CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Slow Is the Way to See the Desert : A new bill that intends to protect the Mojave would ruin it. We just need more enforcement of off-road laws.

Since the early 1950s, my family and I have camped in the Mojave Desert and throughout the Southwest. We are a part of a shrinking group of those who want to camp away from it all, who three or four times a year leave the city behind to explore the byways of the Mojave.

Driving carefully up a narrow dirt road as it crosses a ridge to expose the beauty of a large valley below and the purple desert peaks beyond brings one back to the important things in life. You may find a wide dirt area just off the side of the road to watch some of the most beautiful sunsets you will ever see, build a small campfire, cook dinner and absorb the tranquillity of a desert evening. No danger of 1 a.m. arrivals at the next campsite banging doors, turning up radios and drinking beer. This campsite is yours: Only you know where it is and it will cease to exist as soon as a spectacular sunrise brightens the next morning into a new day and you move on.

The California desert bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein is advertised as a law to save the desert for future generations by preserving it from the depredations of off-roaders, dirt bikers and other sundry beings. With California’s two new Democratic senators and a new President and vice president who campaigned on platforms of environmental protection, this bill has a high probability of passage. That is unfortunate. The bill is wrong.

There already is a law against traveling off a road anywhere in California if one drives on vegetation. It’s called the Native Species Act, and provides for fines of up to $100,000. Those who say there is so little vegetation in the desert that this bill doesn’t protect it only show their ignorance of the desert.

The Sierra Club, the major lobbyist for the new bill, however, says that if the desert isn’t closed, people will trample the vegetation, kill the animals, cave in their burrows. The only “roads” the sponsors of this bill see are the wide, graded ones on which one travels at 40 or 60 m.p.h. These will be further graded and then paved over. It is ironic that the proponents of the desert bill, in attempting to get people to respect the outdoors, will close down the roads on which one must travel slowly, really seeing and appreciating it, to leave only the big, flat, wide roads on which people travel so fast they don’t have time to see, let alone enjoy, the wilderness.

Proponents of the bill argue that one can hike into the desert. That misses the point: water. This is a desert. There are no streams or springs here for replenishment as there are in the Sierra, the Cascades or the Rockies. An active hiker in a dry climate will use about a gallon of water a day. A gallon of water weighs eight pounds. Five days’ worth, never mind for washing or cooking, is 40 pounds. Can a person carry that, and food and gear? No. In addition, there are many who are not physically able to hike miles. Perhaps the Sierra Club thinks that they shouldn’t see the wonders the desert bill is to protect.

Water does come to the desert occasionally. Last April, after the March rains, the desert was as green and lush as I have ever seen it. Yellows and oranges of wildflowers carpeted the valleys. Up close, there were deep violets, bright reds, whites. The roads leading to most of these valleys will be closed by this bill.

These sudden rains can also bring destruction. This is the same desert in which sections of Interstate 15 have been washed out twice in the past 10 years. Interstates have very specific, strongly built roadbeds and protective berms several feet high and miles long to channel the sudden runoff of desert thunderstorms. Are the roads to be paved as a result of the desert bill going to be as strong as the interstates? Will the protected desert be bulldozed for miles for protective berms? Or will these roads be rebuilt every few years after the normal thunderstorms? Who will pay for that?

The desert bill also would establish campgrounds with its paved roads. Each of these will require water. Where will the water come from? Water and people and paved roads require sanitation and a sewage treatment plant, as in Joshua Tree National Monument. The Sierra Club, rightly so, often writes about the human impact on the Colorado River system and the aquifers of the West.

Over the years, protection of the desert has become critical as the human impact on it has increased. That is good. The Kelso Dunes, some of the greatest in the West, were closed to off-road travel years ago and have benefited greatly. In the past 20 years, there has been a significant decrease in despoliation. This has resulted from the work of the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations. The gas crises of the 1970s also cut dramatically the abuse of the desert wilderness. (If you really want to decrease despoliation, increase the price of gasoline.)

We have gone far enough, though. The laws are now on the books to protect the wilderness but still provide access to its wonders. Money would better be spent on enforcement of these laws than in closing off the desert. The Bureau of Land Management has six people to patrol and enforce these laws over an area of 5 million acres. That’s one enforcement officer for every 1,300 square miles. Increasing their number would allow real enforcement of the current laws. This would protect the desert without closing it.

Fifty or 100 years from now, if all that people know of the desert is what they have been shown by Hollywood--sandy, trackless wastes--or by desert bill campaign literature pictures of off-road bikers who don’t care what the current law is, why should the public care any longer about protecting it? It is odd to think that a bill dedicated to preserving the desert wilderness will, literally, cause us to lose sight of it all.