Off the Beaten Path : With the Passage of the California Desert Protection Act, Off-Road Enthusiasts Feared the Worst, but Its Effects in Death Valley Are as Unclear as Park Boundaries

Ranger Hank Kodele fingered the long, thin sagebrush scratches along the sides of Rick Russell’s glossy red Hummer and said, “Know what they call these things? Desert pinstripes.”

Even Russell, who makes off-road maps and videos for a living, hadn’t heard that one, so it was one thing he would learn from an expedition to Death Valley National Park to explore the mysteries of the federal California Desert Protection Act (CDPA) enacted last October.

Through eight years of lobbying, politicking, compromising, trade-offs and wheeling and dealing, with a transition in Democratic caretakers from Sen. Alan Cranston to Sen. Dianne Feinstein along the way, SB 21 collected its own desert pinstripes on the road to becoming a somewhat confusing law.

California’s federal wilderness lands are held by the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management or the Fish and Wildlife Service. The CDPA expanded those holdings from 6.3 million acres to 13.97 million acres, and prohibits the use of any mechanical conveyance, including a bicycle, in a wilderness area. Leaders of the state’s estimated one million off-road enthusiasts feared the worst when it inevitably became law.

First, says Harry Lewellyn, who publishes a monthly newsletter called Ecological 4-Wheeling and leads caravan trips in California and Mexico, “I hate the word off-road. “

Off-highway would be more accurate, Lewellyn says, since responsible four-wheelers--the vast majority--don’t drive cross-country but travel on existing rocky, rutty roads and trails. Yet the perception that they were ravaging the desert flora and terrifying the fauna was a major thrust behind the CDPA.

The law hasn’t changed much yet. Russell, Lewellyn and some friends set out to find out for themselves in a pair of Hummers--the market version of the military truck that proved its worth in Operation Desert Storm during the Persian Gulf War.

The Park Service also has a couple of Army surplus Hummers in Death Valley, but since it became a national park and expanded from 2.1 million acres to 3.4 million acres, Kodele patrols the back roads in the same white Bronco he did when Death Valley was only a national monument.

Kodele offers a map outlining the new boundaries--drawn on a copy of an Auto Club map. Most of the people in charge of enforcing the CDPA’s restrictions are still trying to figure out exactly where the boundaries are. The blueprint maps sent from Washington this month are too smudgy to tell.

Jeff Aardahl, a leader of the park’s transition team, said, “The boundary line is not well-defined. It’s just meandering around.”

The map makers in Washington sometimes ignored geographical features, such as ridges and washes, to serve private interests--such as the Last Chance sulfur mine that required a 10-mile, dandelion-shaped invasion of the new northern boundary to accommodate a two-lane road leading to the mine. Although now surrounded by the park, the mine is technically outside the park and free to do business as usual.

Merely having the “national park” status is expected to increase Death Valley’s business about 25% from one million visitors a year, but four-wheelers might not notice any difference. Russell said, “If there’s an increase in visitors to this park, it’s going to be on the paved roads.”

Statewide, Russell said, “It cut out 100,000 miles (of dirt roads and trails accessible to four-wheel-drive vehicles) and didn’t add any.”

What’s left? Plenty, it seems.

“If Death Valley, for example, is going to be managed the way I’ve been told, I’m elated,” Russell said.

The federal custodians apparently plan to keep existing roads open, although some may be “cherry stem” corridors across new wilderness land, allowing access to old destinations, such as the Barker Ranch, where Charles Manson and his clan were captured in 1969.

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Manson might not have been impressed if the law had pulled up to the ranch in Hummers that day, but the big, boxy vehicles turn a lot of heads.

“My daughter loves it when I take her to school,” Russell said.

The Hummer was born in the mid-1980s when the Army put out bids for a super machine that could serve all the purposes of everything from a Jeep to a 1 1/4-ton truck. Fully loaded, it had to have 16 inches of ground clearance, climb a 22-inch vertical step and a 30-degree grade and ford 30 inches of water--and it had to have automatic transmission because some of the kid recruits couldn’t handle a stick shift.

The result was the High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) that is now the most-used mode of transportation in the U.S. military. AM General of South Bend, Ind., which started out as Willys and built the first Jeeps in World War II, won the contract and has built more than 120,000 Hummers for the U.S. military and, according to a spokesperson, “friendly” foreign governments. Along the way, HMMWV became Humvee, then Hummer.

Straightforward and functional, Hummers aren’t stylish, but they can be ordered with almost any option you can get on a luxury sedan and are sufficiently expensive--$40,000 to $75,000, depending on options--to attract the young and affluent in search of the latest fad. Arnold Schwarzenegger owns five Hummers, including the first one that was hand-modified for civilian use before AM General started building them for the public in 1992. Andre Agassi and Demi Moore own Hummers.

On the average pair of rocky ruts, the Hummer breezes along. Even when you hit a rock higher than 16 inches, it’s harmless because the underside is heavily armored. The creators were thinking land mines.

John Sweeney, a friend of Russell’s from Palmdale, brought one of his two Hummers on the Death Valley trip.

At 86 1/2 inches, not counting the breakaway mirrors, the Hummer is much wider than other four-wheel-drive vehicles, but Sweeney said, “I haven’t been anywhere yet it’s too big for. I like big vehicles. Jeeps scare me.”

Oddly, Sweeney added, according to factory warranty information, only 5% of the Hummer owners ever take their beasts off the pavement.

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Sixteen years ago, Don Connolly, 54, quit selling insurance in Los Angeles and moved to the desert. He is the mayor, sheriff and only resident of Ballarat, an otherwise abandoned mining settlement. He owns a small general store, a tired car and a trailer he shares with his scruffy, friendly dogs, Buddy and Blackie. The Desert Act has put Ballarat in a new wilderness area. Or has it?

“I’ve had the BLM rangers here and the park rangers here, all scratching their heads,” Connolly said. “(They say,) ‘We don’t know. No one’s told us.’ ”

He expects that his site at the base of the Panamint Mountains, which separate Ballarat from Death Valley, will experience a jump in the population of wild desert burros. Under current policy, the BLM rounds up excess animals for adoption. The Park Service shoots them.

“That’s why we have so many wild burros on this side,” Connolly said.

Connolly also is concerned about plans for a massive gold strip-mining operation seven miles down the Panamint Valley that will blow out a piece of Redlands Canyon roughly half a mile wide and half a mile in.

“They were going to blow up 505 acres of public land inside Redlands Canyon and cyanide it for gold,” he said. “The passage of the Desert Protection Act has now released an additional 19,000 acres of mining claims that they have on the mountainside.

“Also, this dry lake bed here was in a wilderness study area. The mining company wanted to put in a 47-acre clay pit to take clay out to line their cyanide pits with. They couldn’t do that until the passage of the act lifted the wilderness study area. Then at the end of six years they’re driving off and leaving it. No one will notice it. It’s just a 47-acre hole.”

Connolly, commuting to Trona, 25 miles distant, and Ridgecrest, even farther away, has been waging a lonely battle against the project, which under the CDPA now seems a fait accompli. He muses bitterly over the irony that such a thing would be permitted under a law called the Desert Protection Act.

But the desert now seems safe from Charles Manson and four-wheel-drives and even an occasional Hummer or two.