Showdown in the desert sandbox

Vvrrrrroooooooooooooooooom. THIS MEETING of the American Sand Assn. will now come to order.

“You could say we’re rednecks!” hollers Bob Mason, 71, the vice chairman. But Greg Gorman, the 43-year-old chairman, gently disagrees.

“We’re gearheads!” says Gorman. Then their voices fade amid engine roar and the howl of wind across 40 miles of dunes.

We rouse ourselves from folding chairs, midway between El Centro and Yuma, at the edge of a 21st century wagon circle. RVs, dirt bikes, dune buggies, epic barbecue provisions -- the landscape is strewn with toys for men. On this Saturday morning, duner sons rev scaled-down ATVs and duner daughters peddle Girl Scout cookies trailer to trailer. The Mexican border lies less than a mile south. To the north, where we’re headed, rolls the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, biggest batch of dunes in the country.

Mason straps me, goggled and helmeted, into the shotgun seat of his home-built $40,000 buggy. He races the 410-cubic-inch sprint-car engine and engages an automatic transmission harvested from a ’79 Buick Riviera, and we creep away from the circle.

Gorman pulls on a helmet, boots and padded suit, throws a leg over his ATV -- a 400cc Suzuki quad -- and lets out the throttle. And suddenly we’re a hurtling convoy behind buggy driver Kurtis Forstie. We leap, careen and romp through the creamy hills and valleys -- a strangely smooth ride, because our shock absorbers are roughly the size of goal posts. Clinging to inclines no road builder would ever attempt, we avoid other duners by looking for the flags atop their mandatory 8-foot poles.

But risk is part of this. You can collide, roll, stick like a lawn dart into the face of a dune or tumble into one of the holes they call Witches’ Eyes.

We cover about 15 miles. Later I borrow an ATV, scramble over a few low dunes and nearly ram Gorman’s RV. No blood spills. Two days afterward, I’m still scraping grains out of my ears.

From one of these metallic beasts, the desert seems inexhaustible. But the longer you look, the smaller this playground gets.

Under pressure over endangered species, federal officials have been steadily cutting back the motorized vehicle territory here. The last big closing, a temporary measure blocking access to about 49,000 acres, came in late 2000 and left the duners with about 85,000 acres, their boundaries monitored by small plane. That’s roughly half the space they had 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, in October, the understaffed Bureau of Land Management tripled its fee here, so regulars pay $90 per vehicle per winter. People like me, dropping by for a week or less, pay a hefty $25.

Duners founded the American Sand Assn. three years ago, hoping to fend off closures and link arms with older pro-access groups. They’ve got 18,000 members now. With big decisions due in coming months, they say they’re spending more than $14,000 a month on attorneys and biologists.

Mason, a retired utility executive, has been driving out from Phoenix since the late ‘60s. Gorman, a software engineer, heads here from Mesa, Ariz., wife and two sons tucked into a 32-foot RV, four ATVs tucked into a trailer behind. Last winter they spent 62 days here.

The area is “a national resource that needs to be managed, for the off-road community as well as everybody else,” says Gorman. “That’s why we’re fighting so hard.”

He and his brethren are up against some big guns, though, including the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

While feds ponder how or whether to reopen those 49,000 acres, arguments persist over such questions as whether the Peirson’s milk vetch (a plant that grows in these sands) should be subtracted from the federal threatened species list or the Andrew’s dunes scarab beetle should be added. “There’s a difference between access and excess,” says Daniel Patterson, desert ecologist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They’ve got to know when to turn on the no-vacancy sign out there.”

So the duners’ enemies are a challenge. And so, in a way, are their friends. In January, California officials counted 717,000 registered ATVs, snowmobiles, dune buggies, sand rails and dirt bikes in the state, more than twice the total in 1980, when there was about twice as much space set aside statewide for them. Some weekends, more than 100,000 people turn up here.

The playing field shrinks, the players keep on coming and this wasn’t the safest sport on Earth to begin with. BLM officials have counted six fatalities and more than 1,300 injury accidents here since October 2001 -- smaller numbers than I expected, given the estimated 1.2 million visitors last year and the inevitable idiots among them.

Before law enforcement started cracking down and groups such as American Sand Assn. starting doing more self-policing a couple of years ago, it was routine for a winter holiday weekend to bring injuries and arrests by the score. In accounts of those nights, you come across the words “Mad Max” a lot. And you wonder why anybody would risk a species to preserve these people’s kicks. But then, rolling with Gorman, Mason and the Girl Scouts, you wonder what sense it makes to evict families and everyone else on wheels so the milk vetches can ripple in peace.

My answer is Sonoran Zen: I see skirmishing lawyers and battling biologists as two more creatures in the new desert ecology, essential as ocotillo stalks and those little lizards that swim through loose sand. We need the scratching and clawing for balance, along with the volunteers hooting and murmuring and rangers prowling. I like blasting up a wind-scoured slope well enough. But I like it better when I’m sure nobody’s on the other side.

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To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.