Shooting Scars on Arizona Land

IRONWOOD FOREST NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz.--Darrell Tersey bumps the four-wheel drive along a desert wash, steers up the bank and comes to a dusty stop. The Bureau of Land Management agent steps out onto what appears to be a dry lake bed. No living thing can be spotted within a 20-acre circle.

The ground sparkles under the harsh sun. Closer inspection reveals it is carpeted with shattered beer bottles and spent shell casings. Tersey bends to collect what’s at his feet and sifts through the brass and aluminum shells in his palm, calling out their caliber: a .38 Special, a 12-gauge (shotgun), a .357 magnum, a .45, some sort of military-issue ammunition. With the toe of his boot, he pokes a live .22 round.

Locals call this area the Shooting Range, but it’s not intended to be. This national monument was set aside two years ago to allow public access to a prototypical Sonoran desert landscape: 300-year-old saguaro cacti, 800-year-old ironwood trees, ancient rock art and hiking trails through rugged mountains.

But the surrounding urbanization has driven the Western tradition of outdoor target shooting into the monument, about 12 miles northwest of Tucson. Although such desert shooting is legal on federal BLM land, it’s not on state property, and Ironwood is a patchwork of federal, state and private lands. Also not allowed is destruction of property, plants and animals. Nor is endangering public safety.

The conflict pitting the right to target shoot against concerns for public safety and the environment occurs on federal lands around the country. But Tucson’s growth of 20% in the last 10 years --twice the national average--makes the problems here more acute. Officials are seeking to address the problems, but with only two law enforcement officers patrolling the 129,000-acre monument, the shooting is likely to continue unabated.

The scope of the damage done by so-called wildcat shooters is breathtaking. Tersey walks 50 yards to a represso, a low-slung livestock pond. Against the dirt berm are shattered computer monitors, an exploded television set, a perforated car battery. Someone cut a square sheet of tin and spray-painted a wraithlike figure of a hooded Ku Klux Klansman in white. The figure’s red-painted eyes are shot out.

Plants on the periphery of this improvised shooting range are shredded. Bullets are embedded in the trunks of mesquite trees. The skeletal carcass of a 12-foot saguaro cactus lists to one side. On the ground are one of the plant’s arms and the top 3 feet of the cactus. The pieces have been shot off and are perforated with bullet holes.

At another shooting site, a hillside of mature saguaros has been obliterated. Arizona’s iconic plant is a notoriously slow grower: 4 inches in a wet year, not at all in drought years such as this. It takes at least 75 years before a saguaro can sprout an arm. In an afternoon’s outing, centuries of growth can be erased with one sweeping spray of automatic weapon fire.

Tersey, who has worked in this part of southern Arizona for 14 years, shakes his head in disgust. He estimates that if this patch of desert--also torn up by tire tracks--were left alone, it would require 300 years to repair itself.

That’s not the only hazard posed by the shooting. With bullets capable of traveling five miles through the air, safety concerns are high for ranch families and livestock living within the monument and those in subdivisions going up just outside it.

Some argue that is it unsafe to shoot anywhere in the monument.

The cherished tradition of freely shooting guns in the region’s vast open spaces is going the way of the open desert, disappearing with Arizona’s inexorable sprawl. As newly sprouted exurbs march into once-empty desert, there are fewer and fewer places gun enthusiasts may go for target practice. Commercial shooting ranges are closing, done in by state laws mandating buffer zones--laws that were written before anyone envisioned housing developments creeping to the edge of the open desert.

Hemmed in by growth, people are increasingly coming into public land to shoot. One national forest in Arizona has already banned shooting because of the overwhelming problems and lack of rangers to patrol.

What’s happening at Ironwood Forest National Monument is not the harmless target shooting and “plinking” of yesteryear. Rangers have come across people firing cannons and tripod-mounted machine guns here. One rancher who runs cattle in Ironwood says three of his animals have been shot dead. Another says bullets have whizzed over the heads of his three young children.

Now, as the relatively new Ironwood monument is devising its long-range management plan, it is also attempting to craft an agreement with gun groups that would allow shooting within the monument to continue. Officials believe what is decided here could be a template for gun use on other heavily trafficked federal lands.

“Freedom to shoot in the desert is one of the beautiful things about living in the West,” said Todd Rathner of Tucson, a board member of the National Rifle Assn. “To go out in the desert and plink, so long as you’re safe and responsible--it’s one of the reasons I live in Arizona.”

But, he added, “I don’t agree with the destruction of property or plants and animals. That has to be prosecuted. But we won’t allow the closure of public land to shooting. I believe we can work this out.”

Rancher Jesus Arvizu, whose family has been ranching here since 1847, said all of his No Shooting signs have been shot to pieces. His livestock water tanks are full of holes. He wants to see the target shooters restricted to designated areas within the monument.

“I just had a guy out shooting next to my corrals,” Arvizu said. “Yesterday a guy shot a hawk and stuck him on one of my fences. Just spread him out. Why would you do a thing like that? It’s not safe anymore. It’s a major problem.”

The problems are manifold. In addition to the wildlife and livestock that are endangered, so is their food source. The array of vehicles that carry shooters deep into the desert destroy shrubs and grass that deer and cattle eat. The tires break through delicate desert soil, called the cryptobiotic crust, that can take generations to replace. The denuded areas add to the dust problem.

In the Los Robles Archeological District within the monument, potshots have taken chunks out of centuries-old rock art found near Ragged Top in the Silverbell Mountains. The extensive bank of petroglyphs is part of the reason the district is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Another major problem is garbage, bulky items hauled in as targets as well as whatever trash shooters leave behind. Last year, volunteers hauled out 42 tons of junk from just one site.

“It’s a pity,” Tersey said, looking at another wildcat range where a pockmarked refrigerator stood on its side. “I was raised shooting, and the way I was raised, you don’t shoot things that break. You pick up after yourself. This offends me.”

Everything is a target. Lower down on the hill, what were large boulders have been pulverized. In the debris field are a pierced golf ball, a ragged bowling pin and tiny blasted parts from a toy.

The shooters know they can come here with impunity. The BLM manages more than 1 million acres in southern Arizona and has six rangers to patrol that land. Of those, two are assigned specifically to Ironwood. The rugged area is rife with lawbreaking; monument officials estimate up to 2,000 illegal immigrants a week are shuttled up from the U.S.-Mexico border along a corridor that also flows with drugs and other contraband.

In two years, officials say, law enforcement officers have made about 300 stops about problem shooting. Officers prefer to give warnings and have issued 20 citations since the monument opened.

“We don’t have the people and we don’t have the funding to deal with this,” Tersey said. “Anything we do will take time. There’s no immediate solution.”

That’s not good enough for Steve Lehning, who manages the Agua Blanca Ranch in the monument. Lehning, 44, is an ex-Marine and emphatically begins his conversation by saying he grew up with guns, learned firearm safety in NRA youth programs and is not anti-gun. He’s not out to pick a fight with gun enthusiasts, he says, but safety is his biggest concern.

Every school day Lehning ferries his youngest two children on the back of an all-terrain vehicle to a distant bus stop. The five-mile ride can be an obstacle course.

“I had picked up my son and I was coming through the front gate,” he said, recalling a recent incident. “A group of guys was firing across the road. This guy had an AR-15 fully automatic assault rife with a banana clip. He was just letting loose across the road. I had to get down and talk him into letting me cross with my boy. It’s absolutely out of control.”