. S. Bureau of Land Management, “it was basically one dune buggy, and it was Mom and Dad and the kids.” The arid lands clearly have a new allure. On Presidents’ Day weekend this year, 14,000 people swarmed the Imperial Sand Dunes, ignoring a cold February drizzle for the chance to, as one exhilarated vacationer described it, “get out and get crazy in the dirt.”

For these off-roaders, the spectacular mounds of sand that rise from the Yuha Desert in far southeast California are a beloved destination. Reaching peaks of 300 feet, the dunes are the largest such sand mass in the state, stretching in a 5-mile-wide band from the Chocolate Mountains for 40 miles south to the Mexican border.

The dunes’ southern portion is designated a “free play” zone by its caretaker, the Bureau of Land Management, making it open to anything and everything with wheels. There is no speed limit, and near collisions are common as riders, often hidden from view by ridges in the ever-changing dunes, hurtle along. Although state law requires that the machines be equipped with mufflers, the piercing, chain-saw-like whine of the engines is, in some areas, almost deafening.

Flanking the dunes are campgrounds packed with recreational vehicles. Radios blare as those awaiting their turn on the all-terrain cycles sprawl in lawn chairs, nursing beers or sampling treats off the hibachi. This is a family affair, with some campsites encircled by fleets of cycles of all sizes.

Dave McWilliams introduced his son, Mike, to the sport at age 2. McWilliams, a truck driver from Hesperia for whom riding all-terrain vehicles is “a great stress reliever,” says his family spends “every weekend we can” at the dunes. It is “healthy recreation,” he says, a wholesome activity for children and adults.

“It becomes a social gathering,” says Sam Bell of Long Beach, who runs an industrial plating business. “It’s space,” adds his wife, Dana, who says her life revolves to a great degree around cleaning up after the previous weekend’s desert outing and organizing the next.

“It’s fantastic freedom for the kids,” explains Dana, a legislative officer for the American Motorcyclist Assn., whose four children range in age from 5 to 11. “You don’t have any drugs. Out there, we turn them loose. They’re safe. They have a ball. You have to take children and find these opportunities. That’s why the desert means so much to me. It’s freedom and it’s safe. . . . And it’s being taken away from us.”

Although the most far-reaching desert protection proposals would leave much of the Imperial Dunes’ and most other “free play” areas intact, it’s the off-road vehicle owners who are leading the desert fight. Their protests can be heard most clearly--and perhaps understood best--at Oldsmobile Hill.

Deep within the dunes, about 2 miles from a paved road, this formidable rise draws a crowd of 4,000 riders on busy days. Revving the engines of their steel machines, they circle at the dune’s base, ready to roar up the steep face.

The melange of vehicles ranges from the garden-variety ATV to custom-made dune buggies such as “Blue Thunder,” a San Diego-based favorite that is capable of zooming up the incline at 100 m.p.h.--on its rear wheels. “This is the place to see who’s got real speed,” says Henry Shorr, business manager of a plumbers’ union in Alta Loma.

Riders such as Shorr have invested thousands of dollars in ATVs and view the desert as a refuge, a place to fly across the sand, unfettered by signs, signals, laws or other urban restrictions. In this era of drugs, gangs and other family stresses, the riders plan to hold tight to this form of escape. The Cranston-Levine bill, they say, is a hostile threat.

Although the off-roaders, whose political muscle appears to have grown significantly in recent years, are the most vocal participants in the desert fight, myriad other less-visible desert users view the measure as an invasion of their rights. Among them are sheep and cattle ranchers, miners and rock hounds who prowl for gems in the craggy crevices of the desert’s mountain ranges. Companies that string electric, telephone and fiber-optic lines across the desert are nervous as well, and the burgeoning number of entrepreneurs tapping its bounty to produce wind, solar and geothermal energy also are on alert.

The mining industry, in particular, has marshaled its forces and launched a spirited attack on the proposed legislation. The California desert has been prospected for more than a century, and today, about $1.2 billion worth of sand, gravel and minerals--mostly borates, sodium and so-called rare earth elements, as well as gold--are unearthed there annually, the U. S. Bureau of Mines reports.

The Cranston-Levine bill would allow existing mining operations to continue and would respect valid mining claims that existed at the time the law took effect. But further exploration of mineral resources within the new national parks and wilderness areas would be prohibited. That angers industry geologists, who dispute conservationists’ arguments that the desert’s mineral reserves have been well documented--and claimed--through decades of prospecting. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” says Charles Davis, manager of government affairs for U. S. Borax, which runs an open pit borate mine in Boron, near Edwards Air Force Base. Only 20% of the desert, Davis contends, has been investigated for ore deposits. “It’s like them saying back in the 1890s, ‘Let’s close the patent office. We’ve already invented everything.’ ”

Equally passionate are the sheep and cattle ranchers who turn their herds and flocks loose under permits issued by the Bureau of Land Management. Grazing would continue in all bureau-administered wilderness areas under the Desert Protection Act, but ranchers with animals in proposed national parklands would be barred from returning after their permits expire.

“Our ranching families are our heritage--mine and yours--and they are far more endangered than any desert is,” says Marie Brashear of Fontana, who is coordinating opposition to the Cranston-Levine measure. “They pay taxes. They own property and they’ve got rights.”

Largely silent in the debate is the desert’s biggest single tenant: the military. Defense installations occupy roughly 3.2 million acres of desert lands from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center near Ridgecrest on the north to the Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range in Imperial County. The Army--contending that it needs additional room for training sites--wants still more, seeking to add 240,000 acres to Ft. Irwin near Barstow.

Critics have challenged the expansion, noting that the land targeted for acquisition includes important habitat for the imperiled desert tortoise. But many desert users, particularly off-road vehicle riders, insist that their access to the land should not be unduly restricted because of an endangered desert shrub or animal. “You come out here after a windstorm and you can’t see a thing,” says Jeff Blosdale of Redondo Beach, gesturing at the mosaic of ATV tracks marking the Imperial Dunes. “It fixes itself.”

TODAY’S FIGHT is over land that nobody wanted for hundreds of years, a vast, seemingly sterile territory long associated with the vivid image of death. Indeed, at times, the federal government literally could not give the desert away. Millions of acres were free for the taking under a series of homestead laws starting in the 1860s, but much of it went unclaimed, appearing, no doubt, too forbidding for even the most enterprising settler.

Not surprisingly then, the desert went unspoken for when the National Park Service and U. S. Forest Service divvied up the most prized of America’s natural areas--Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. In 1933, the Park Service adopted the desert’s crown jewel, creating the 2-million-acre Death Valley National Monument, and three years later, the service protected 560,000 acres at Joshua Tree National Monument. But large amounts of desert remained unclaimed, with no a suitor to be found.

In 1946, Congress created one--the Bureau of Land Management. Awarded about 340 million acres of federal real estate that included most of the West’s desert, the BLM took as its mission a task quite unlike the preservationist-oriented charter of the Park Service: overseeing the “multiple use” of these forlorn, leftover lands.

The BLM quickly became a solicitous landlord, leasing millions of acres of range to ranchers, miners, and oil and gas exploration companies. If the image of the national park ranger was one who wore a crisp green uniform and peaked campaign hat, the BLM fellow was the guy in jeans, a rumpled tan shirt and battered Stetson. His job, in the era between the end of World War II and 1976, was to simply cater to those who sought to use the desert for commercial gain. Although advised to watch for flagrant abuses such as overgrazing, the BLM was not charged with protecting the desert for the sake of the land itself.

To environmentalists, this philosophy seemed like a crime, and by the 1970s they had begun amassing evidence to support their suspicion. Off-road vehicles--sales of which exploded in the ‘70s--were running roughshod over the desert’s fragile crust, and marksmen were using tortoises and Joshua trees as targets. Poachers were preying on the desert’s bighorn sheep, and vandals were plundering its prehistoric sites.

Scientists, meanwhile, continued to unlock new windows on the desert’s natural splendor. Through the years, their work revealed the desert as a cradle for a startling variety of life--1,836 species of plants, 420 birds, 94 mammals, 63 reptiles, 43 fishes and 16 amphibians. Researchers documented 46 distinct land communities--from riparian marsh to desert forest--with many of them literally islands in the sky, worlds of animal and plant life that retreated to the mountaintops as the inland seas of the Ice Age shrank and evaporated.

In 1976, cries lamenting damage to the desert reached a peak, and Congress--sensitive to pressure from the politically potent environmental community--passed the Federal Land Management Policy Act. That changed everything for the BLM. Suddenly, the agency had dual, often conflicting, objectives: Protect “the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological . . . and archeological values” of the desert, Congress ordered, but allow users to have their fun as well. To stay true to this ethic, BLM officials were directed to draft a land-use plan for the desert. The subsequent effort was a landmark undertaking for the BLM, which had never dealt with issues such as preservation or wilderness protection.

By 1980, the BLM plan--the product of 100 community meetings, 40,000 public comments and $8 million in taxpayer money--was complete. Although a flurry of lawsuits from some parties accompanied its birth, the majority of desert lovers regarded it as a compromise land-use plan that gave everyone--wilderness supporters, rock collectors, off-road cyclists, miners, ranchers and just plain people--a share of what the desert had to offer.

For preservationists, however, the optimism that accompanied adoption of the document soon faded. In January, 1981, the Reagan Administration brought into office a dim view of strong federal land-use planning and a crusade to cut the domestic budget in favor of military spending. It could not have come at a worse time for the BLM’s Hillier, who oversees the desert district from a Spartan office in Riverside. “We took about a 25% cut in personnel,” Hillier remembers glumly. The BLM was forced to embark on its unprecedented management venture with only 20 rangers to patrol an area twice the size of Vermont.

Preservationists could see that the staff cuts were hurting the BLM, but by 1984 they were convinced that a lack of commitment to truly enforce the desert plan was the agency’s bigger problem. The BLM, they argued, had not become the vigilant steward its leaders had promised that it would be.

Topping the environmentalists’ laundry list of complaints was the agency’s 1982 approval of a series of amendments to the plan that reduced by 400,000 acres the amount of land the BLM proposed to designate as wilderness. The amendments signaled “a retreat, a massive retreat from protection,” Sierra Club leader Elden Hughes says. There were, he says, other atrocities. The Barstow-to-Las Vegas motorcycle race, a controversial annual event that had been canceled by the BLM in 1974, was inexplicably allowed to resume--on a course that cut through desert tortoise habitat and a region being studied as possible wilderness. And, after failing to obtain a reclamation bond from operators of a mine in a wilderness study area in the Inyo Mountains, the BLM was forced to pay $25,000 to remove 20 drums of cyanide left behind when the mine was abandoned.

By 1984, the preservationists were convinced the BLM lacked the will to enforce the desert plan. Unless the desert was appointed a new, more vigilant steward, preservationists concluded, the destructive forces bearing down upon it would leave only a tattered remnant for the ages.

ELDEN HUGHES traces his love for the desert to 1938. He was a boy of 7 who caught his first glimpse of Death Valley during a family outing. The visit left a lasting impression.

There was the towering Telescope Peak, looming 11,049 feet above sea level, and the fetid pond at Badwater, the lowest point in the United States--at 282 feet below sea level. There were sand dunes, seemingly endless salt pans and a quiet that seemed haunting to a child. And there was the odd, jagged ledge formed by an earthquake fault along the eastern edge of the valley floor. “I was a wee tad then,” Hughes recalls, “but it was a memorable trip.”

And the first of many to come. Today, this Whittier resident is one of the desert’s most ardent defenders, a self-described “wanderer” who rarely lets a month pass without traveling there. For Hughes, the desert provides a place for contemplation and exhilaration, for peace and inspiration.

He might stand on the curl of a dune waiting for the light to shine just right on a blooming beavertail cactus he hopes to photograph. He might pack a lunch and prowl Caruthers and Keystone canyons in the New York Mountains, where 273 species of plants create a stunning garden. Or he might inch quietly across a sunbaked bajada , hoping to fix his lens on an unsuspecting desert animal.

“The special thing about the desert is its vastness, which gives you the feeling you’re the first person there,” says Hughes, a bear of a man with a silver beard. “If you stand in the Mid-Hills and look north to Telescope Peak and southwest to San Gorgonio and northeast to Mt. Charleston, you know there are works of man below--a railroad, power lines--but the desert is so vast you can’t see them. That’s what’s special about the desert. It can swallow up the works of man.”

For another preservationist, Jim Dodson of Lancaster, the desert’s magic lies in the ability of its inhabitants to survive what seem intolerable conditions. “You have to understand how marvelous it is that nature can provide these adaptation mechanisms that allow plants and animals to succeed in a land so hot and dry,” says Dodson, budget officer for Edwards Air Force Base. “Until you see how much life there is, you won’t really know the desert.”

To Hughes and Dodson, the desert is like a child--precious, irreplaceable and vulnerable. And they are alarmed by what they see as random, often senseless, violence that is increasingly inflicted on its inhabitants and lands.

Thirty-eight varieties of plant, animal and insect life are threatened or endangered in the desert, they say. The most recent listing, just last month, was the lumbering desert tortoise, California’s official state reptile. The tortoise seems to be dying out at a disturbing rate, in part because of predation and loss of habitat, but also because of disease. Its demise, many environmentalists say, is an ominous symbol of the desert’s plight.

Still, these men are realists. With Southern California’s population at 16 million and threatening to swell, they recognize that human impact on the region’s emptiest playground is inevitable. The trouble is, they say, things have gone too far. The desert, Hughes says, “is in crisis. There are areas that are still true gems, but we need to save them, now.” Otherwise, the elements of the desert that they cherish will be lost for good.

The best candidate for the role of rescuer, conservationists believe, is the National Park Service. The BLM--derisively referred to as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” by some detractors--has failed to give the desert the protection it deserves, they say. And so, the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and other groups have concluded that the desert’s best parts should become parkland.

In 1984, Cranston agreed and introduced the California Desert Protection Act. Together with a companion House measure sponsored by Levine, the proposal would set aside 4.5 million acres of wilderness, enlarge Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments and make them national parks, and transform the East Mojave Scenic Area into a new, 1.5-million-acre national park.

Off-roaders and other critics angrily contend that the legislation would fence off the desert for an elite few, those fit enough to survey its wonders on foot. “Locked out,” they argue, would be families with children or grandparents or disabled members unable to experience the desert’s special places if denied the right to enter by vehicle.

But advocates describe the plan as a compromise that shields the desert’s most spectacular and pristine features while leaving plenty of territory open to military maneuvers, all types of motorized recreation, mining and other uses. Without it, they say, the desert’s future looks bleak.

“Man can trash the desert, and in places man has,” Hughes says. “Without protection, we’ll have nothing to pass on to future generations. Wouldn’t that be a sin?”

IN DEATH VALLEY Canyon, near the foot of Telescope Peak, lies a startling geologic formation, one that blends billion-year-old Precambrian rock with limestone and lava from the Tertiary period of mere millions of years ago. At a loss for any rational description, scientists labeled this formation “Chaos.” It could serve as a geologic metaphor for the continuing debate over the desert, one in which the clash of extremes has created a seemingly immutable deadlock.

When the BLM’s first desert-use plan was submitted to departing Interior Secretary Cecil D. Andrus in December, 1980, the secretary asked what the people in California thought about it, recalls Hillier, one of its prime architects. About 10% hated it as too restrictive, 15% thought it was not tough enough and 75% generally supported it, Andrus was told. “That’s good enough for me,” he responded. “If you ever lie awake worrying about satisfying those 25% on the fringes, you’ll never get anything done.”

But alas for Hillier, the vocal, often shrill, fringes of both sides still dog the BLM. And the difficulties of establishing the agency as a resource protector on par with the Forest Service or Park Service have locked him, too, in the conflict.

Wilderness legislation in the West always is a contentious issue, one usually reconciled only when both senators from the state involved compromise. But so far, Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) has refused to work out an agreement with Cranston and is not likely to do so as long as Wilson is running for governor of California. So the fight has moved to the Democrat-controlled House, where Levine has run into potent opposition led by Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis of Highlands, whose 35th Congressional District covers most of the San Bernardino County desert. An influential GOP leader, Lewis helped persuade the Reagan and Bush administrations to side with the BLM and oppose the Cranston-Levine plan. They support Lewis’ bill, which essentially would ratify the present BLM desert plan into law.

A key to the BLM campaign to hold onto the land it now controls is the argument that the East Mojave does not have the unique and significant resources that would qualify it as a new national park. In February, at Lewis’ insistence, the BLM persuaded Park Service Director James M. Ridenour to sign a BLM-composed letter declaring that the East Mojave area “did not have the qualities needed to designate it as a national park,” Park Service sources have disclosed.

At a jammed hearing in California, Lewis brandished the letter for all to see. The BLM maneuver horrified old Park Service pros, who knew that sentiment within the agency actually ran with the Cranston-Levine plan.

In fact, the Park Service had concluded in a 1987 report that East Mojave “would be a worthy and valuable addition to the National Park System.” And even the BLM’s own desert planning staff found in 1979 that East Mojave “readily qualifies for national park or monument status.” But acknowledging that at this time, one informed environmentalist believes, would be a serious blow to the BLM. If Congress grabbed the East Mojave and gave it to the Park Service, he says, that would undermine the BLM’s fledgling perception of itself as a preservationist force. “They have started to move in the right direction. One way to kill that feeling, that spirit, is to yank this away from them.”

Hillier insists that the BLM is making a sincere effort to provide the sort of long-term protection the desert needs. He bristles at the environmentalists’ notion that the BLM is partial to off-roaders and miners. Hillier says he is carrying out the congressional mandate, which often angers the mechanized road runners as much as Sierra Clubbers.

And he resents the implication by some preservationists that his agency has stood by while the desert was harmed by special-interest groups. “The fact of the matter is, in terms of off-road-vehicle use, you can fly over millions of acres of this country and never see a track,” he says.

Although his budget and staffing have improved, Hillier still faces an uphill battle to persuade Congress that the Cranston-Levine bill is not necessary, that the BLM can protect the desert well enough. Although the Park Service has suffered devastating budget cuts--the 33% reduction in real dollars since 1985 means that only 10 permanent rangers must patrol 2 million acres of Death Valley--park status still carries prestige and tradition. There is a perception among some legislators that critical areas of the desert would be less vulnerable to neglect and abuse if they were in a park.

Even if the dispute is not settled this year or next, the desert will survive. Critical portions are preserved in parklands now, and others will become protected wilderness. The BLM has proposed that Congress designate about 2 million acres in wilderness areas of 6 million originally studied for preservation, giving them the protection the Sierra Club and others are demanding. Whenever this battle is over, it is almost certain that at least 2 million acres of desert will be incorporated into the national wilderness protection system.

Other portions have been designated as areas of critical environmental concern, to protect special natural features or endangered plant or animal life. And a 1.5-million-acre region west of the Colorado River and bracketed by Interstates 10 and 40 has been set aside as the East Mojave Scenic Area for management similar to that of a park, but not as restrictive. Such “interim” protection is vital, because both sides declare that they are in the trenches until victory is theirs--and there is no talk of compromise.

“No!” declares off-roader Dana Bell. “We compromised back in 1980. We gave up 98% of the desert, and we don’t want to give up the 2% we got.”

The Sierra Club’s Hughes is equally adamant. “The Cranston bill was written as a compromise. It has taken park protection to save the desert so far, and we think that’s what it will take in the future. Much of the desert is pristine and near-pristine. We are in time if we do it now, and we have plenty of horrible examples of what happens if we don’t.”

Hillier, who has listened to such desert extremism for 14 years, has come to hear in it commonalities unacknowledged by either camp. “They both love the desert in their own way and, in fact, there’s probably even a bit of hypocrisy on both sides,” he says. “There’s probably more than enough elitism on both sides.”

Sounding a bit wistful, and decidedly weary, Hillier sighs and adds, “The thing that probably has made it the most difficult over the last decade is the consensus that we had hoped for when we finished the plan has never really fully come together.”