America’s Eroding Atolls of Nature

Five motorcycles are wallowing up to their tailpipes in a mountain stream. The pine air is filled with clouds of exhaust and the snarling of high-performance machines clawing for traction amid the mud, pebbles and willow shoots of one of Southern California’s last wild trout streams.

“I’ve got no clutch!” a rider screams from the pack. Two others stall before a green Yamaha surges out of the water, pirouetting crazily until its rear tire bites into dry land.

Behind these are 200 more contestants in the fifth annual dirt bike “Enduro” through the San Bernardino National Forest. The sound of oncoming engines, reverberating through the forest like chain saws on steroids, gives ample warning to the fishermen, sunbathers, wading children and dogs who are also here.

It’s all part of Sunday morning mayhem in America’s urban national forests, eroding atolls of nature, where shooting ranges, rock concerts, traffic jams, crime, crowds and population growth are blurring the distinctions between inner cities and deep woods.

Less than two dozen of the nation’s 165 national forests are classified as urban because of their proximity to fast-growing cities such as Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix and metropolitan Los Angeles. But they get nearly one-third of all forest visitors, up 50% since 1980.

During the same period, the amount of money appropriated to regulate recreation in these forests has declined by 25% or more nationally. At the San Bernardino National Forest, the current $1.9 million for recreation and wilderness management is $800,000 less than it was four years ago.

Now, as the Forest Service struggles to keep a grip, it is turning for help to the private sector and particularly to companies that have business interests in the forests, such as the American Honda Motor Co., promoter of the Enduro.

Critics say that the arrangement is a devil’s bargain with businesses that profit from mining, motorcycle racing, water extraction and other kinds of environmentally damaging activity. Forest managers say that they have no choice.

“At the current level of staffing and funding, the job we face is an impossible one,” said San Bernardino Forest Supervisor Gene Zimmerman.

$1.3 Million Raised

The San Bernardino forest is leading the trend toward stronger partnerships with the private sector. Through a nonprofit association set up to solicit contributions, forest managers have raised just over $1.3 million. Contributing members range from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Forest Foundation to the Yucca Valley Elementary School.

But support also comes from a variety of private companies, several of which have economic interests in the forest. Prominent among them are Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water Co., Southern California Edison, Mitsubishi Cement Corp., Snow Valley Ski Resort and Honda, which has emerged as the forest’s chief private sector benefactor and policy advisor.

The San Bernardino Forest Assn. has restored six fire watch towers that had fallen into disrepair, endowed a 300-acre children’s forest that introduces students to forest ecology, and subsidized an attractive new visitor and outdoor education center at Big Bear Lake.

Forest Service officials acknowledge the danger that corporate partners could maneuver forest policy to their own advantage.

“There is definitely the risk with corporate partners that they will become the senior partners,” said Rick Cables, supervisor of two national forests that border Denver and Colorado Springs. “But where else can you go? The taxpayers aren’t going to bail us out.”

Self-sufficiency, not corporate self-interest, is the goal of the San Bernardino Forest Assn., said board member Paul Slavik, who is also American Honda’s off-highway vehicle resources coordinator.

“We wanted to develop a business plan for the forest that would make it self-sustaining and be a model that could be exported to the rest of the country,” Slavik said.

No environmental groups belong to the influential San Bernardino Forest Assn. Nor have any been invited to join, Slavik said.

“It is strange we haven’t brought any of them in,” Slavik said recently. “But we have never looked to them, and I don’t recall ever discussing bringing an environmental group into the mix.”

Slavik said Honda has contributed $250,000 to the forest and along with other manufacturers and dealers provided the Forest Service with a small fleet of cars, motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles.

“We’ve got more vehicles than people to ride them,” said John Wambaugh, who coordinates the Forest Service’s off-road driving program in the San Bernardino forest.

Honda also helped the Forest Service design the San Bernardino forest’s 204-mile off-road vehicle route and sold the agency on the idea of holding the Enduro.

The annual motorcycle stampede is a good example of what the urban forest has become--a place for city dwellers to let out the clutch and have a roaring good time.

Hard Use by Visitors

A lot of forest fun these days has a hard-edged, no-holds-barred quality to it.

Last year, a target shooter in the San Bernardino forest sparked a wild fire that burned down 11 cabins. In national forests near Albuquerque and Tucson wildlife experts blame loose dogs and throngs of hikers, rock climbers and skiers for driving two herds of bighorn sheep to extinction.

In the Angeles National Forest, prospector Bernie McGrath is among a dozen miners on the San Gabriel River every day scouring the bottom with powerful vacuum dredges that do not differentiate between fish eggs and gold dust.

McGrath scoffs at the criticism of conservationists that miners are destroying fish habitat with their dredges. “The trout love the holes that we make here,” he said.

Many of the problems plaguing the urban forests, and the resulting need for money to deal with them, are on display in the San Bernardino.

The 800,000-acre forest rises to nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, taking in most of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains, five wilderness areas and several resort communities, most notably Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear and Idyllwild.

From the days when Paiute Indians clashed with Mormon lumberjacks, the forest has spawned a disparate, rough-and-tumble culture. Today, ski resorts, church camps and third-generation family cabins back up against shantytowns, chop shops, drug labs and marijuana plantations.

Crime is a chronic problem.

On a recent swing through a transient forest community north of Fontana known as “Scotland,” a task force of rangers and sheriff’s deputies arrested parole violators, broke up a burglary ring and found two stolen cars and three methamphetamine labs.

Two years ago, a suspected car thief who had been hiding out in the forest shot down a pursuing police helicopter with an AK-47. The pilot was injured and the suspect was arrested.

But much of the toll on natural resources is a result of perfectly legal activities.

New real estate development on private land around Lake Arrowhead continues to fragment the forest while completely cutting off public access to the lake shore.

Utility companies such as Edison that serve communities outside the forest have diverted billions of gallons of water for hydroelectric power and drinking water, in the process drying up 20 miles of streams. Stream corridors cover only 3% of the forest’s land, but 70% of its wildlife depends on those places for sustenance.

In the Holcomb Valley north of Big Bear Lake, a lush meadow full of rare plants that botanists say exist nowhere else, huge mining operations by Mitsubishi and two other companies tear off tons of topsoil to get at one of the richest deposits of limestone in the Western Hemisphere.

Unlike the National Parks, which were set up explicitly to preserve natural wonders, the National Forests were established a century ago with long-term commercial exploitation of their timber and other resources as a central purpose.

But over time, our increasingly urbanized society has come to see value in the forests themselves, not just the trees. It is now the steadily increasing demand for forest recreation that puts the most pressure on natural resources in the urban forests.

Since 1980, annual visits to Forest Service land have risen to nearly one billion a year. Surrounded by 20 million people, the San Bernardino Forest is now busier than either Yellowstone or Yosemite National Parks.

Last year, in another controversial move, several urban national forests, including San Bernardino, began charging hikers, campers and others a $5 fee as part of a two-year demonstration program.

The fees have provoked a hornets’ nest of opposition from people all over the country who think access to public lands ought to be free.

Referring to the Forest Assn. and its business partners, Patrick Marley, a lawyer for the group Save Our Forest, said: “Instead of saying no to some of the worst abusers of the public lands, the Forest Service is going into business with them and then making the public pay for the damage.”

Use of Volunteers

Zimmerman, the San Bernardino Forest supervisor, acknowledges that forest planning efforts have not placed the emphasis on endangered species that the law calls for. And he said he feared that court-ordered compliance could lead to restrictions “on everything from picnicking and camping to picking wild flowers, swimming in a creek or driving for pleasure.”

As much as anything, it’s the forest’s model volunteer corps that is the envy of other national forests.

The San Bernardino Forest Assn. has paid to recruit and train more than 1,000 volunteers whose tasks range from secretarial stints to backing up rangers on moonlit nocturnal patrols to remote parts of the forest.

Last month, Ranger Brad Burns led half a dozen volunteers on one such mission down a steep canyon path to the Deep Creek Hot Springs.

Deep Creek is one of two native trout streams in the forest, and the Forest Service wants to protect the water quality as well as a fragile population of endangered amphibians found along the banks.

The canyon bottom also holds the archeological keys to an 800-year-old Native American culture that flourished along the creek. But the artifacts are in danger of being ground to dust by the steady parade of sport utility vehicles that make their way down a tortuous, illegal two-mile track.

Overnight camping and campfires have also been banned.

Nevertheless, as many as 300 campers have squeezed into the canyon at the same time, threatening to turn Deep Creek into an open cesspool.

Once a hide-out for Charles Manson, the hot springs and adjacent canyons have attracted squatters and fugitives ever since. Paramilitary groups have held maneuvers here. Bodies have been dumped. A partially clad skeleton turned up in August.

The trek led by Ranger Burns was the first nighttime visit by the Forest Service in a year. Burns prepared the volunteers on what can happen. He said he has had knives drawn on him in the past by people he attempted to cite for various infractions.

It’s part of a day’s work in urban forests.

When the Forest Service closed a dirt road to mining claims in nearby Horse Thief Canyon last month, again to protect endangered species, a prospectors’ association fired off a letter to Zimmerman warning of “violent reprisals.”

A dozen miles south of the hot springs, in a scene that calls to mind the movie “Road Warrior,” the Forest Service spent $100,000 in federal funds erecting a wall of boulders to stop a joy-riding assault force of jeeps and dune buggies from motoring up the stream bed.

“We’ve had rangers attacked there,” Burns said.

But at Deep Creek Hot Springs, Burns and his volunteers encountered little resistance--aside from many angry insults--as they rousted the occupants of about 20 illegal camps, many of whom had come down in jeeps ignoring the ban on driving.

“This is pure government harassment,” said one jeep owner as he was handed a $30 citation. “Why don’t you pick up the garbage instead of marching around like little green fascists?”

It was an awkward moment for the volunteers, all of whom are off-road enthusiasts.

But they kept their cool, making no mention of their last daytime visit here when they hauled several tons of trash out on their backs.

Seeking a Compromise

Zimmerman cites the volunteer corps as the backbone of the support system he hopes will eventually allow the forest to depend less heavily on the government’s largess.

“Without the volunteers, we’d have virtually no presence on the trails,” he said.

But the volunteers have not made up for a 40% reduction in Forest Service personnel, and Zimmerman agrees with critics who say that many forest resources are taking a beating.

“Biodiversity has degraded and will continue to degrade until we find an acceptable way to limit human pressures,” he said.

Yet, he is reluctant to do that in the ways environmentalists think necessary, by putting areas of the forest off-limits to human activities.

“I don’t want to lock out the people who love the forest. If we lose them, we lose our base of support.”

Zimmerman prefers to negotiate solutions to natural resource problems, but it can be an agonizingly slow process.

For the last nine years, Forest Service botanists have been working with Mitsubishi and the other mining companies to create a series of refuges for six rare plants that grow on the forest’s highly prized limestone deposits.

But it is the environment of Deep Creek, with its fishing holes, sculptured canyons and hot springs, that has been the sorest point of contention.

For several years, Save Our Forest has sought to ease pollution and erosion of the stream by prohibiting crossings by jeeps and motorcycles.

The Forest Service has agreed to rip out the jeep track to the hot springs, but it has refused to block upstream crossings that are popular with off-roaders and Enduro riders.

“Trying to stop people from going through the water would be like trying make water flow uphill,” Wambaugh said.

Moreover, representatives of Honda and the American Motorcyclist Assn. have resisted a proposal to build a bridge across the creek.

Instead, they have lobbied for a compromise plan to install paving stones on the creek bottom to stop some of the erosion caused by churning tires.

“A bridge wouldn’t be natural down there,” said Dana Bell, western states coordinator for the American Motorcyclists and the official starter of the 1998 Enduro. “Besides, splashing through the water is a big part of the fun.”

Third in an occasional series on the environment of the West at the close of the century.

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Off-Road Dispute

Environmentalists and residents concerned about loss of solitude and threats to wildlife in the San Bernardino National Forest are taking issue with a growing network of trails designed for off-road vehicles. The American Honda Motor Corp., a promoter of the trails, is the biggest contributor to the San Bernardino National Forest Assn., a nonprofit group that helps pay for educational and recreational programs. Critics say that Honda and other companies with financial interests in the forest are helping shape forest policies through the association.