As ATVs Roam Fragile Upland, Preservation Movement Grows

On the San Rafael Swell--a vast uplift of land chiseled into canyons, mesas and towering rock sentinels--Butch Cassidy and his gang of bandits eluded three posses and made off with $7,000 in gold, coal diggers’ pay.

But Cassidy wasn’t being chased by hordes of all-terrain vehicles, which are increasingly finding their way into the rugged swell, a region 35 miles wide and 85 miles long.

The landscape isn’t as forbidding or solitary as Emery County rancher Lee Jeffs recalls from his youth, when he could camp for two weeks and “never see anyone.”

Jeffs, 53, noticed the land change 15 years ago, when ATVs became popular, turning up in numbers that would have flushed the Wild Bunch from the region’s hidden canyons. The land is being overrun, he complains, comparing off-road incursions to overgrazing in the West that led to the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.

Though “it tears my heart out,” Jeffs, a third-generation rancher on public lands, finds himself in favor of more government controls for the San Rafael Swell.

Those controls were the subject of a bill in Congress that would afford some protection, though not enough for environmental groups holding out for more restricted wilderness designation.

The dispute, and how it is resolved, could become a guide for vast tracts of federal land in the West that don’t enjoy national park, forest or wilderness status. Those designations put sharp limits on what the public can do on the land.

With the Clinton administration’s support, the San Rafael Western Legacy bill is moving rapidly through Congress, said Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah). In the House, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) moved the bill from a subcommittee to the Natural Resources Committee, which plans to take it up Wednesday.

On March 21, a day before the bill made its congressional debut, the Bureau of Land Management announced a crackdown on ATVs that Jeffs called long overdue.

But with only one BLM ranger to cover a region nearly the size of Connecticut, the effort so far is mostly symbolic. Jeffs says new BLM signposts get ripped up almost as fast as they’re planted in the ground.

The San Rafael Western Legacy bill would allocate $1 million a year to manage a nearly 1-million-acre conservation area--the heart of the swell, a kidney-shaped bulge on the earth’s surface that was once an ancient ocean floor--inside a 2.8-million-acre historic district.

The bill gives the BLM four years to come up with a land-use plan that allows motor routes in the conservation area. It’s the four-year wait that environmentalists most object to.

“We need protection right now,” says Heidi McIntosh, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Bennett answers the criticism by saying “there is nothing in this bill that would prevent the designation of wilderness. It is absolutely wilderness neutral.”

“They don’t want it to be resolved,” Bennett says of the wilderness alliance and the Sierra Club, which are pushing for 9 million acres of red-rock wilderness across Utah--legislation Bennett says has little chance of becoming law.

McIntosh said the wilderness alliance may support a revised bill if it contains meaningful protections against off-road vehicles.

“Right now, that’s the primary threat,” she said. “We’re seeing tracks in places that didn’t have tracks three weeks ago.”

On a sun-drenched day in early April, Jeffs surveyed his grazing lands along the Salt Wash where a crop of “no vehicles” signs fights a losing battle to restrict traffic to an old wagon road. Tire ruts run in all directions.

“This really bothers me,” says Jeffs, who doesn’t leave ranch roads in his own truck. He tends his far-flung cattle on horseback.

He leases 20,000 acres for grazing from state and federal governments.

Jeffs, who has been reduced to a hobby rancher with just 37 cattle on the open range, calls all-terrain vehicles “the biggest threat to my little livestock industry.” They trample fragile desert grasses, knock over livestock fences, ruin his crude waterworks and leave cattle gates open. That once earned him a BLM trespassing ticket because of a wandering bull.

Mark Williams, 59, runs a booming ATV tour business. He is a boyhood friend of Jeffs. But they are divided by a canyon of disagreement over how strict the government should get on off-road vehicles in the swell, a region that still contains no permanent settlement and remains remote if not entirely untouched.

The swell’s soft rocks hold fossils and ancient Indian drawings. Jeffs keeps the location of one drawing to himself, certain no one else has found it after 2,000 years. He fears ATV riders will open it to vandalism or ruin.

As Jeffs provides a rolling discourse in his truck cab on malicious ATV damage--”a certain percentage of folks who continually abuse the land”--Williams hardly puts up a fight.

Williams allows that off-roaders “don’t need to go out and tear up the country.” If he could write $10 tickets for trail violations, “I’d be rich,” Williams says.

Nor does Williams object to BLM’s closing some trails, saying, “They closed the dead-ends.” He guides customers, many of them retirees, on 42- and 55-mile designated loops across badlands and painted deserts.

The pair has forged an uneasy truce, “an agreement to disagree.” Both support Cannon’s bill, although they say it leaves much to be worked out.

Jeffs doesn’t advocate wilderness, which could kill off his family ranching tradition or force him to ride a horse from town to reach distant grazing lands.

“I’m all for multiple use, but there’s been so much abuse,” Jeffs said. “Fifteen years ago, I could see what would happen if the BLM did nothing. It finally got to the point where something had to be done.”