Bob Libershal is a forest protection officer, level two law enforcement on the Angeles National Forest. He lives and works above the Los Angeles smog where the air and sky show the sharp relief of the chaparral of the San Gabriel Mountains. He’s been in fire for twenty-three years, and he patrols from the Monte Cristo Station on the Los Angeles River District of the most visited national forest in the country, covering a broad swath of the forest along the Angeles Forest Highway that crests at Mill Creek Summit.

Since he’s out on the forest every day (even on days off—he’s rented a house next to the fire station from the U.S. Forest Service since 1980), he looks after things. He’s supposed to update fire warning signs and patrol for fire danger, but he also picks up after parties and hauls junk that’s been dumped. He writes tickets when people drive off-highway vehicles where they shouldn’t go and he can catch them. Sometimes they’re armed, and he might wait forty-five minutes for backup. He doesn’t carry a gun.

“You don’t need to wear a gun,” Libershal says. “You need to know what the law is and engage people.” Sometimes he writes letters to people he’s given tickets or issued warnings to. In one recent letter, he quoted the California Motor Vehicle Code and described where a father could go to give his daughters proper instruction in riding a four-wheeler. “He seemed a nice enough guy,” Libershal says, and he had the man’s address. Why not send him a letter?

Libershal also takes pictures of people he cites. Most are still wearing helmets. Some stand with the body language you’d expect of somebody who’s about to get a ticket: their heads are cocked, part defiant, part playing dumb. Some are smiling. “They just don’t care,” Libershal says.

Libershal narrates stories picture by picture. The stories start with his spotting an empty all-terrain-vehicle trailer or seeing five trucks go up a legal road and only four coming out. Then he waits. Hours later he might hear them, grinding over a rough grade. One picture shows a party of people clearing stones from a closed road for an old Land Rover. The impromptu trail crew is oblivious to Libershal snapping pictures from his Forest Service truck parked to block the road. “All you need is one person to establish a place and then more responsible people will follow.” They’re too busy clearing a path and cheering their man. When the Land Rover driver makes it down to the road he can legally drive on, Libershal starts writing tickets. One of the group is a sheriff’s deputy. Libershal later calls the sheriff to tell him about the deputy’s ticket. The sheriff tells him that if there was one deputy, there were probably a few others in that group who wouldn’t admit to it.

Libershal finds lawlessness exasperating. “A significant minority is going to do their own thing,” Libershal says. “All you need is one person to establish a place and then more responsible people will follow.”

There’s a minimum-security prison fire camp on Mount Gleason Road on the crest of the highest ridge where Libershal patrols. The road is alternately known as the Santa Clara Divide Road and as Route 3N17. Built to serve an old missile base that’s been taken over by the prison, it’s one lane of crumbling pavement that’s sports-car-commercial curvy. Big red fire-crew trucks hammer down it and there are skid marks before most of the blind corners. Even the pinecones are treacherous. They’re as big as pineapples, and Libershal swerves to avoid them: they’ve popped his tires before.

Mount Gleason Road is a Back Country Discovery Trail, part of a state-funded system meant to someday link off-highway vehicle, or OHV, riding areas. According to the forest plan for the Angeles and the documents designating the road as part of the state system, it should be open only to street-legal vehicles, so Libershal found it odd that it was signed open for all kinds of all-terrain vehicles, street-legal or not. He did some research and asked around. No one on the forest could answer whether the signs were correct. No one on the forest could answer whether the signs were correct. No one could tell him who put the signs up, though they were Forest Service signs. The forest plan map showed the road closed to non-street-legal vehicles. The road parallels the hikers-only Pacific Crest Trail and has offered easy illegal access to the trail from off-roaders for years. So seeing a hazard and hoping to reduce the temptation for off-roaders to take an illegal ride, he took the signs down.

He thought, he says, sounding a little bit like he’s singing a bar from Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, that he would be congratulated for his initiative. Instead, he was ordered to put the signs back up. He refused the order four times because, by his account, his bosses were ordering him to break the law. He was suspended in late April for failure to follow a direct order. “It’s like they never wanted to hear the explanation,” he says. “It’s simply a matter of ‘We told you to do something and you didn’t do it.’ It doesn’t matter how we got to this point.”

The noisiest, most destructive and perhaps least popular form of recreation on the national forests of California is the best funded,The noisiest, most destructive and perhaps least popular form of recreation on the national forests of California is the best funded and those funds have been controlled almost exclusively by the OHV community for three decades. User groups have stacked California’s OHV Commission with their leaders, and grants have been tied directly to the amount of use offered and developed. Environmental damage and public safety were largely ignored until two years ago when representatives from environmental groups were appointed to the commission as a vocal minority.

California is the proving ground for OHV issues. It’s where many manufacturers go to test their new machines, and it’s also where the limits of public patience and the resiliency of its wild places have been tested. The state’s Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Division boasts more than 100,000 miles of roads and trails designated for OHV use, and of that, the national forests, a few of which abut the state’s major population centers, offer 44,000 miles of off-highway recreation. According to the Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Division, 3.5 million people participate in off-highway vehicle recreation. Each vehicle can displace tons of soil in just a few miles off-road, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study. Decades after being closed to off-roading, some public lands have yet to recover. This is a landscape where tracks from General George Patton’s tank training exercises in the desert still show.

California has the biggest and wealthiest OHV program in the country, and at least a dozen other states have or are mulling adopting similar gas tax–funded programs. The federal government sets aside a portion of the federal gasoline tax for trail recreation as well. The lawlessness of OHV use in California should be a cautionary tale for OHV funding and perhaps recreation funding in general. Money can pervert good intentions.

The off-road community in California and across the country argues that off-roading is a family activity, that only 1 percent of users are bad apples. The truth is not so simple. California national forests have the most OHV use of any nationwide—twice as much as Arizona, the state with the second highest OHV use on national forests. According to the state’s gas tax formula, about half of the non-street-legal vehicles used off-highway in California are unregistered, and their operators are breaking the law when they use them on public land. A small minority of riders rip down closure signs, ride into wilderness areas and, with a twist of the throttle, leave established routes to start new trails where trails weren’t intended to be. But a much higher percentage than that 1 percent follow the 1-percenters’ tracks into places not intended for OHV use. In the field, it can be hard to differentiate between what the Forest Service calls “user located” trails and those trails maintained by the agency for OHV use, especially in the absence of clear signs and good maps.

Land managers and user groups are philosophically at odds about what’s open and what’s closed. Before the late 1980s, the national forests of Southern California had a policy that the forests were open to OHV use unless signed closed, but the new forest plans turned that on its head: routes in the forest were closed unless signed open. The difference is critical. Before, OHV riders could go anywhere on- or off-road and impact to the land was much more pervasive. Under the new policy, use can be much more clearly managed: the trail or road is either open or it’s not and off-road riding is limited to “open use” areas. It’s easier to write tickets for unlawful behavior but requires more responsibility from users—they need to know what the rules are. However, leaders of the OHV community—among them Ed Waldheim, the president of the California Off-Road Vehicle Association, a member of the OHV Commission and a close correspondent with the Angeles National Forest leadership—advocate an “open unless signed closed” policy. This puts the burden on the Forest Service to sign every illegal spur and rutted hillclimb and anticipate where the next user-located trail will start.

Add to the conflict in philosophies confusion within the Forest Service about where people can ride. Add to the conflict in philosophies confusion within the Forest Service about where people can ride. The Angeles National Forest has two different maps, one supplementing the forest plan that shows OHV routes legally established under the plan and another, a photocopied sheet of blue paper with the Forest Service seal on it, that shows a much broader system of OHV routes. When I walked into the forest supervisor’s office and asked about places to ride an OHV, the woman at the desk gave me the blue map and a yellow packet updating trail closures for the month. Cross-referencing the two with my commercial map of the forest, the yellow packet showed that only a few in the web of OHV routes were open. Curious, since I had seen several of these routes signed open for OHV use the day before, I asked which routes were open. The receptionist responded that all of the routes in and around Mount Gleason Road were closed, including Mount Gleason Road. A previous call to the Angeles yielded a more positive response, with the receptionist saying that OHV use was open on all of the forest’s dirt roads.

Libershal ran into the same problem when he researched whether Mount Gleason Road should legally be open to OHV use. He found the forest plan’s map, and it showed Mount Gleason Road closed to OHV use, despite the official Forest Service signs that had been posted opening the route to non-street-legal vehicles. He came across the forest’s application to the Back Country Discovery Trail program. The application designates Mount Gleason Road as part of the system on an interim basis but says that it is paved and “is not an OHV route.” Libershal thought that was answer enough, so he took the signs down and started the process that resulted in his suspension in April.

When Libershal goes back to his job, he’s not sure whether he can or should write a ticket for someone operating a non-street-legal vehicle on Mount Gleason Road. The blue map says they can ride and so do some of the signs, but the forest plan says it’s illegal. On Libershal’s district, the OHV management plan approved in 1996 promises an accurate map of routes by December 1996 at a cost to the forest of $200. The blue map was completed in June 2000 and Libershal complained about its problems, but its inaccuracies have not been corrected. Libershal is the only forest protection officer who regularly patrols the area and pays attention to where people are riding. If he doesn’t write tickets, the OHV rules will go unenforced.

Seven years ago, the General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigative arm, saw the same problems when it reviewed federal management of OHV use on three California national forests as well as national forest and Bureau of Land Management sites in Idaho, Arizona, Utah and Nevada. The GAO wanted to see if federal land managers were complying with OHV management rules signed in the 1970s by President Nixon and President Carter. What they found were confusing systems of management that had abdicated much of their authority to the states. Five of the eight sites studied had not completed inventories of OHV roads, trails and open-use areas and had not completed maps or posted signs showing where OHVs could be used. “Without such inventories, maps, and signs, neither the public nor the staff can be certain whether specific areas, roads, or trails are available for OHV use,” states the 1995 report Information on the Use and Impact of Off-Highway Vehicles.

The Angeles National Forest was not part of the study and had at least one good map, the forest plan map, but didn’t follow it or do much to publicize it. For years, pressure to offer more use came from the OHV Commission doling out its huge recreation grants. The user-group-dominated commission placed a priority on creating OHV opportunity and the agencies responded, says Paul Spitler, a recently appointed member of the commission and the executive director of the California Wilderness Coalition, a group critical of OHV use in the state. “Across the state we see a lot of the land managers kowtow to the local OHV interests,” Spitler says. “The agencies short-shrift the nonmotorized users and the natural resources.” For years, the Forest Service and the BLM “have relied heavily on the states to support their OHV programs so that, in an era of constrained federal funding, the extent of their future compliance is likely to depend on the level of support they receive from nonfederal sources,” the GAO report states. In an era of budget cuts, expect more influence from the states.

Though the effects are clear, the semantics are nebulous. All-terrain vehicle? Off-road vehicle? Four-wheeler? Jeep? SUV? Dual sport, quadbike or dune buggy? California and the federal land agencies there call the two-, three- and four-wheeled machines OHVs. Off-highway encompasses pretty much everything that’s not pavement and not maintained by the California Department of Transportation. In fact, OHV is a distinction tied closely to the public funding source for OHV recreation in California—a liberally applied gas tax combined with a nominal user fee. The user fee is called a Green Sticker and it’s required of all OHVs that can’t legally be registered for street use. Green Sticker fees—$20 for two years for each vehicle—are widely ignored and contribute less than 10 percent to the state OHV pot.

What’s more contentious and far more lucrative is the gas tax that goes toward funding OHV use. A portion of the state tax applied to gasoline used in vehicles operated off roads maintained by the state goes into an OHV trust fund. The gas tax formula includes gas used by Green Sticker vehicles but also accounts for gasoline used by unregistered dirt bikes, quad-bikes and other vehicles that can’t be made legal for street use. In addition, the gas tax formula includes all vehicles used off maintained highways that are street legal even though they may not be driving off-highway for sport. Under the formula, two-wheel-drive sedans are considered OHVs if they drive any of the tens of thousands of miles of unpaved roads in California’s national forests—even if the users are driving to a trailhead for a hike or to a river to fish. (By driving the back roads of the Angeles National Forest in my rented Ford Focus to research this story, I was helping to fund OHV opportunity in California.)

The gas tax adds up to $30 million each year that the OHV Commission doles out to user groups and local, state and federal agencies. By far the largest portion—about 90 percent of the grants in the past decade—goes to the national forests and the BLM. On the Angeles, the annual grant is close to $450,000 each year. For comparison, Adventure Pass, the recreation fee demonstration project on the Southern California national forests, amounts to about $1 million annually to the Angeles and it’s supposed to draw from all users of the forest, even OHVers. In fact, on a list of improvements to the forest made with Adventure Pass money, an Angeles National Forest flier lists OHV recreation as one of the many beneficiaries of Adventure Pass funds. So not only is OHV recreation being funded by a gas tax and separate user fees, the national recreation fee demonstration program is kicking in a share.

Spitler sits on an evolving OHV Commission. “It’s no fun being the one environmentalist in a room full of off-roaders,” Spitler says. But he’s seen a lot of change. There’s still “tremendous damage” to the land caused by OHVs but he’s found his work on the commission “utterly rewarding.”

“I’m convinced that the state’s program is doing more good than harm,” he says. For the first time, Spitler says, federal agencies are required to monitor OHV effects on soil and wildlife and plan for law enforcement.

The Forest Service sees it a bit differently. The mission of the OHV Commission is “closer to the mission of the Forest Service than it ever has been,” says Rich Farrington, the Motorized Recreation Program coordinator for the national forests of California. “It was a rapid change and a lot of our field people have struggled to understand the changes.”

It’s telling and ironic that the commission’s new resource protection priorities are pushing the federal agencies to better manage OHV use, and that new push is causing some rebellion. Spitler says a number of forests are “bad actors.”

In April, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about an internal Forest Service memo regarding the Stanislaus National Forest’s grant application that described several strategies for getting money from the state commission. Among the ideas were to “Take the money and run!” and “Fake it!” Among the ideas were to “Take the money and run!” and “Fake it! Apply for funds during the upcoming cycle, and see what progress we have made over the next few months.” The memo also said Stanislaus forest managers could recruit off-road clubs to make a case to the commission for more trails and funding from the commission. The groups could even use the Stanislaus’s PowerPoint presentation to do it, the Chronicle reported.

Spitler is disgusted by the attitude of the Stanislaus and other forests that disregard their responsibilities to manage the land for a wide range of values. “I don’t think we should give them any more money until they clean up their act,” he says.

Farrington takes exception to the Chronicle article and its lead sentence that says the Forest Service “promotes” OHV use. “The word promote is the wrong word,” Farrington says. “We’re out there doing intensive management.”

“I put that boulder there,” Libershal says. He’s pointing to one of the many user-located trails that he’s tried to close. Libershal makes unauthorized trails unappealing. He drags limbs, rolls boulders, puts posts in the ground and throws in a few of those big menacing pinecones for good measure. When he can get closure signs, which is unusual, he puts them in at the head of the trail, but he doesn’t use wood posts if he can help it: people pull them out and use them for firewood. He has a strategy to keep people out: rather than putting up gates or huge boulders that would require a work crew to move, he builds layers of barriers that he can create on the spot. “I’m limited to what I can do with a pry bar and just me,” he says. “There’s an art to it and I really get off on that.”

The rocks and logs are nothing that a determined illegal off-roader wouldn’t be able to move, but it apparently takes more time than most are willing to commit to get their kicks. There’s a different psychology to a place that’s being tended to, he says. People aren’t going to mess with it if it looks like it’s been maintained. “When you work for the Forest Service, you’ve got to find ways to gain satisfaction other than from management or the organization,” he says.

When Libershal took down the signs opening Mount Gleason Road to OHVs, he made three others out of sheets of plywood with several coats of white paint and hand-stenciled with STREET LEGAL VEHICLES ONLY in black. The sign is up when we turn onto Mount Gleason Road from the Angeles Forest Highway in the morning. We spend most of the day driving the road and discover that one of the other hand-stenciled signs has been removed at the other end of the disputed route. Libershal gets out of the truck and looks at the post. Work boot prints in the dust at the base of the post make him think that it must have been a forest employee taking the signs down, not vandals. He’s upset. He’s even more upset when we drive out the road a few hours later and see that his sign at the turnoff from the Angeles Forest Highway has been taken down, too. The same boot prints are in the dust there as well. Somebody was right behind us.

“It would really hurt me if it was another Forest Service employee taking down that sign, just doing what he’s told,” Libershal says.

Libershal served his suspension a few weeks later, and he wants to retire. He was planning on it before the sign issue blew up. He’s filed suit to get his superiors to follow the law, and the Los Angeles Times ran a story about him and the suit in early May. No sign has been put up to clarify which vehicles can legally travel Mount Gleason Road. According to the forest plan’s closed-unless-signed-open policy, that would mean the road is closed to non-street-legal vehicles. But it certainly doesn’t eliminate the confusion. And signs probably aren’t the solution.

“A sign is just a poor substitute for a ranger who isn’t there,” Libershal says.