Utah losing a wide-open spot for off-roading

updated 1:13 p.m. ET Aug. 30, 2006

CAINVILLE, Utah - For off-roaders, few places are as good as the badlands around Factory Butte, where the terrain seems perfectly suited for a knobby rubber tire.

"If ever there was a place God created for off-road recreation, Factory Butte is it," said Michael Swenson, executive director of the Utah Shared Access Alliance.

This Wild West of off-road travel may not last long, however. The Bureau of Land Management is moving to impose regulations as early as September, the start of riding season, on some of the baddest of the West's badlands, about 180 miles south of Salt Lake City.

The decision chips away at Utah's standing as one of the last Western states where BLM lands are still largely open to cross-country travel.

"Times have changed," Cornell Christensen, a bureau field manager, who has been watching all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes crawl over the nearly 200,000-acre Factory Butte district like an army of ants. "We've had open areas for so long, people can just go and go."

It wasn't noise, traffic, ruts or erosion that forced BLM, after years of pressure from conservation groups, to take a hard look at drawing boundaries here on off-road travel. Instead, it's two little-known, delicate species of cacti classified years ago as threatened or endangered and only recently discovered around Factory Butte.

"The law is we have to protect those plants," said Christensen.

A decision will be made by higher-ups at the Interior Department, where the review could take as little as two weeks or as many as six months, he said, depending on how the politics play out.

The restrictions could take the form of designated routes, areas kept off limits and open "play" areas such as a place riders call Swing Arm City, which is defined by a natural basin along State Route 24. Off-road advocates counter that in a landscape with few natural barriers, it will be impractical to draw any boundaries.

Swenson said regulation should be the exception, not the rule, for the barren moonscape-like land around Factory Butte, a 1,500-foot-tall monolith that looks vaguely industrial. His group advocates management with a light touch and accuses BLM of lurching from a hands-off policy in Utah to strict regulation of its lands.

"The BLM has failed miserably to manage ATV use," Swenson said. "Now they're behind the eight-ball, and their knee-jerk reaction is to close areas."

Christensen said most of the cacti were found in areas not often visited often by off-roaders, "but they want everything kept open."

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