Utah losing a wide-open spot for off-roading

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It's easy to see why. The badlands, which are especially suited for dirt bikes, consist of rolling hills of wind-sculpted Mancos shale soil alternating with shallow ravines. Riders worship the lift or bounce their machines get from the spongy, dry soil, comparing it to powder skiing. They say their tracks mostly get washed away by summer monsoons.

The scenery is another draw. It's one of the largest, most spectacular badlands on the Colorado plateau, geologists at Brigham Young University determined in 1980, when all-terrain vehicles were still a novelty with three wheels.

It wasn't until 1986 that Honda ushered in a more stable, four-wheel ATV, and today tens of thousands of these machines and dirt bikes roam Utah's public lands. Many riders come from Colorado and California, where the BLM long ago clamped down on off-road travel.

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Utah is one of the last Western states still largely wide-open for travel on public lands. The BLM controls nearly half of Utah, yet has made an effort to designate routes on only 3 million of its 23 million acres of land, though increasingly the rest is being marked off-limits to any motorized travel. In all, Utah still offers more than 70,000 miles of dirt roads, tracks and trails.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance wants the Factory Butte area for part of a larger wilderness complex, and cited the distinctive, forbidding landscape as a reason. Now it's the cacti that are making a difference.

Both species can grow in the fine-textured alkaline soils.

One can be hard to find. The Wright fishhook - a small, barrel-shaped cactus with cream-colored flowers - retracts or shrinks nearly underground during winter, popping back up in spring. "It's a survival technique," said Heather Barnes, a botanist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This region of south-central Utah also holds pockets of Winkler cactus, a small, leafless, globe-shaped succulent with pink flowers. It was listed in 1998 by the Fish and Wildlife Service as a threatened species; the rarer Wright fishhook was classified as endangered in 1979.

Christensen said a survey that BLM commissioned last spring found both species in the Factory Butte area. Once they were discovered, BLM became obligated to protect them.

"We're just trying to do the right thing," Christensen said. "We know we got some damage to the cactus."

On the Net:

Bureau of Land Management: http://www.ut.blm.gov/

Fish and Wildlife Service: http://www.r6.fws.gov/

Utah Shared Access Alliance: http://www.usaall.org/

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