‘Boggers’ Turning Off-Roaders’ Names to Mud

A red Dodge pickup, its windows shattered and tires gone, sat in a crumpled heap off a dirt path in Umatilla National Forest, miles from anywhere.

Shards of glass and bits of trash littered the mountain meadow, but Robert Wolfe Jr., law enforcement officer for the Forest Service, focused on something else -- great globs of mud splattered on the truck’s exterior. Wolfe swiped a sample from the cab’s door.

“This mud’s pretty fresh, only a few days old,” he said. “This guy must have found a new spot I don’t know about yet.”

With that, Wolfe began the hunt for another elusive mud-bogger, hard-bitten four-wheel aficionados who take their off-road hobby to the extreme -- and often beyond the law.

Wolfe and a dwindling number of Forest Service enforcement officers nationwide find themselves in an uphill battle with horsepower junkies who illegally test their tires and engines in fragile wetlands and riverbeds on public land. The goal is to see whose rig can plow the deepest into molasses-thick mud and emerge unscathed -- or emerge at all.

The result can be devastating for the delicate wetland ecosystems, where mud-boggers sometimes leave ruts up to 6 feet deep that take years to heal.

Mud-bogging is illegal on all federal land and the vast majority of state land, although it is legal on private land that isn’t near any environmentally sensitive areas. Enforcement agents nationwide have stepped up efforts to find and punish violators who tear up public land.

“We’re talking about fragile meadows where even one acre of damage is too much, where one track is unacceptable,” said Dick Dufourd, coordinator for an interagency group that manages off-road vehicle use in the Deschutes and Ochoco national forests in Central Oregon.

It’s hard to tell exactly how many people illegally mud-bog nationwide -- or even from one national forest to the next. Offenders can do years’ worth of damage in five minutes. With an average of one Forest Service enforcement officer per million acres, it’s hard to catch anyone in the act.

But those who work in the field say the problem has grown in the past decade, in part because of television ads for heavy trucks and SUVs that show vehicles plowing through muddy streams and over steep terrain. In the past four months alone, mud-boggers have destroyed two wetlands in Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming and a trailhead in the Panhandle National Forest in Idaho.

A brief drive through Umatilla National Forest in northeastern Oregon turns up at least a dozen large mud-bogs visible from the dirt road. One year-old site is scarred by tire ruts 19 inches deep that have yet to sprout new grass. Wolfe guesses that there are dozens more identical sites that he isn’t even aware of.

“I’ve got some sites that were mudded out eight to 10 years ago and they’re still not healed,” Wolfe said. “The mud just goes everywhere and the soil just disappears -- you can’t put it back in even if you wanted to.”

Wolfe and other Forest Service law enforcement agents routinely work 16-hour days, struggling to keep up with offenders. Under Forest Service budget cuts, Wolfe has seen his patrol area more than double, to 1.2 million acres, over the last 10 years. It takes him 3 1/2 hours to traverse his territory, and he puts 1,000 miles on his truck each week, he said.

The number of enforcement officers has dropped by nearly half on the Umatilla, Wallowa and Whitman national forests since the early 1990s, Patrol Capt. Dwight Johnson said. Overall, the number of full-time Forest Service positions has dropped 13% since the previous 10-year period that ended in 1993, said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Despite the hard work, Wolfe and the five other agents who patrol the Umatilla, Wallowa and Whitman national forests solve only about a dozen mud-bog cases a year because the crime is so hard to prove, he said.

“”You can’t be out here 24/7. But that’s our job and we’re driven to catch them,” he said.

Wolfe and his colleagues have recently become more aggressive about enforcing mandatory federal court appearances for suspects and pressing judges for restitution in money or physical labor. They hope to set an example for would-be offenders.

Mud-bogging on federal lands is punishable by up to a $5,000 fine and six months in jail -- although no one has received the maximum punishment yet.

Last year, three mud-boggers were indicted on charges of felony criminal mischief for destroying the riverbed around Desolation Creek, home to threatened and endangered fish species. The charges were eventually reduced, but the trio paid a total of more than $2,200 in restitution.

“That alone got a lot of attention from some people who have traditionally regarded this as a form of recreation and nothing else,” Johnson said.

In cases where the damage isn’t serious enough to require restoration work, officers will issue up to $400 in tickets per case for mud-bogging, illegal off-roading and littering, Wolfe said.

Such harsh punishments have the support of the majority of off-road enthusiasts who condemn illegal mud-bogging, saying it tarnishes the reputation of their hobby.

Hundreds of off-road groups nationwide enjoy mudding, but do it on private land at organized events far from sensitive streambeds and wetlands.

At a recent “mud drag” in the tiny timber town of Willamina, in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley, 125 contestants lined up to race each other two-by-two in deep, man-made trenches filled with sludge. Several hundred spectators watched the daylong, alcohol-free event from bleachers or picnic blankets. The $5 entry fee went to the local Head Start program.

Tread Lightly, a national nonprofit organization based in Ogden, Utah, was founded in 1985 to promote responsible use of motorized vehicles on public land.

The organization has tried to work with auto manufacturers to change the off-road images they use in TV commercials. Several companies, including Toyota, Nissan and Mercedes-Benz, have asked Tread Lightly to review their ads. At least one company spiked a TV spot after the organization didn’t like it, said Lori Davis, executive director.

“If there are 12 advertisers, we can get half to go kinder and gentler and the other half will go the other way,” she said. “It’s the nature of the beast and it’s not going to go away.”

This year, Tread Lightly received $300,000 in federal and private money to start a volunteer program called Tread Trainers. Volunteers will eventually offer elementary school seminars and educational materials featuring Lightfoot Squirrel, a mascot modeled after Smokey the Bear.

But back in Umatilla National Forest, Wolfe’s workload doesn’t let up.

Wolfe circled the crumpled Dodge truck, sifting through scattered mail and other papers that yielded a keg receipt and a pay stub with the owner’s name on them.

But without a witness or hard evidence linking the suspect to a mud-bogging site hidden in millions of forested acres, Wolfe must content himself with simply having the truck towed away.

“We never did find that mud-bog,” Wolfe said three weeks later. “It could be anywhere.”