National parks grapple with surge of illegal off-road vehicles

An Interior Department spokesman told Congress in July that 43 of the nation's federal "park units" allow snowmobiles, 25 allow off-road vehicles, and nine allow personal watercraft.

But he made no mention of any problem with the illegal vehicles highlighted by the internal survey.

Critics say the problem is acute and growing, even if not yet felt uniformly. "The pressure to increase these kinds of uses in national parks is constantly increasing," Mr. Barger says. "Our park lands are becoming more and more like isolated islands, with the demands for their use from everybody."

At least 113 of the nation's 388 park units report illegal off-road vehicles, the internal survey showed, and 85 of those report that the vehicles have caused environmental or other damage. Striking as those results are, they may understate the scope of the problem, says Sean Smith, public lands director for Bluewater Network. Only 273 of the 388 park units had responded to the survey. Parks like Yellowstone, Acadia, and Shenandoah National Parks had not responded.

There are signs of movement. Sections of Cape Hatteras were closed this summer to limit damage to nesting piping plover. The tiny shorebird's chicks are often trapped in the ruts left on the beach by off-road vehicles and run over.

But in the survey, many parks reported they lacked the staff or funding needed to chase down the illegal vehicles, says Bluewater's counsel Robert Rosenbaum of the law firm Arnold & Porter in Washington.

"Operators are rarely caught due to staffing limitations," wrote a park official in the survey from Arches National Park and Canyon lands National Park in Utah, cited in a June letter by Blue water to the Park Service. "There are a number of locations where off-road travel has destroyed microbiotic soil crust, destroyed desert vegetations, crushed animal burrows ... impacts that may last for years."

Although Yellowstone National Park was not part of the survey results, a now infamous example occurred in 2003 when two men on off-road vehicles damaged Lone Star Geyser by driving around its cone and in surrounding meadows, according to park reports. Just last year, other illegal drivers cornered a herd of bison in a stand of trees at the park.

"To allow that kind of thing just because a set of recreational users want to take snowmobiles and whatever else into Yellowstone is crazy," says Bill Wade, a former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park, now a spokesman for the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, a watchdog group based in Tucson, Ariz.

"It's like me saying that because I like skeet-shooting, I should be able to do that in the Sistine Chapel," he says. "There are some places with such high degree of reverence [vehicles] just should not be allowed."

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