A Heated Battle : Off-Roaders, Environmentalists Gird for Desert Protection Fight

Nick Ervin, a self-described “lover of rocks,” reached into the gravel near Corrizo Gorge on Tuesday and came up with treasure: a shard of pottery, one of the few remnants of the area’s last human inhabitants, the Kumeyaay Indians.

The fragment was among many sights that reminded Ervin--a San Diego County social worker and Sierra Club volunteer--why he had taken a day off to show a group of hikers the perimeter of the Anza-Borrego desert.

Ervin put it this way: He wants you, your children and your elderly relatives to learn about granite rock formations, cholla cactus and fan palm trees firsthand. Without the California Desert Protection Act, Ervin fears, you won’t get the chance.

“I’ve heard this bill accused of being a radical document--it’s not,” he said to the four environmentalists and five journalists who accompanied him. “I’ve heard people say it’ll serve only the athletic, physical, elitist, backpacking set. But I could take my grandmother and walk to a wind cave in the Coyote Mountains without breaking a sweat. The desert is enormously accessible to the average person.”

Tuesday’s hike proved Ervin’s point.

In an effort to draw attention to the proposed protection act and to related congressional hearings, the Sierra Club challenged three newspaper reporters and two photographers to a day’s desert excursion. They got a close look at two of the 11 sites in San Diego and Imperial counties that would be designated permanent wilderness land under the bill: Corrizo Gorge and the Jacumba Mountains in southeast San Diego County.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), would create a 1.5-million-acre Mojave National Park east of Barstow, would designate 4.4 million acres in 81 separate tracts as permanent wilderness, would greatly expand the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments by making both national parks, and would add 20,500 acres to Red Rock Canyon State Park in eastern Kern County.

Off-road and all-terrain vehicle owners are among the desert act’s stiffest opponents. They feel that the current “multiple-use” plan employed by the Federal Bureau of Land Management is sufficient, and they attack the Cranston-Levine proposal as the environmentalists’ attempt to lock up the desert for themselves.

“We’re 100% opposed to the Desert Protection Act,” said O. C. (Fud) Fudpucker, president of the San Diego-area District 38 American Motorcyclists Assn. “It’s what we view as a very selfish outlook on the desert. We’ve got a plan that’s workable, and, given some money to enforce it, everything will work. Environmentalists want it all, and ‘You can’t have any.’ We don’t feel that’s the American way to do things.”

In an attempt to gather Californians’ views, the congressional subcommittee on national parks and public lands is holding three hearings in California--in Bishop on Saturday, in Barstow on Nov. 11 and in Los Angeles sometime in January.

Fudpucker says he knows of about 25 San Diegans who will accompany him to Barstow--just a few among thousands of off-road enthusiasts who are expected to protest the Cranston-Levine bill.

The Sierra Club’s San Diego chapter has mobilized as well. As of Tuesday, 116 people had signed up to make the four-hour trip, and, according to Barbara Bamberger, the chapter’s conservation coordinator, the chapter expects to send more than 200 people. Environmentalists from throughout the state are expected to attend as well. People like Fudpucker prefer alternate legislation, introduced early this month by Rep. Jerry Lewis (D-Redlands) and three other California congressmen, which would designate 2.1 million acres of the Southern California desert as wilderness, divided into 51 tracts. In at least three of the wilderness areas, vehicle access would be permitted with the permission of the secretary of the interior.

Environmentalists fend off criticism of the Cranston-Levine bill, saying that access to the desert would not be reduced. According to one study, 85% of the wilderness acres would be within 3 miles of road. They also criticize the Lewis proposal for allowing the ruination of pristine desert and for making tracts too small to support ecosystems.

“You need more than islands of wilderness,” said Norbert J. Riedy Jr., assistant regional director of the Wilderness Society. Riedy trudged alongside reporters as they clambered over rocks. “That’s what (the Desert Protection Act) is all about, creating contiguous large areas of land for the animals that live there.”

On Tuesday, as if on cue, a number of animals came out of hiding. Known for their skittishness, the endangered bighorn sheep remained out of sight, but lizards sat sunning themselves on the rocks, and a red-tailed hawk swooped overhead. In the Jacumba Mountains, dozens of barrel cactus sat round and spiny amid the boulders, which were covered with rust-colored microorganisms commonly called “desert varnish.”

Ervin, the rock lover, warned that even the Cranston-Levine proposal would not solve everything.

“The Desert Protection Act is important,” he said, “but it’s going to be an empty victory if we don’t provide the resources to enforce it. If the BLM doesn’t have the manpower and the money, we’ll only have half the job done.”

Returning the pottery fragment to the spot where he had found it, Ervin looked around him and smiled.

“It’s worth it,” he said. “The desert is open and free. You see the raw earth, exposed. Some people find that desolate, but I find it exciting.”