Sand Dunes Park Bracing for Invasion of Off-Roaders
Every November, Rick Goldsberry has these dark nightmares about the desert.
In one cruel flashback after another, the 42-year-old former emergency medical technician is back at the wheel of his ambulance, careening down Highway 78 with another broken body, the aftermath of yet another accident involving the off-road riders who rumble across the roller-coaster sand dunes in this far-flung southeast corner of California.
For 16 years, Goldsberry raced accident victims from the sprawling Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area to Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley, 25 miles away. In his mind’s eye, he sees them just like it was yesterday--the ones who made it, the ones who didn’t.
The motorcyclist with the snapped spinal cord. The boy whose father taped his hands to his three-wheeler, which crashed and rolled a dozen times. The little girl who lost her leg at the knee and died crying in his ambulance as he desperately tried to reach the emergency room.
Each Thanksgiving, the painful images reach their peak. That’s when the annual invasion of the off-road armies arrives again.
“You’ve got too many people out there in the desert,” he said. “Add alcohol and speed and carelessness and you’re going to have terrible injuries.”
The long holiday weekend formally launches eight months of all-terrain-vehicle fever, as 100,000 enthusiasts from across the Southwest--a full 20% of the seasonal total of a half-million people--converge on a 125,000-acre finger of dunes stretching south from the desolate Chocolate Mountains toward the Mexican border.
As their mobile homes, tents and camper shells fill campsites and line roadsides, the off-roaders double the population of Imperial County, establishing the dunes as the most-used public land in the nation this weekend.
The area becomes the sandy domain of three-wheelers resembling overweight tricycles, zippy four-wheel runabouts and souped-up motorcycles, lithe-looking sand runners and modified Volkswagens--anything from the high-priced and sophisticated to Tonka Toy-sized buggies commanded by children barely old enough to walk.
In Glamis, especially at Thanksgiving, sheer survival means shouting over the motorized din of tens of thousands of ungoverned engines. The dust kicked up by the wandering hordes stings the eyes, makes the teeth grind like sandpaper, forcing the use of car headlights even at noon, making the canned goods inside the Glamis store resemble artifacts recovered from a pharaoh’s tomb.
All day and late into the night--the dunes set aglow by a galaxy of campfires--the manic motorists race up one sand mountain and down the next, stirring up reddish clouds that are visible for miles, a silent omen of the chaos that rules the desert floor below.
Between October and May--until the return of the scorching summer heat--as many as a dozen people are killed on the dunes and an additional 800 are injured, local hospital statistics show. Of those injuries, between 80 and 100 involve serious spinal cord breaks.
But by far, Thanksgiving weekend is the worst.
Over three days last Thanksgiving, three people died and 390 were treated for injuries at the Pioneers emergency room. Half a dozen with spinal cord trauma were flown to Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego, which nurses there have begun to call Brawley West.
In the last month alone, two people have died on the dunes: a motorcyclist in an ill-fated jump and another in a crash between an ATV and a pickup truck on a desert road known as the sand highway.
The off-roaders bring other troubles. Officials from the Bureau of Land Management, which administers the dunes, say robbery, assault and thefts are on the rise. Arguments fanned by alcohol sometimes end in gunplay.
Environmentalists say the annual off-road pilgrimage is altering the fragile desert landscape, threatening already-endangered species of plants, animals and insects--many of which are found nowhere else in the world.
Off-roaders contend that they’ve been given a bad rap. Most say they are from law-abiding families looking for relief from big-city stress. Many question the supposed environmental damage to a desert ecosystem that’s survived for eons without any help from environmentalists.
The injury rate is a fraction of those killed on the freeways each Thanksgiving, they say. “It’s a wonderful sport,” said Dana Bell, Western states representative for the American Motorcyclists Assn.
Added off-roader Jim Ransehousen: “Once in a while, somebody falls down and breaks an arm. Big deal. They can do that at home.”
The bureau acknowledges that it can’t slap an outright ban on the off-roaders, who have a legal right to use the dunes--despite the rising injury rate.
So this year, Pioneers Memorial doubled the size of its emergency room to 16 beds--in part because of the Glamis injuries. Doctors will treat most emergencies on another floor, to leave the emergency room open for the off-road trauma.
In a bit of grisly hospital humor, Pioneers emergency room staffers once wore military fatigues all weekend. “It’s like working in a M.A.S.H. unit,” said nurse Robyn Atadero, veteran of 11 Glamis invasions. “All the injuries--it’s a war zone.”
Rick Goldsberry recently decided he’d had enough. He quit his paramedic job, finding solace in the education office at Pioneers.
“The people who say this is a safe sport weren’t there in my ambulance,” he said during a rare visit to the emergency room. “They didn’t see that little girl with the missing leg who died before my eyes, even though I was driving over 100 mph.
“I’ve still got the scars,” he adds, pointing to his head and heart, “here and here.”
A Magnet for the Multitudes
The sheer wildness of the scene attracts a cast of oddball characters. There are dusty off-road tumbleweeds like Norman Warford, a 67-year-old retired Air Force man whose ruddy skin shows the wear from decades of shaking and baking under a harsh desert sun.
There are desert rats like Gene LeBlanc, owner of the Glamis General Store, the only business in the tiny outpost. Each year, the 71-year-old LeBlanc makes a small fortune selling six-packs, $5 showers and T-shirts showing overturned dune buggies that read “I barely survived another Thanksgiving invasion at Glamis.”
Still, he refers to off-roaders as a “buncha damned idiots. Every year, they get drunk and run each other over,” he says. “Leave their brains at home.”
But the Glamis story is all about the riders. Off-roaders like Mike Violette have been drawn to the Imperial Sand Dunes since Model-T dune buggies roamed the region. The sport caught fire in the 1970s and was bolstered by the advent of the all-terrain vehicle a decade later.
Rangers say the dunes sit on an ancient lake bed. Shifting winds eventually collected mountains of sand that now resemble the drop-off site for an army of God’s own dump trucks.
Violette, a house painter from Temecula, likes to feel the power of his ATV engine between his legs, hooting and hollering at the moon as he heads off for places like China Wall, Lizard Hill, Oldsmobile Mountain and valleys large enough to swallow Dodger Stadium and the parking lots surrounding it.
“I like to get out here and drive as fast as I can, blow that stress away, even if it’s only for two days,” he said. “Whenever I sit in traffic, I say ‘Gosh, I wish I was back in Glamis, where I could cut loose and go where I wanted.’ ”
But Violette and his comrades are feeling the pinch from those who contend that ATVs are destroying the habitat of plants like Pierson’s milk-vetch and giant Spanish needle, as well as the fringe-toed lizard and dune scarab beetle.
“The dunes are becoming a sterile moonscape,” said Sierra Club activist Nick Ervin. “Even if you banned ATVs, it would still take 100 years for anything to thrive there again.”
Off-roaders say the pressure on their sport is turning them into the endangered species. “All this talk about lizards and beetles,” said Barbara Ransehousen. “The world was made for people, not creepy-crawly things.”
To avoid injuries, the ATV crowd says it needs more space to roam and has its eyes set on the adjacent Algodones Dunes Wilderness, 35,000 acres of off-limits land just north of Highway 78.
Afraid of getting lost or running out of gas, most off-roaders don’t venture too far south of the campgrounds near the highway into the open dunes. Especially at Thanksgiving, most stay within a mile of camp, barnstorming a place called Competition Hill, causing sometimes lethal congestion.
Sweet Marie Pierce, a former interior decorator who sells engine parts and cold drinks to off-roaders, jealously eyed the closed-off wilderness just across the road from her ramshackle trailer. “I say open it up! It’s just sand! What are they gonna do, save it for our grandchildren so they can’t use it either?”
Overwhelming Odds
The preparations begin weeks before the holiday onslaught, as Bureau of Land Management rangers like Neil Hamada roam the dunes, handing out safety literature and friendly words of advice.
Rangers admit it’s not enough. Despite hiring 22 extra staffers--and as many patrol volunteers--for the Thanksgiving weekend, they say there is no way to control the drinking and lawlessness that often occurs among 100,000 rough-riding off-roaders. “I could use 300 men,” said Robert Zimmer, the bureau’s chief law enforcement officer at the dunes.
Thanksgiving weekend puts such stress on the agency’s El Centro manpower that there is only one ranger left to patrol the remaining 1.3 million acres the bureau manages in Imperial and eastern San Diego County.
Zimmer needs all the men he can get to control the rowdies who peel off shots from their semiautomatic weapons, who drive their ATVs with open containers of beer and alcohol, who start campfires with smoke-spewing magnesium engine blocks or smelly truck tires--practices outlawed by the bureau.
“The only way to clean this place up is to change people’s attitudes,” he said. “I’d ban alcohol and get people to stop taking needless chances on their vehicles.”
Oscar Garcia agrees. Even with eight ambulances working the dunes and several helicopters on call this weekend, Pioneers Hospital’s head emergency room nurse still doesn’t feel safe.
More than 80% of the accidents are alcohol-related, he says. “One Thanksgiving, we’re going to stand out on the highway with our ambulances and warn each off-roader who passes that half a dozen of them are in serious jeopardy. If they don’t get killed, they’re going to leave this valley inside a helicopter with a paralyzing spinal cord injury.
“Sometimes, I wonder if even that would do any good.”
