Desert’s Fate Might Hinge on Progress of Senate Bill : Plan to Increase California’s Protected Wildnerness Angers Off-Highway Vehicle Users, Who Claim a Caretaker Role

On Interstate 10 between the Salton Sea and Joshua Tree National Monument is the General George Patton Memorial Museum, a tribute to the man who trained tank crews and troops here during World War II. Fifty years later, the imprints of eight-foot-wide tracks are clearly visible nearby.

For two years, Patton’s armor ran roughshod over 12,000 square miles of California desert--or, roughly, what Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would close to future use. According to the California Desert Coalition, that amounts to two-thirds of the 19,000 square miles now available for public, commercial and non-military use and would boost the percentage of state land in wilderness from 6% to 16%.

Feinstein has resurrected S. 21, the California Desert Protection Act launched unsuccessfully by her predecessor, Alan Cranston, with the strong support of the Sierra Club. S. 21 would render about 8 million acres to wilderness, monument or national park status, making it off limits to all mechanized travel and commercial use-- mechanized, not motorized, so it would exclude anything with wheels.

But off-highway vehicle users say that it’s unfairly zeroed in on them. It would severely cramp their style by closing about 10,000 miles of roads they use and compressing their rising numbers into smaller areas.

And they do use roads, which is why they say S. 21 misses the point. Even when they leave the pavement, off-road vehicles stay on roads, many of which were there before Patton arrived. True, they made some themselves, with war surplus Jeeps in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, but the majority are trails back into time blazed by miners and ranchers in the early part of the century.

The desert takes a long time to restore itself. Lee Chauvet, deputy director of the state Parks and Recreation Department’s Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Division, said, “Patton’s tank tracks are constantly thrown back at the off-highway people.”

But any significant damage since Patton was probably done by a past generation of four-wheel-drive yahoos. Today’s enthusiasts generally abide by a strict code of ethics: Stay on the roads, don’t disturb plants or wildlife, leave the place cleaner than you found it.

Said Chauvet: “The desert is cleaner today than it was 20 years ago because of things the OHVers have done.”

He cited projects to remove trash and derelict cars and cover about 70 old mine shafts, for safety.

Rick Russell, the president of Sidekick Off Road Maps in Chino, was driving through the Orocopia Mountains, a popular off-highway area, in a caravan of five Jeeps last week when Russ Kaldenberg, area manager for the Bureau of Land Management, remarked from the back seat, “Look at this road . . . you don’t see any trash out here.”

All day an observer saw no torn-up terrain and only one discarded tissue, an empty beer bottle and the scattered debris of a military plane that crashed in the early ‘70s after a mid-air collision. The tissue was collected for disposal. The beer bottle remained at the crash site, where there was no wish to disturb history.

“There is no question there should be wilderness,” Russell said. “We don’t need any new roads. Just let us use the ones that are here.”

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The OHVers suspect that many supporters of S. 21 believe that it is the only hope to save the fragile desert from destruction. But the Bureau of Land Management has a more conservative proposal that would designate only 2.5 million acres as new wilderness and leave many established use areas alone.

Originally inspired by President Carter in the 1970s, it became the California Public Lands Wilderness Act. It expired in the latter days of the Bush Administration, wasting more than a decade of study by the BLM.

Kaldenberg helped to write 137 Wilderness Study Reports for the BLM plan that he hopes will find new life before Feinstein’s bill becomes law.

“It’s (based on) the concept of multiple use,” Kaldenberg said. “We have preserved wilderness at one extreme, where everything stays as it is. Then you have the graduation of use all the way to coal extraction, oil and gas and sand and gravel. BLM is a money-making agency, as well as an agency that preserves and protects (land).”

According to David Eslinger, the BLM’s outdoor recreation planner for the area, the Wilderness Act of 1964 defined wilderness as “generally, 5,000 acres or larger in size, roadless (and) substantially unaffected by the imprint of man and offering opportunities of primitive or unconfined types of recreation.”

In other words, any place with a road automatically is not a wilderness? Not exactly.

“It gets pretty subjective,” said Chris Roholt, the BLM’s California Desert District wilderness coordinator.

Said Eslinger: “The definition of road (in the ’64 act) was a route of travel that was maintained on a relatively regular or continuous basis by hand or mechanical means. There was a lot of scratching of heads. In some places you don’t need to maintain it . . . a dry lake, many trails in the Mojave.”

Some of those questionable roads were followed on the tour of the Orocopias. The Jeeps, shifted down into low range, negotiated various degrees of “roads” through boulder-strewn dry washes, steep culverts and pristine canyons.

One of those, Pinnacle Canyon, would be closed by S. 21 but left open by the BLM plan. The tour was a revelation even for Kaldenberg.

“I’ve never been back in here,” he said. “I don’t have a vehicle that would make it.”

That raised the question of how the BLM, with its limited means and manpower, would enforce the massive area proposed by S. 21, which offers no funding.

Some roads are identifiable only by the lack of plant life in two parallel strips. In Pinnacle Canyon, John Butts, the BLM’s outdoor recreation planner for the district, indicated the tracks in the sand behind the caravan and said, “One light rain or windstorm and they’ll be gone. Nature is the most destructive force in here.”

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Authorities estimate that there are more than half a million four-wheel-drive vehicles in California, supplemented by at least that many dirt bikes and four-wheel, all-terrain vehicles. Multiply that by the family members that use them, a recent survey found, and 14% of Californians had an off-highway experience last year.

With hundreds of dealers and specialty-parts houses to support their recreation, said Jerry Johnson, chief of the California Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Division, it’s a billion-dollar industry.

Of course, people could still walk into the wilderness areas.

“But it may be (several) miles to the feature you want to observe,” Eslinger said, “(such as) Indian petroglpyhs that were scratched into the rocks hundreds or thousands of years ago. The weight of the water you’d have to carry in with you (would make it impossible).”

Said Johnson: “You’re denying the public a recreational opportunity that has no impact. The four-wheel-drive people have been the stewards of these areas for many years. For search-and-rescue operations, they are the most valuable people around (because) they have the knowledge and the vehicles.”

Said Chauvet: “It’s a mass exodus (to the desert) on a weekend . . . whole families together. That’s part of America’s wellness program: to stay happy and healthy. It’s a shame to see more restrictions being placed on people to do that.”

Many OHVers are resigned to the passage of S. 21. They would prefer the BLM plan but, at worst, can only hope for a modified S. 21 that would use some of the old roads as corridors through new wilderness areas. There is precedent for those in other wilderness areas of thestate.

Frank Currie runs a small business that makes custom rear ends for OHVs. He sounded tired when he said, “We’ve been fighting the battle a long time. I expect we’re going to lose.”

And Patton would have hated that.