Untracked Utah: off-road vehicle sales are booming, but wilderness isn't a drive-thru experience

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 2003 by David Darlington

As the lowering sun suffused the castle-like spires of Family Butte. we picked our way across the sagebrush-and-pinon-dotted "Sinbad Country" of south-central Utah, 7.000 feet high in the heart of the San Rafael Swell. The day before, we'd hiked through the San Rafiwi Reel, a 1,500-foot wall of up-thrust flatiron composed of lowering, tilted slabs of multicolored sandstone. Now red rock was beginning to reappear. scores of sloping pediments capped by cliff's, swarming mesas standing on striated footings like laver cakes.

As I ogled this tableau, something began to compete for my attention. At first it sounded like a fly, then a lawnmower. then a chainsaw. Soon it became visible a yellow off-road motorcycle, its helmetless, sunglassed, goateed rider smoking a cigarette as he closed in on me from behind.

The bike zoomed past and disappeared downhill into the canyon. When we reached the bottom, I could still hear the whining engine working its way through the willows and cottonwoods along Muddy Creek. Soon it reappeared, cutting back cross-country toward me through the riparian vegetation on the valley floor. A hundred yards away, my companions were settling down for the night, but the peaceful stillness of the canyon was shattered as the rider went about the business of having fun.

THE SAN RAFAEL SWELL'S DOME-SHAPED UPLIFT IS THE northernmost example of "canyon country. As such, it is easily accessible to the burgeoning population of the Wasatch Front via Interstate Highway 70, which runs east-west through the middle of the region. This road was responsible for my own introduction to the 1,500-square-mile area when, en route from California to Colorado one Labor Day, I found myself in an astonishing landscape of shining mesas and plunging canyons, with violet shadows accentuating the outlines of vermilion, burgundy, and tapioca-colored sandstone carved into otherworldly shapes by eons of erosion. Later, when I happened to fly over the area, I realized how it had gotten its name: Stretching west from the Green River was an enormous, egg-shaped blister, red around the edges, which appeared to have been scoured and swept by some extraterrestrial broom.

Our group of 11 desert-hiking enthusiasts assembled at Justensen Flats, a high meadow area just off I-70. This also turned out to be a convenient meeting place for all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), whose riders use it as a jumping-off point for the northern San Rafael Swell. As I was waiting for my companions, four ATVs came roaring out of the backcountry, piloted by two fortyish couples who had piled coolers and gear on their rear racks for a day in the boondocks. Loading the $6,000 vehicles into an enormous panel van, they told me that it was possible to make a 50-mile loop from the point where we stood.

ATVs are four-wheel dirt bikes with knobby tires, compact engines, and indestructible frames. Easier to ride than motorcycles but less confining than jeeps, trucks, or sport-utility vehicles, they're engineered to power over or through everything from mud bogs to boulder fields to brush-shrouded streambeds. Whereas a motorcycle's wheels disturb one acre of topsoil in 20 miles of travel, an ATV churns up six. A subcategory of the vast and proliferating horde of off-road vehicles (ORVs), they appeared on the market in 1982, superseding the three-wheel version that was banned because of its high rate of rollovers and injuries.

ORV registration in Utah has quadrupled to 80,000 over the past dozen years, and the state is now second to California in ORV use. Even though associated fees contribute more than a million dollars to state coffers, only half of the protected areas in the San Rafael Swell have signs directing drivers onto sanctioned routes or informing them that off-trail riding is illegal. Since only one Bureau of Land Management ranger patrols the 2.5 million acres, compliance is largely voluntary.

"ATVs aren't going to go away," veteran rider Mark Williams, president of the SouthEastern Utah Off-Highway Vehicle Club, told me. "We're gaining more registrations every year. There's no way you can lock up [the Swell] and keep all the people out--you'd have to have an army. That's why, if they closed the roads into Sids Mountain, I think we'd ride 'em anyway. That area is just too vast, and the federal government doesn't have the manpower."

"A lot of our club members are in their 50s and 60s," says Williams, who is 62 himself. "One is in his 80s; others are in their 30s and 40s. Most of us drive SUVs, but it's much easier to use an ATV on rough dirt roads to see the country and hunt deer and elk. If we were all great hikers, maybe that would be the way to see the country, but I've got a heart condition so there's no way I can hike. Everybody ought to be able to see the deep canyons, though--Sids Mountain, Coal Wash, the Devil's Racetrack, and Eagle Canyon are the best-looking part of the San Rafael Swell. What good is a wilderness if nobody sees it?"

Our hiking group was intent on seeing the Swell, but without noisy machines. We ranged in experience and ability from Steve Thaw--one of 55 people to have climbed every major mountain in the Sierra Nevada--to those (like me) who were more gravitationally challenged. Our leader, Dave Holten, showed up in a T-shirt proclaiming "Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill." Holten, a 72-year-old retired engineer from Sparks, Nevada, has been backpacking since he was 12. Every spring he leads a camping and hiking sojourn to southern Utah, always including proposed wilderness areas in the itinerary. This year the first hike took us into the Sids Mountain Wilderness Study Area, stretching north from I-70 to the Little Grand Canyon of the San Rafael River, and including the state's densest concentration of desert bighorn sheep.