Off Road Vehicles

Off-road vehicles will be banned from part of the Sonoran Desert National Monument early next year because reckless riders have done extensive environmental damage, federal officials say. Kevin Harper of the Bureau of Land Management and other officials said riders had ignored postings, taken their vehicles off designated roads, carved new trails and mangled vegetation. In doing so, they have created ruts and other problems for the desert ecology, the officials said.

The Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by environmental groups Monday that accused the federal government of failing to safeguard Western wilderness areas from an onslaught of off-road vehicles. The unanimous decision said environmental groups could not use the courts to compel the federal Bureau of Land Management to take more aggressive action to protect land that is under study for designation as wilderness.

A federal judge has rejected key provisions of a plan for managing millions of acres in the California desert, saying the U.S. Bureau of Land Management designated roughly 5,000 miles of off-road vehicle routes without properly taking into account their impact on public lands, archaeological sites and wildlife. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on Monday ruled that the West Mojave plan, which the bureau approved in 2006 after a decade of development, is "flawed because it does not contain a reasonable range of alternatives" to limit the number of miles of off-road routes.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to study whether a lizard population in a stretch of Mojave Desert in eastern Nevada and western California should be listed as threatened or endangered. A notice published Thursday in the Federal Register begins a 12-month review of whether the Amargosa River population of the Mojave fringe-toed lizard merits federal protection.

For the off-road warriors of Northern and Central California, few wild landscapes are as enticing as the Clear Creek Management Area, with its deep canyons, scampering feral pigs, rainbow-hued flowers and giant rock formations. But on Thursday, a 48-square-mile swath of the Diablo Mountains in San Benito and Fresno counties was labeled a virtual death zone where five visits a year over three decades could lead to lung cancer and other crippling diseases.

In an about-face, officials at Yellowstone National Park said Wednesday that they would quickly craft a plan to allow snowmobiles and snow coaches into the park in time for the winter season. After a federal judge ruled two weeks ago that Yellowstone's snowmobile-use proposal was unacceptable because it would put the health of visitors and animals at risk, park officials said they would not be able to hammer out a new plan before the season starts Dec. 15.

For Byron Clayworth, it didn't get much better than this: sipping a beer, camping on the beach with his buddies and their families, frying up dinner for 15 on a homemade wok, and, most of all, zooming around the dunes on an amazing variety of off-road vehicles. That about 25,000 other people were enjoying the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area in much the same way this weekend was no big deal.

A new group of retired land managers and forest rangers said Thursday that reckless off-road vehicle recreation was the No. 1 threat to public lands in the West. The 13-member Rangers for Responsible Recreation said it was voicing the concerns of many federal land management employees in the West, including in California, who report that an increasing number of riders and the growing power of the vehicles are endangering natural resources and public safety.

San Bernardino County's crackdown on off-roaders trespassing on private land came as a relief to homeowners when it was approved last year, but the regulations have been under constant attack by riders, who say it is killing a popular Southern California pastime. In response, county supervisors will decide today whether to repeal or modify the ordinance, which passed unanimously in April 2006.

Spurred by desert homeowners tired of noise and dust, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to uphold an ordinance that clamps down on off-road riders gathering in groups or trespassing on private land. But supervisors promised to review some aspects of the ordinance criticized by riders. In particular, supervisors promised to look at the restriction on "staging" -- when a large group of riders gathers on private land.