Dust-Up Over Off-Roaders Roars Across Backcountry

Besides the mountain scenery, all Judith and Bob Spencer wanted from their dream retirement home was a little peace and quiet.

The Spencers, who had been living in San Jose, chose this small lakeside community for its seductive location, poised at the edge of Stanislaus National Forest in the western Sierra Nevada.

They imagined days of hiking the wooded trails and serene evenings sitting outside, listening to nothing more than the wind in the trees.

What the Spencers didn’t count on was what sounded like a demolition derby roaring along a trail beyond their property line. Nor did they anticipate that off-road vehicles would tear up their driveway to get to the trailhead. Nor the incessant high-pitched whine of motorcycles racing through the neighborhood on their way to the forest trails. Nor the threats of violence that have followed their complaints.

“I don’t really know what to do. We’re at our wits’ end,” Judith Spencer said. “They are not going to force us out of our own home, but how can we live like this? Sometimes it feels like a battleground.”

Spencer has organized a group of residents, including some off-roaders, who are seeking to reroute motorized trails away from their homes. Recently, the 62-year-old former nurse handed the sheriff a thick letter containing a crude rendering of Spencer with arms and legs outstretched and bound, the ropes held by motorcyclists.

Neighbors Kitty Dennis and Larry McFall are musicians who say they are unable to compose when the cacophony of motors starts up. Dennis said the racket is causing her to worry about declining property values.

The Spencers and their neighbors find themselves in a dispute that is boiling across rural communities, national forests and national parks. It pits urban refugees and others who search out the quiet beauty of the countryside against the passionate aficionados of all-terrain vehicles, off-road motorcycles and snowmobiles.

The clash has spawned guerrilla tactics on both sides. Property owners have barricaded gates and blocked roads. Off-roaders have responded by cutting fences, tearing down “No Trespassing” signs and blazing illegal trails through wildlife habitat.

Even those officials who are charged with policing motorized recreation and public lands don’t agree on how best to manage off-road vehicles. California’s Off Highway Vehicle Commission has withheld funds earmarked for motorized recreation in the Stanislaus National Forest and other areas where state officials believe federal agencies have failed to effectively control off-roaders.

Local authorities complain they are inundated with complaints that they are unable to respond to.

“Our law enforcement operation is basically geared to deal with 40,000 people,” said Calaveras County Sheriff Dennis Downum, who says he’s overwhelmed by conflicts between off-roaders and property owners living on the edge of the Stanislaus National Forest.

“On these big weekends, it’s 80,000 people. We can’t handle that,” he said. “People come here and think they are in the middle of nowhere. They are in people’s backyards. They do what they want to do. I’ve seen signs that say ‘This Area Closed’ knocked down with tire tracks all over them. It’s at the point where it’s out of control.”

Thirty years ago, about 2 million Americans used off-road vehicles for recreation. Today, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that 36 million people use them in national forests alone.

Overall, off-highway vehicle registration has increased 108% in the last 20 years. California leads the nation in off-road vehicle use, according to the state parks department.

Tom Quinn, Stanislaus forest supervisor, said motorized access is by far his most contentious issue. His biggest headache is the Interface Trail, a series of paths and trails across 8,000 acres of national forest adjoining private property like that of the Spencers and their neighbors. For the most part, the trails are open to motorized recreation.

Wide open, some would say. With the area a mecca for dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles, riders are increasingly ignoring private property boundaries in their haste to reach the alluring trails of the Stanislaus.

Quinn is sympathetic to motorized recreation but is close to issuing a new trail-use plan that would attempt to keep the drivers separate from the hikers and move the trails for dirt bikes and ATVs well away from people’s homes.

“I understand, as a homeowner, not wanting dirt bikes in close proximity to my home,” Quinn said. “I don’t want to take away their property values and their right to sit on the back deck and enjoy the forest. At the same time, I don’t want to take away the experience of motorized recreation from people who love that.”

While camping, hiking and rock climbing are also growing in popularity -- they generate $16 billion a year in economic activity -- their rise is not as precipitous as that of their motorized counterparts.

By the early 1990s, off-road vehicle recreation was generating $3 billion a year in economic activity in California alone.

Don Amador, Western states representative for the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which lobbies for motorized access to public lands, described it as the leisure activity of choice for a growing segment of middle-aged, middle-class America.

“A lot of the baby boomers who enjoyed off-road recreation in the late ‘60s and ‘70s had to stop when they raised their kids,” he said. “Now their kids are in college. I’ve seen a lot of reentry into the sport.”

In today’s stress-filled world, Amador said, motorized recreation is a great way to let off steam. “It hits the spot.”

As for the sport’s troublemakers, he said, “Blue Ribbon has taken a strong stance. We urge our members to protect the rights of others.”

Bill Dart, Idaho-based director of the Blue Ribbon Coalition, said much of the conflict stems from resentment over areas that have been closed to the sport.

The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 set aside millions of acres in the Mojave Desert as wilderness, off-limits to vehicles. Where off-roaders once had 13.5 million acres to play in the desert, they now have closer to 7 million acres.

For some riders, “No Trespassing” signs are becoming more a provocation than an edict.

“I have noticed in the last two years people I know who have always been responsible land users -- not kids, but 55- to 60-year-old people -- are saying, ‘To hell with it. I’m going anyway. If I get caught, I get caught,’ ” said Ron Schiller, chairman of the High Desert Multiple Use Coalition, a group of off-roaders and equestrians in Ridgecrest. “It’s the wrong thing to do, but I understand how they feel. They are fed up.”

Local rider Jim Willis is fed up too. Willis said he grew up riding dirt bikes in the hills around Oakland. “The next thing you know, the environmental movement came along and we could no longer ride in the hills,” he said.

Willis, 55, moved his family to this area in 1975, he said, to ride the forest trails. Now he confronts the same kind of complaints that caused him to leave Oakland.

“If they are so against hearing a dirt bike,” he said, “they shouldn’t have moved to a place where dirt bikes are so predominant.”

Willis admits targeting the activist group organized by the Spencers. He tacked up a mock “Not Wanted” poster around town with Spencer’s photograph, the text describing her and her cohorts as “nature Nazis.”

“It’s not a threat; it’s how we feel,” he said.

Recently, off-roaders have been emboldened by policies of the Bush administration that have favored the expansion of motorized recreation on federal lands, including places where snowmobile and ATV use had been restricted -- including Yellowstone National Park and much of the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area west of Blythe.

But the machines do not tread lightly on often-fragile Western lands. In the million-acre Stanislaus National Forest, ATVs have damaged streams, eroded legal trails and overlaid the landscape with a network of illegal trails now indelibly carved into the forest.

In April, U.S. Forest Service Director Dale Bosworth cited “unmanaged recreation” as one of the four most important issues facing American forests. Among the problems posed by off-road vehicles, Bosworth said, are “erosion, water degradation and habitat destruction. We’re seeing more and more conflicts between users. We’re seeing more damage to cultural sites and more violation of sites sacred to American Indians.”

In Arizona, managers of the state’s five national forests have agreed to ban cross-country trailblazing by off-road vehicles, saying the damage inflicted on the land and wildlife is too great.

In Colorado’s Boulder County, Mark Boslough has been trying to keep off-roaders from trespassing on his family’s 300 acres for years.

The dispute has turned into a series of running battles. Boslough places boulders in the middle of his road; four-wheel-drive clubs hold outings to winch them out. Boslough plants hundreds of seedlings to restore a riverbed damaged by four-wheelers; off-roaders pull them up.

Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, says he has been threatened with violence on off-road Web sites, including lynching.

Dana Bell of Long Beach, Western representative on the National Off Highway Vehicle Conservation Council, a group of off-road enthusiasts, says the sport’s growth has outstripped officials’ ability to manage motorized recreation.

“We haven’t had the degree of management, education and enforcement necessary to prevent conflict between the different recreation groups and adjacent landowners,” Bell said “There are so few enforcement officers out there that their presence is totally missing.”

Amador agreed. “We’re willing to educate our members to respect the land, but we need leadership from Washington.”