Off-Road Rules
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Off-roading is big business. Sales of everything from three-wheelers and snowmobiles to rock-crawling trucks quadrupled during the 1990s, with 36 million users fueling a $4.8 billion industry. Between 1979 and 2006, the number of registered off-road vehicles (orvs) in Utah alone went from about 9,000 to more than 500,000 (and many more go unregistered). Crowds at Moab's Easter Jeep Safari have been growing each year, with the motels on Main Street filling to capacity, restaurants overflowing, and mechanics working nonstop. The rodeo arena outside town turns into a trade show with booths offering outsize tires, gas-tank skid plates, superpowered winches, shock mounts, and the latest lines from Suzuki, Honda, Ford, and Chrysler.
Last year, Easter Safari attendants opened the event's 72-page newsprint brochure to find a full-page ad featuring a trio of cigar-chomping gangsters aiming Tommy guns and wearing slouch hats labeled "Sierra Club" and "Wilderness Society." The headline read, "These guys wanna rub you out! Their racket is to lock you out of YOUR public lands." The ad was paid for by the nation's largest orv group, the Idaho-based Blue Ribbon Coalition, whose sponsors include branches of the Honda, Harley Davidson, and Yamaha corporations, as well as major mining, timber, gas, and oil companies (see "Blue Ribbon Bedfellows," opposite page). The coalition, along with other off-road enthusiasts' associations, is a co-plaintiff in San Juan County's push to reopen Salt Creek Canyon via RS 2477.
For lobby groups like the Blue Ribbon Coalition, jeepers function as an informal army of RS 2477 missionaries. They blaze new trails or rediscover the old, hurtling along the abandoned mining paths and seismic-exploration lines that web southern Utah. And, in a perfect feedback loop, the jeepers also justify the counties' road claims: Here, after all, is public use.
I rented a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon on a sunny day not long ago, traveling a jagged trail that edged Arches National Park. The truck slammed and sloshed, leaped over boulders, and cracked its shanks against the limbs of piņons. There was thrill in the power of the vehicle, its acquisition of each hard mile. For eminently practical reasons alone, jeeps have a place on federal lands, as of course do roads. The question boils down to where, and how many. As far back as 1977, a National Science Foundation study noted that "orvs have now invaded an enormous variety of natural settings, from deserts and coastal dunes to forested mountains, and from fertile habitats for wildlife to unique refuges for relict flora and fauna.... Damage by orvs in even the least vulnerable areas will require periods for recovery measured in centuries or millennia.... Archaeological and historical features, relict landforms, primitive soils, and other legacies of irreplaceable cultural, aesthetic, and scientific value have also been permanently lost."
During Easter Jeep Safari last year, I stood in the crowd at Potato Salad Hill, a stretch of oil-stained red rock a half-mile outside Moab. A thousand people had formed a human amphitheater, watching the jeeps go up against the stone. A roaring creature resembling a prehistoric bug, stripped to roll cage and wheels and engine, crawled up the face; it hovered, shivered, lost footing, and finally it tipped end over end, thudding down the incline. Cheers and beers went up, and the driver walked away unhurt. Nearby was a derelict, pillbox-shaped gauging station for a stream flowing from the mountains east of Moab, a spot where women gathered to watch the machines. On its wall, someone had spray-painted Dr. Seuss' Lorax, mustache resplendent, arms upstretched.
Photo: Lisa Church
As for Private land, shoot the [deleted]ers if they are on YOUR PROPERTY.
If they are littering, then they should pay the price.
But as far a s PUBLIC land goes, let's keep it PUBLIC.