ORV Mayhem on Utah’s Public Lands
Videos Document the Damage

Utah’s magnificent redrock country, renowned for its stunning landscape of iconic buttes, slickrock mesas and serpentine canyons, has been transformed into an off-road-vehicle (ORV) theme park.

As we’ve discussed before, the Bush administration completed land use plans for 11 million acres in southern and eastern Utah before it left the White House.  These plans, transformed Utah’s public lands into a huge ORV theme park, designating over 20,000 miles of ORV routes in addition to designating cross-country ORV “play areas.”    The routes run through ancient Native American cultural sites, in and out of rare desert streams, and into proposed wilderness areas. The plans made a whopping 85 percent of southern Utah’s public lands available for ORV use.  As a result, much of the redrock landscape is within a mile (that’s eight city blocks!) of a designated ORV route.

These out-of-balance plans make it increasingly difficult to escape the high-pitched whine, exhaust fumes, and dust clouds of ATVs and dirt bikes buzzing through canyons and across plateaus, and the grinding gears and spinning wheels of jeeps crawling up steep slickrock ledges.  Deep ruts, damaged and muddied streams, and the signature black tire marks of these destructive machines deface the desert. The scars will last for decades.  In addition to challenging these savagely lopsided plans in court, we’ve asked the Obama administration to overhaul them, not perpetuate them.  

A little surfing on YouTube reveals a treasure trove of videographic proof of ORV abuse on Utah’s public lands.  These videos are typically shot by ORV drivers themselves—likely unaware of the damage such use causes to the natural resources and landscape.  

Here are a few videos to give you a picture of the ORV Mayhem occurring in Utah’s redrock country, a direct result of the BLM's ORV plans.