Off-road battle revs up in Utah
By Photos and Story by BOBBY MAGILL
The Daily Sentinel
Sunday, January 21, 2007
AINEVILLE, Utah — Some call Swing Arm City, near southern Utah’s Factory Butte, God’s gift to motor bikers. Others call it ugly, desolate and good for nothing but a great time with dirt and a throttle.
It’s “the baddest badlands in America,” said Caineville business owner Randy Ramsley.
A popular riding spot for western Colorado off-roaders, Swing Arm City is the unofficial name of a 2,600-acre motor sports playground riddled with Mancos shale hills, bike-tracked, knife-edge ridges and rutted ravines.
The badland is part of a 144,000-acre tract of public land in Wayne County between Utah Highway 24 and Capitol Reef National Park, known all over the West as one of the greatest cross-country riding areas on the Colorado Plateau.
But when the Bureau of Land Management told off-roaders to stay on trails last September to protect two endangered cacti, it angered Wayne County officials so much that they’re proposing to allow motor bikers to ignore the BLM’s closure and ratchet up the vitriol in the off-highway vehicle community that already is hopping mad about all-terrain-vehicle trail closures throughout the San Rafael Swell region of central Utah.
“What (impact) it will have is: There are less of the areas around that allow travel off the specific, designated trails,” said John Martin, who operates Motorcycle Accessories in Grand Junction and sits on the Northwest Colorado BLM Resource Advisory Council. “You can draw a picture of what’s going to happen (in Utah) and put 6-to-1 odds on it happening at almost every location.”
Western Colorado off-roaders often go to Factory Butte and the San Rafael Swell to ride during the winter, he said. “That part of Utah is kind of suburban to what we do here. It’s a day-trip ride to us.”
Evidence showing off-roaders are harming the endangered Winkler cactus and Wright’s fishhook cactus prompted the BLM on Sept. 20 to issue an emergency closure order for cross-country riding on 142,000 acres of the Factory Butte area, requiring all off-roaders to remain on designated routes.
The BLM keeps information about where the cactus grows secret, even for those who just want to take a picture of one.
“That information I’m definitely not allowed to give you,” Sue Fivecoat, recreation planner for the BLM’s Henry Mountains Field Station in Hanksville, said Tuesday.
The Factory Butte area likely will remain closed to cross-country motorized-vehicle use until at least 2008, when the BLM is expected to implement its revised management plan for the area, she said.
Swing Arm City remains open, but you don’t have to stray far before BLM signs begin telling you where to ride.
The controversy over Factory Butte is the latest development in many years of setbacks for off-roaders, many of whom remain angry at the BLM for closing parts of the nearby San Rafael Swell to cross-country travel at various times over the last decade.
“We’re kind of bitter,” said Brian Hawthorne, a former Grand Junction resident and Utah Shared Access Alliance, or USA-ALL, employee who now serves as the public lands director for the Blue Ribbon Coalition, an off-highway-vehicle advocacy group.
“You close us out of the Dirty Devil; you told us to go to Factory Butte. You don’t want us on the Moroni Slopes, and told us to go to Factory Butte. Now you’re wanting to lock us out of Factory Butte, too. All we want is to protect this one area that we have left that allows us to enjoy this sort of rare OHV experience,” Hawthorne said.
It’s a tenuous, vitriolic and potentially deadly situation.
Ramsley, who owns the Mesa Market a mile or two down Highway 24 from Swing Arm City, said he has received numerous death threats from off-roaders miffed that he’s been outspoken in opposing unfettered cross-country access to Factory Butte.
In October, Richard Beardall, president of the Utah-based Americans With Disabilities Access Alliance, and other group members protested the BLM closing vehicle access to Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell. The group removed the BLM’s barricade above Muddy Creek at the old Hidden Splendor Uranium Mine north of Factory Butte to send a message to the agency that the elderly and disabled want motorized access to places they can no longer visit. The BLM issued citations to many of the protesters.
In USA-ALL newsletters stacked in the Wayne County Courthouse in tiny Loa, group president Rainer Huck proclaims the BLM caved to “radical environmentalists” at Factory Butte in order to, he fears, “exterminate traditional motorized recreation” and eventually manage the area as wilderness.
Environmentalists were determined to close Factory Butte to cross-country vehicle use any way they could, and they finally succeeded after the BLM discovered the Endangered Species Act could lock out off-roaders, said Mark Williams, president of the Southeast Utah OHV Club.
“They had to go out and really do some research to find the cactus,” he said.
TAKING ON THE BLM
Upset that the BLM and environmentalists are swiping away Utah’s prized play areas, Wayne County officials are fighting back.
Disregarding the authority of the BLM, the county is developing its own management plan for 190,000 acres around Factory Butte, an area the county’s proposal calls the “Factory Butte Cross Country OHV Special Recreation Management Area,” which would stretch from Highway 24 north of Hanksville all the way to Capitol Reef National Park.
The proposal, up for review by the Wayne County Planning and Zoning Commission on Jan. 24, proclaims the Factory Butte area open for cross-country motorized-vehicle use “24 hours a day.”
“It is our intent to amend the county plan to include the Factory Butte and recreation area,” said Wayne County Commissioner Stanley Wood. “The purpose is to preserve traditional OHV use by establishing the Factory Butte OHV Management Area.”
The county wants to keep the BLM from building fences around cactus habitat, he said.
The proposal calls for off-roaders to stay on trails only in areas where the cacti are found. But the federal government’s judgment on where endangered cactus habitat exists isn’t good enough. The presence of either cactus must be “independently verified by and to the satisfaction of Wayne County officials,” according to the proposal.
But that’s only when the cacti are growing above the ground, says the proposal, adding that when the cacti are dormant and have retracted beneath the surface, cross-country motorized-vehicle use in those areas is fair game.
But damage to the cacti can happen any time of the year, said Heather Barnes, a botanist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Salt Lake City.
Off-roaders can easily crush the cacti, and their motor-bike tracks can compact the soil, change the water drainage patterns in the area and prevent plant seeds from germinating.
A study conducted by University of Arizona adjunct geosciences professor John C. Dohrenwend, Ph.D., reports that off-road vehicles have removed three inches of soil totaling 1 million pounds per acre on Mancos shale slopes in the Swing Arm City area.
“This additional erosion has been occurring at a rate that is nearly four times higher than the natural erosion rate in the Caineville badlands,” he wrote.
Thus, Barnes said of the BLM’s closure at Factory Butte: “It’s just to balance the needs of the ecosystem with the (off-road) activity.”
The BLM’s position on Wayne County’s proposal is clear: “They don’t have the authority to do that, kind of out-of-hand determine what kind of actions will take place on federal land,” said Mary Wilson, spokeswoman for the BLM’s Utah state office.
If Wayne County commissioners approve the OHV management area, they’ll be attempting to usurp federal authority over public land and be inviting a lawsuit, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance Moab representative Liz Thomas said.
“Public lands is not something that’s under the control of the county commission,” she said. “Everybody has a voice in the decision process the BLM goes through. ... They definitely have to restrict off-road-vehicle use in areas where there’s considerable adverse effects.”
Wood and Commissioner DeRae Fillmore said they are newly-elected and not entirely familiar with the Factory Butte issue. Neither would comment about whether the county is trying to usurp federal authority with its OHV management area proposal.
The county’s proposal may be included in public comments submitted in response to a pending draft resource management plan for the Factory Butte area, Wilson said.
Utah OHV clubs advocating for more public-lands access also may have the support of off-roaders from western Colorado who say they use the Factory Butte and San Rafael Swell areas almost on a weekly basis.
“As for closing parts of the (San Rafael Swell and Factory Butte) area, we strongly oppose it in the cases where there is no compensation, no public input and no logical demonstrated reason,” said John Potter, treasurer of the Fruita-based Bookcliff Rattlers Motorcycle Club.
There are more OHVs in Utah and Colorado now than ever before, he said, and the BLM should accommodate expanded use.
A “BLATANT ASSAULT”
Evoking the image of a derelict auto-manufacturing plant, Factory Butte hovers over a desiccated, alien, desert landscape blanketed with endless trails of countless dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles and pickup trucks.
Hiking to the foot of the Pinnacle, a lone rock formation a few miles north of Swing Arm City within the area the BLM closed to cross-country riding, Ramsley followed a track imprinted into the loose soil by what looked to be a pickup truck.
All over the area, recent motor bike tracks crisscross beneath the Pinnacle, in some places forming inverted, U-shaped trails on steep slopes beneath the towering rocks. Contrary to claims by some off-roaders, including Beardall, that motor bike tracks disappear after each rainstorm, Ramsley said there are some on his property that have been there for years.
He said he’s angry that such a beautiful place can be marred by people who have little connection with nature.
For off-roaders, he said, “it’s all about twisting the throttle.”
Ramsley moved to this water-sculpted desert hinterland about a decade ago, sank his life savings into his organic farm and market, and now celebrates each day living beneath night skies nearly as dark and starlit as you’re able to find anywhere.
Wayne County’s OHV Management Area proposal “is a blatant assault on me,” Ramsley said, because the crowds of “rip-roaring, tear-it-up-anywhere-you-want-to-ride” off-roaders would destroy his business and quality of life by marring the landscape he loves, kicking up clouds of dust that obscure his desert views and generally disturbing the peace.
“This is a designated scenic highway,” he said. “What (tourists) see are tire tracks instead of scenery.”
The death threats have done little to improve the situation, he said.
After he realized the damage off-roaders were doing to the Factory Butte area, he said he decided to serve on a BLM committee addressing off-road access at Factory Butte, formed after the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance petitioned the BLM to restrict motorized-vehicle use there to protect the cacti and the soil.
“Factory (Butte) is different from anything else we’ve ever done,” Thomas said. “When the BLM got out on the ground with the (committee), it was clear that there wasn’t a whole lot of options. They had to close that area.”
But the representatives of many of the towns and counties on the committee showed that they and the BLM are biased toward OHV use regardless of reasonable arguments supporting conservation, Ramsley said.
On the last day the committee met, “those boys said no compromise, no consensus,” he said, referring to Wayne County Commissioners and motorized-vehicle advocates.
Many of them were opposed to scientific arguments for curbing cross-country OHV use, he said.
“They didn’t want to hear anything about impacts,” Ramsley said.
The county is pandering to a handful of off-roaders and ignoring those who come to the area for its scenery, he said, adding he just wishes the off-roaders would listen to conservationists who want to try to preserve the ecology and scenery at Factory Butte while sharing the area with OHV users.
“There’s a very radical element of anti-environmentalist types that make life very difficult for anyone with the propensity to stand up and buck the trend,” he said. “It’s typical Sagebrush Rebellion mentality we’re dealing with here.”
The off-road community claims it’s environmentalists such as Ramsley who are the ones stonewalling any progress to work together with the federal government to create a land-use plan everyone can agree with.
“That’s the scariest part about Factory Butte, is that there’s just not been a good dialogue,” said Emery County, Utah, Economic Development Director Mike McCandless.
Much of the San Rafael Swell lies within Emery County, which has been working with the BLM office in Price to develop a management plan for the northern parts of the swell, generally north of Interstate 70. But, McCandless said, what happens at Factory Butte has implications for what could happen elsewhere in the swell.
The problem with environmentalists, he said, is that when they say saving a cactus is an emergency or they file a lawsuit to force the federal government to shut off public lands to off-roaders, “you end up bringing in the extreme on both sides of the issue.”
“You get those (environmentalists) who don’t want to see cooperation because it takes away their reason for existence,” McCandless said. “It leads to these stupid things like death threats and all of that ... because (environmentalists are) not at the table.”
Ramsley, however, said environmentalists are at the table and often willing to compromise, but the needs of the ecosystem must be accounted for.
“The machines are stronger than the land,” he said. “Any limitation on the machine, it’s all a political firestorm. Anyone counter to the ideology that the machines should be able to go pretty much everywhere is pretty much hung out.”
By Photos and Story by BOBBY MAGILL
The Daily Sentinel
Sunday, January 21, 2007
AINEVILLE, Utah — Some call Swing Arm City, near southern Utah’s Factory Butte, God’s gift to motor bikers. Others call it ugly, desolate and good for nothing but a great time with dirt and a throttle.
It’s “the baddest badlands in America,” said Caineville business owner Randy Ramsley.
A popular riding spot for western Colorado off-roaders, Swing Arm City is the unofficial name of a 2,600-acre motor sports playground riddled with Mancos shale hills, bike-tracked, knife-edge ridges and rutted ravines.
The badland is part of a 144,000-acre tract of public land in Wayne County between Utah Highway 24 and Capitol Reef National Park, known all over the West as one of the greatest cross-country riding areas on the Colorado Plateau.
But when the Bureau of Land Management told off-roaders to stay on trails last September to protect two endangered cacti, it angered Wayne County officials so much that they’re proposing to allow motor bikers to ignore the BLM’s closure and ratchet up the vitriol in the off-highway vehicle community that already is hopping mad about all-terrain-vehicle trail closures throughout the San Rafael Swell region of central Utah.
“What (impact) it will have is: There are less of the areas around that allow travel off the specific, designated trails,” said John Martin, who operates Motorcycle Accessories in Grand Junction and sits on the Northwest Colorado BLM Resource Advisory Council. “You can draw a picture of what’s going to happen (in Utah) and put 6-to-1 odds on it happening at almost every location.”
Western Colorado off-roaders often go to Factory Butte and the San Rafael Swell to ride during the winter, he said. “That part of Utah is kind of suburban to what we do here. It’s a day-trip ride to us.”
Evidence showing off-roaders are harming the endangered Winkler cactus and Wright’s fishhook cactus prompted the BLM on Sept. 20 to issue an emergency closure order for cross-country riding on 142,000 acres of the Factory Butte area, requiring all off-roaders to remain on designated routes.
The BLM keeps information about where the cactus grows secret, even for those who just want to take a picture of one.
“That information I’m definitely not allowed to give you,” Sue Fivecoat, recreation planner for the BLM’s Henry Mountains Field Station in Hanksville, said Tuesday.
The Factory Butte area likely will remain closed to cross-country motorized-vehicle use until at least 2008, when the BLM is expected to implement its revised management plan for the area, she said.
Swing Arm City remains open, but you don’t have to stray far before BLM signs begin telling you where to ride.
The controversy over Factory Butte is the latest development in many years of setbacks for off-roaders, many of whom remain angry at the BLM for closing parts of the nearby San Rafael Swell to cross-country travel at various times over the last decade.
“We’re kind of bitter,” said Brian Hawthorne, a former Grand Junction resident and Utah Shared Access Alliance, or USA-ALL, employee who now serves as the public lands director for the Blue Ribbon Coalition, an off-highway-vehicle advocacy group.
“You close us out of the Dirty Devil; you told us to go to Factory Butte. You don’t want us on the Moroni Slopes, and told us to go to Factory Butte. Now you’re wanting to lock us out of Factory Butte, too. All we want is to protect this one area that we have left that allows us to enjoy this sort of rare OHV experience,” Hawthorne said.
It’s a tenuous, vitriolic and potentially deadly situation.
Ramsley, who owns the Mesa Market a mile or two down Highway 24 from Swing Arm City, said he has received numerous death threats from off-roaders miffed that he’s been outspoken in opposing unfettered cross-country access to Factory Butte.
In October, Richard Beardall, president of the Utah-based Americans With Disabilities Access Alliance, and other group members protested the BLM closing vehicle access to Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell. The group removed the BLM’s barricade above Muddy Creek at the old Hidden Splendor Uranium Mine north of Factory Butte to send a message to the agency that the elderly and disabled want motorized access to places they can no longer visit. The BLM issued citations to many of the protesters.
In USA-ALL newsletters stacked in the Wayne County Courthouse in tiny Loa, group president Rainer Huck proclaims the BLM caved to “radical environmentalists” at Factory Butte in order to, he fears, “exterminate traditional motorized recreation” and eventually manage the area as wilderness.
Environmentalists were determined to close Factory Butte to cross-country vehicle use any way they could, and they finally succeeded after the BLM discovered the Endangered Species Act could lock out off-roaders, said Mark Williams, president of the Southeast Utah OHV Club.
“They had to go out and really do some research to find the cactus,” he said.
TAKING ON THE BLM
Upset that the BLM and environmentalists are swiping away Utah’s prized play areas, Wayne County officials are fighting back.
Disregarding the authority of the BLM, the county is developing its own management plan for 190,000 acres around Factory Butte, an area the county’s proposal calls the “Factory Butte Cross Country OHV Special Recreation Management Area,” which would stretch from Highway 24 north of Hanksville all the way to Capitol Reef National Park.
The proposal, up for review by the Wayne County Planning and Zoning Commission on Jan. 24, proclaims the Factory Butte area open for cross-country motorized-vehicle use “24 hours a day.”
“It is our intent to amend the county plan to include the Factory Butte and recreation area,” said Wayne County Commissioner Stanley Wood. “The purpose is to preserve traditional OHV use by establishing the Factory Butte OHV Management Area.”
The county wants to keep the BLM from building fences around cactus habitat, he said.
The proposal calls for off-roaders to stay on trails only in areas where the cacti are found. But the federal government’s judgment on where endangered cactus habitat exists isn’t good enough. The presence of either cactus must be “independently verified by and to the satisfaction of Wayne County officials,” according to the proposal.
But that’s only when the cacti are growing above the ground, says the proposal, adding that when the cacti are dormant and have retracted beneath the surface, cross-country motorized-vehicle use in those areas is fair game.
But damage to the cacti can happen any time of the year, said Heather Barnes, a botanist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Salt Lake City.
Off-roaders can easily crush the cacti, and their motor-bike tracks can compact the soil, change the water drainage patterns in the area and prevent plant seeds from germinating.
A study conducted by University of Arizona adjunct geosciences professor John C. Dohrenwend, Ph.D., reports that off-road vehicles have removed three inches of soil totaling 1 million pounds per acre on Mancos shale slopes in the Swing Arm City area.
“This additional erosion has been occurring at a rate that is nearly four times higher than the natural erosion rate in the Caineville badlands,” he wrote.
Thus, Barnes said of the BLM’s closure at Factory Butte: “It’s just to balance the needs of the ecosystem with the (off-road) activity.”
The BLM’s position on Wayne County’s proposal is clear: “They don’t have the authority to do that, kind of out-of-hand determine what kind of actions will take place on federal land,” said Mary Wilson, spokeswoman for the BLM’s Utah state office.
If Wayne County commissioners approve the OHV management area, they’ll be attempting to usurp federal authority over public land and be inviting a lawsuit, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance Moab representative Liz Thomas said.
“Public lands is not something that’s under the control of the county commission,” she said. “Everybody has a voice in the decision process the BLM goes through. ... They definitely have to restrict off-road-vehicle use in areas where there’s considerable adverse effects.”
Wood and Commissioner DeRae Fillmore said they are newly-elected and not entirely familiar with the Factory Butte issue. Neither would comment about whether the county is trying to usurp federal authority with its OHV management area proposal.
The county’s proposal may be included in public comments submitted in response to a pending draft resource management plan for the Factory Butte area, Wilson said.
Utah OHV clubs advocating for more public-lands access also may have the support of off-roaders from western Colorado who say they use the Factory Butte and San Rafael Swell areas almost on a weekly basis.
“As for closing parts of the (San Rafael Swell and Factory Butte) area, we strongly oppose it in the cases where there is no compensation, no public input and no logical demonstrated reason,” said John Potter, treasurer of the Fruita-based Bookcliff Rattlers Motorcycle Club.
There are more OHVs in Utah and Colorado now than ever before, he said, and the BLM should accommodate expanded use.
A “BLATANT ASSAULT”
Evoking the image of a derelict auto-manufacturing plant, Factory Butte hovers over a desiccated, alien, desert landscape blanketed with endless trails of countless dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles and pickup trucks.
Hiking to the foot of the Pinnacle, a lone rock formation a few miles north of Swing Arm City within the area the BLM closed to cross-country riding, Ramsley followed a track imprinted into the loose soil by what looked to be a pickup truck.
All over the area, recent motor bike tracks crisscross beneath the Pinnacle, in some places forming inverted, U-shaped trails on steep slopes beneath the towering rocks. Contrary to claims by some off-roaders, including Beardall, that motor bike tracks disappear after each rainstorm, Ramsley said there are some on his property that have been there for years.
He said he’s angry that such a beautiful place can be marred by people who have little connection with nature.
For off-roaders, he said, “it’s all about twisting the throttle.”
Ramsley moved to this water-sculpted desert hinterland about a decade ago, sank his life savings into his organic farm and market, and now celebrates each day living beneath night skies nearly as dark and starlit as you’re able to find anywhere.
Wayne County’s OHV Management Area proposal “is a blatant assault on me,” Ramsley said, because the crowds of “rip-roaring, tear-it-up-anywhere-you-want-to-ride” off-roaders would destroy his business and quality of life by marring the landscape he loves, kicking up clouds of dust that obscure his desert views and generally disturbing the peace.
“This is a designated scenic highway,” he said. “What (tourists) see are tire tracks instead of scenery.”
The death threats have done little to improve the situation, he said.
After he realized the damage off-roaders were doing to the Factory Butte area, he said he decided to serve on a BLM committee addressing off-road access at Factory Butte, formed after the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance petitioned the BLM to restrict motorized-vehicle use there to protect the cacti and the soil.
“Factory (Butte) is different from anything else we’ve ever done,” Thomas said. “When the BLM got out on the ground with the (committee), it was clear that there wasn’t a whole lot of options. They had to close that area.”
But the representatives of many of the towns and counties on the committee showed that they and the BLM are biased toward OHV use regardless of reasonable arguments supporting conservation, Ramsley said.
On the last day the committee met, “those boys said no compromise, no consensus,” he said, referring to Wayne County Commissioners and motorized-vehicle advocates.
Many of them were opposed to scientific arguments for curbing cross-country OHV use, he said.
“They didn’t want to hear anything about impacts,” Ramsley said.
The county is pandering to a handful of off-roaders and ignoring those who come to the area for its scenery, he said, adding he just wishes the off-roaders would listen to conservationists who want to try to preserve the ecology and scenery at Factory Butte while sharing the area with OHV users.
“There’s a very radical element of anti-environmentalist types that make life very difficult for anyone with the propensity to stand up and buck the trend,” he said. “It’s typical Sagebrush Rebellion mentality we’re dealing with here.”
The off-road community claims it’s environmentalists such as Ramsley who are the ones stonewalling any progress to work together with the federal government to create a land-use plan everyone can agree with.
“That’s the scariest part about Factory Butte, is that there’s just not been a good dialogue,” said Emery County, Utah, Economic Development Director Mike McCandless.
Much of the San Rafael Swell lies within Emery County, which has been working with the BLM office in Price to develop a management plan for the northern parts of the swell, generally north of Interstate 70. But, McCandless said, what happens at Factory Butte has implications for what could happen elsewhere in the swell.
The problem with environmentalists, he said, is that when they say saving a cactus is an emergency or they file a lawsuit to force the federal government to shut off public lands to off-roaders, “you end up bringing in the extreme on both sides of the issue.”
“You get those (environmentalists) who don’t want to see cooperation because it takes away their reason for existence,” McCandless said. “It leads to these stupid things like death threats and all of that ... because (environmentalists are) not at the table.”
Ramsley, however, said environmentalists are at the table and often willing to compromise, but the needs of the ecosystem must be accounted for.
“The machines are stronger than the land,” he said. “Any limitation on the machine, it’s all a political firestorm. Anyone counter to the ideology that the machines should be able to go pretty much everywhere is pretty much hung out.”
