Photo by Jim Coit

Motorheads. “They’re fellow human beings. This is the only way they know how to enjoy their recreation time."

Sunday morning in the little desert pitstop of Burro Bend. Everything’s quiet. The sun has just risen over the Salton Sea; in the light, it looks like a vast oil slick. The gas station’s closed; the café’s locked up. The greasy restrooms are empty. Across the street there’s a small hill with a huge white cross on top glowing in the orange and pink dawn. Suddenly there’s a rumbling in the distance like an army of tanks, and on all sides a mushroom cloud of dust boils up on the horizon and converges toward the cross. The noise grows louder and louder, and wheels of all shapes and sizes emerge from the cloud, bouncing and wobbling across the rugged terrain.

Burro Bend. Suddenly there’s a rumbling in the distance like an army of tanks.

Then faces appear, grim and goggle-eyed, like sunburnt ghosts riding in the heart of dust devils. The roar of modified mufflers, backfiring glasspacks, and trembling headers is like a hot wind blowing in all directions at the same time. They race up the hill, skidding, sliding, jockeying for position, kicking up acres of gravel and dirt, right up to the very base of the cross. And then, as if there had been a signal from heaven, they all shut off their engines and the silence collapses around them while pillars of golden light descend through the swirling dust and radiate off the cross.

After church somebody on a dirt bike says, “Let’s make a run to the Salton Sea,” and they suck up their guts, strap on kidney belts to keep their innards from sloshing around, duck into their helmets.

Sunrise services in off-road vehicle land.

After church somebody on a dirt bike says, “Let’s make a run to the Salton Sea,” and they suck up their guts, strap on kidney belts to keep their innards from sloshing around, duck into their helmets, kick-start their lean, multi-colored, knobby-tired bikes, and scream out across the desert in weaving packs, leaping gulches, flying off hills, careening through sandy washes like madmen with paroxysms of the right wrist, escaping roads, ignoring trails, creating their own intricate network of criss-crossing pathways through the desert decorated with twisted king-pins, shattered headlights, bloated oil filters, tire shards, beer bottles, toilet paper, and tattered underwear; while shreds of daisies, lizards, ocotillo blossoms, creosote, mesquite, and confounded balls of brown beetles spray up on all sides like lawnmower clippings. And when they reach the Salton Sea, they turn around and come back in the same fashion.

They chatter back and forth in a slang of “wheelies,” “whoopty-woops,” “scrambles,” “enduros,” “topped-outs,” and “airbornes.”

In the meantime, their families and friends in dune buggies are waiting in line over at Blow Sand to take a run at the big dune. When it’s their turn they give the throttle a few trial revs, then tromp on it, pounding into the hillside, their faces pelted by a hot rain of sand, their bodies bouncing weightlessly up to the roll bar and back, while the driver's elbows fly around the steering wheel trying to hold the buggy to the mountain. When they get to the top they wait in line for their turn to go back down.

Dune buggy. “Sometimes it’s necessary to nurture your suicidal tendencies.”

And back at camp, inside the wagon-train circle of RVs, each of the kids has his own desert machine — a hopped-up VW, a trail bike, a stout three-wheeler, even a moped, which they are tuning up for the ultimate desert experience while they chatter back and forth in a slang of “wheelies,” “whoopty-woops,” “scrambles,” “enduros,” “topped-outs,” and “airbornes.”

“The important thing is that my family’s together.”

Why?

It’s hard to say. Most off-road vehicle users don’t verbalize about their sport. It's a physical experience, and they usually don’t or won’t talk about it. They’ll just say, “It’s a thrill,’’ and if you understand, then that's enough. But one old veteran with twelve years’ experience loosened up enough to muse, “It’s being in perfect tune with your body and your machine, pushing them both to the peak of performance and just a little bit beyond. It’s a level of awareness, of concentration. It’s being totally awake.’’

Whatever it is, it provides a kind of excitement that most people don’t get in their daily lives. And if that sounds like a flirtation with death, then as one dune buggy driver put it, “Sometimes it’s necessary to nurture your suicidal tendencies.”

But it isn’t all cheap thrills. They say that on an average weekend they'll spend about half their time just repairing their machines. So there they are out in the one hundred-degree sun, crawling around in the sand, a halo of gas fumes over their heads, grease to their elbows, blood on their knuckles, gravel pitting their sunglasses, and foam on their mouth, trying to untangle a transmission linkage. And they say it’s fun! Ask them why, and they’ll say because they fixed it, they made it work with nothing but know-how, a six-pack of beer, and a little help from their friends.

Motorheads, they love their machines.

Likewise, they’ll take a brand-new $6,000 four-wheel drive up to Mt. Laguna and run it up to the axles in three feet of sucking mud. Why? So they can pull it out. So they can test their equipment and their mechanical savvy. There will be a whole group of them slogging around in the mud, talking it up, swapping little tricks of machine wisdom. And when they finally coax that hulk of metal across the muck, there’ll be a flurry of backslapping, hat-tossing, whooping and hollering, and the pop-tops will fly like snowflakes.

They love it. It’s a new form of recreation, and San Diego County, with 173,000 off-highway vehicles, is pretty close to being the world center for it. Yet there are only two places in the entire county, Ocotillo Wells and Bronco Flats, where they can legally go, and this has caused an emotionally intense and hotly contested controversy that is only beginning to be resolved.

The issue, of course, is between the conservationists who want to see what’s left of the deserts and mountains of San Diego County preserved, have said that there is no place on God’s green earth for a dune buggy, and call the off-road vehicle (ORV) users “land locusts,” “cheap thrill seekers,” and “unethical gas guzzlers”; and between the ORV users who call the conservationists “nature fakers,” “environmeddlers,” and even despicable names like “Sierra Clubbers,” and suggest the whole lot of them go take a hike to hell.

John Hobbs, a political science professor at San Diego State who has been outspoken on the side of the conservationists, says, “We have been disturbed to see our desert lands usurped by people with no land ethic whatsoever.” As far as trying to work out a compromise between the ORV users and those who prefer a quieter approach to enjoying the desert, he says, “The two are incompatible. The noise an ORV user makes extends out of his space for perhaps a mile, while the hiker's space extends maybe five feet . . . The only compromise possible is when the conservationists say we are willing for there to be ORV parks in the western one-third of the county . . . But when we suggested that be done in the Santee area, where thirty-five percent of the ORV users live, they really went up in arms, because it would demean their homes and affect their property values.”

Ivan McDermott, on the other hand, is active in defending the ORV users. “Most of them don’t know what they’re talking about, so I represent them,” he says, and cites a long list of committees and organizations he works for. “It’s the only way for some people to get out of the rat race of the city and into an area where there’s not a lot of people and the average person, like me, who works behind a desk, couldn’t get to." He insists that the ORV users have been labeled the bad guys in this controversy only because of the few abusers. “Some of them don’t even realize they're doing things they shouldn't be doing . . . But we’re trying to educate people. We have dealers who are willing to train young riders ... We have clean-ups and repair jobs. A four-wheel drive club recently re-seeded an area in McCain Valley. We want to see parks established, because then the county can control it.”

And what is the possibility of ORV parks being established in San Diego County? Right now the county has a grant of $750,000 to build a park, and can get $2 million more from the state by simply applying for it. But the money is going begging because nobody can agree yet on where the park should be.

“Until now the whole county has been like an ORV park,” says Loraine Costa of the County Integrated Planning Office, which has been working for the past several years, in cooperation with a citizens advisory committee, on a compromise plan for ORV use in the county. Their plan has yet to be approved by the county planning commission, “but we’ve addressed the problem; we’ve laid the groundwork.” All government agencies found that they had been caught off guard by the sudden popularity of ORV use and are only now attempting to control it. Briefly, what the plan does is try to accommodate the needs of both sides of the controversy, establish areas for ORV parks in the county, and set the guidelines for those parks. “It satisfies everybody and nobody, so I think it’s a pretty good plan,” says Costa.

The funds for these parks, which are beginning to appear all over the state, come from the ORV users themselves in the form of a fifteen-dollar fee charged by the state to register an ORV for two years. This money, called “Green Sticker Money,’’ has been accumulating since 1972 and is readily available to all local governments in the form of yearly rebates and grants. ORV users have resisted paying this fee (in fact, an estimated twenty-six percent of the ORVs in the county go unregistered even though they are in violation of the vehicle code) because at first the money was used to enforce the regulations. Why, they wonder, pay fifteen dollars to have somebody write you a ticket? But more recently, the money is being used to establish parks and facilities for the ORV users, and even the conservationists are benefiting from the money because in more than one instance it has been used to excavate archaeological sites and to protect rare plants.

At the moment, Green Sticker Money is being used by the state parks to purchase 14,000 acres near Ocotillo Wells in an area that has already been heavily, although illegally, used by ORV users for years. The land being purchased is perhaps the least scenic in the area, and it is hoped that by channeling the use into this spot some of the pressure can be taken off the more delicate areas of the Anza Borrego, where ORV use is not allowed but the regulations are mostly unenforceable.

The Bureau of Land Management, which regulates about 185,000 acres in San Diego County, which probably have more ORV use than any other areas, can't receive the Green Sticker Money because it is a federal and not a state agency. It is currently undergoing a thorough re-evaluation of its management plans, including inventories of archaeological sites, wildlife areas, mining, grazing, and ORV use, according to Richard Tobin of the bureau, “but rather than come up with a haphazard plan, we are allowing ORV use until we can establish a total plan.” This means that although there are no designated areas for ORV use on the federal land, it is being tolerated. “When people say the BLM is closing out the desert, they are misinformed. More than ninety percent of the desert is open to ORV use,” Tobin says. But in an area where the original pioneers' wagon tracks are still etched in the earth as though they were made yesterday, ORV damage is irreversible. For that reason, the authorities are asking people to stay on the established roads.

Every weekend Charlie Tuck is one of those unseen faces hidden under a motorcycle helmet, charging through the desert on the rear wheel of a Yamaha; the kind of guy you might think drinks gasoline and chews on old tires when he’s hungry, wears his motorcycle boots to bed, and has every great geological era represented by the sediment on his mud flaps. But back in town, when he's out in the front yard washing his car with his two sons, you can see it’s not like that at all, no machine-crazed glint in his eye, no carbon-monoxide withdrawals. Just a young healthy father who looks like he could -be somebody’s favorite neighbor, and who speaks with the care of a man who's put a lot of thought into the things he says.

“The times I remember my own father are when I think about the things we did together, the places we went ... I want my own sons to have that, and going out to the desert has done that for us, it’s brought us together . . . We enjoy the riding, the coming against all the obstacles and finding a way around them. But there are the other benefits too; the things we’ve learned about motorcycle engines — we could take them apart and put them back together again; I could probably make a living as a welder now if I had to…”

He smiles, drops his washrag, wipes his hands on his pants, and looks down. “I know motorcycles can be offensive. I wouldn’t want to go up to Palomar and see a bunch of bikes riding all around. There’s different ways to enjoy the land. We take our bikes to the desert because it can handle it. We go out there one time, ride up and down a wash, go back again later and the wash isn’t even there, no sign of it . . . But just because we’re on bikes doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the beauty. It’s beautiful out there! We went up to Squaw Peak, got off our bikes, got down on our hands and knees and crawled around looking at the rocks. We spent twenty minutes just looking at the rocks.”

He walks slowly over to his garage, which is filled with a camper, a dune buggy, a desert VW, a motorboat, several motorcycles, other toys, tools, weekend paraphernalia. “Some people say we use more than our share of gas. We got kind of caught up in this gas thing as you can see, but then how much gas does it take to get someplace where you can go skiing? To heat a hotel room? How much gas does it take to drive up the Sierras to go backpacking? Everybody uses gas . . . I’d pay a dollar a gallon to do what we do.”

Each one of his desert machines has a green sticker, which represents at least S75 in state fees for his family to enjoy their sport. “I register them all,” he says. “We obey the rules, the boundaries. I teach my sons to, but there will always be somebody who won’t. It’ll always be that way. You put a guy on a bike inside a fence, and in a few minutes he'll have ridden around the whole place and want to go somewhere else.”

His sons stick close to him, listening to what he has to say, nodding their agreement. They show off a couple of twisted handlebars they keep around like trophies. “We do a lot of other things, we go diving, we go backpacking . . . Some people drive a small car to the mountains, walk everywhere they go and want everything to look untouched. I wish it could be that way, but even the waffle stompers those people are wearing tear up the mountains . . . We hiked up to Tamarack Lakes. There was trash on the trail, under the trees, in the water. Those people destroyed the thing they went to see.”

Charlie could talk about this forever. “But the important thing,” he repeats, “is that my family’s together.”

Stan Allgeier, district ranger for Cleveland National Forest, has an unusual approach to the ORV issue, which he explains while cruising along behind the wheel of a Forest Service pick-up looking at the areas on Mt. Laguna which were closed to ORV use this winter.

”ORV users are going to do their thing, and I don’t blame them. - If I had the money I’d buy a dirt bike right now because it's just a thrill. But we go along and set the rules and regulations about ORV use, which the people won’t accept; then we’re caught in a power struggle, and they’re going to win every time.” He points out an area where ORVs are allowed to use the dirt road but aren’t allowed off of it. If they’re caught off the road they’re given a citation, but the road is only patrolled maybe once in a heavy weekend, or not at all. “The people accept the citation as the price of admission to their sport. They already have hundreds of dollars invested, and a citation isn’t going to stop them.

“It’s true that they have no respect for the land, but the single largest cause of erosion in the forest, including logging, is roads . . . Look.” he says, pointing across Interstate 8 to a heavily eroded bank carved out of the mountainside, “we accept that because it’s for a freeway, but then we walk across the street, find a four-wheel-drive track in the mud, and say ‘what a pity’. What is erosion? Sometimes we assume that any change in the environment is damage; but is that true, or is it just change?”

In other places, though, the damage is obvious. He points out places on Mt. Laguna where ugly ruts cut across once pristine alpine meadows, scars which were caused only last winter but will now be there for many years. He points out places where areas have been blocked off by placing boulders across the access roads, but ORV users came out in the night, like impish elves, and rolled away the massive stones. He cruises past places denuded by the Mt. Laguna fire some years ago where crews have been working to reforest the hillside, but the tiny seedlings were mowed down by ORV users enjoying the snow. “These things are just unacceptable,” he says. He points out ruts three feet deep in dirt roads. “These were caused in a single day. We don’t have the engineering department to maintain these roads.” The area was finally closed because of an executive order from Jimmy Carter to all federal agencies, which says, essentially, that any agency head shall close areas under his management if it has been determined that the land has suffered damage because of ORV use.

“But management by exclusion is easy,” Allgeier says. “The problem is that we don’t have a handle on disperse-type camping. We don’t understand the sociological aspects of recreation, and we offer very few alternatives.”

There are also other government agencies involved in regulating ORV use in San Diego County. An example of how they are interrelated: The day after the Sand Pit, a popular but illegal ORV area in Santee, was closed, a picture appeared on the front page of a local paper showing a young man on a three-wheeler doing a wheelie in the snow on Mt. Laguna. The next day the Forest Service was besieged by an army of ORV users trying to get to the snow.

The plan outlined by the County Off-Road Vehicle Advisory Committee suggests that the Marine Corps and the Navy might provide areas for ORVs, but the Navy only mumbles cynically, “That is highly unlikely.” And the Commandant of the Marine Corps himself flatly stated that “none will be allowed.” The reason, according to a Marine public affairs officer is, “the danger of dead ordnance pieces,” meaning that Camp Pendleton is riddled with unexploded shells. “We’re also very ecology minded here,” he’s quick to add.

Another alternative for ORV users is private land. But an odd coalition between conservationists and landowners has been forming lately. To most landowners, an ORV user is a fence-cutting, cattle-rustling, hog-stealing, grass-stomping SOB. At least two popular ORV areas, the Sand Pit and Otay Rancho, both private land, have been closed, barbed wire fences put up, and armed guards hired to keep ORV users out. The conservationists, likewise, want to see a revision of the trespass ordinance, which currently states that an area has to be posted “No Trespassing” to keep people out, an invitation, they say, for ORV users to tear the signs down and go where they like. In some other counties the ordinance states that a trespasser must have written permission to enter private land.

Perhaps the future of ORV use is for private enterprise to open specially designed ORV parks, such as the successful Saddleback Park in Orange County. But the ORV users grumble that with the restrictions in the proposed San Diego County plan, that kind of arrangement is going to be extremely difficult here. Still, there are already people trying.

Some kind of compromise is going to be worked out, and is being worked out, even though the two sides have disagreed so violently. And that seems to be the astonishing part of it, that a compromise is possible.

Mitch Beauchamp, who describes himself as “probably the leading botanical consultant in San Diego County until the Mafia bumps me off,” seems to represent the spirit of the compromise. He is a conservationist who has lent his talents to the enemy’s camp by working to see that the ORV users got their land in Ocotillo Wells, but at the same time seeing that two rare plants there, the orchuts astor and the imperial buckwheat were set aside and protected. “They’re fellow human beings,” he says of ORV enthusiasts. “This is the only way they know how to enjoy their recreation time. I don’t agree with them; I think they have an immoral point of view because of the fossil fuel shortage, but they have that right. This is the way our country is run. But you can’t change people. The next two generations will have to put up with this insanity. They are destroying my resources, but I would rather localize this destruction than have it random ... It isn’t possible to completely control these people, but we can control them more than we are now.”