California dirt bikers battled against desert preservation, spawning anti-environmental wars

In 1975, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the Phantom Duck of the Desert started his motorcycle engine in Barstow, Calif. in defiance of federal orders. He and his friends were headed to Las Vegas for their first “unorganized” trail ride, off-roading through the desert to protest the Bureau of Land Management.

The U.S. agency had recently denied a permit for the 10th annual Barstow-to-Vegas, the “granddaddy” of dirt bike races. The Duck and his compadres were incensed. 

Barstow-to-Vegas became a symbol that divided the California desert. On one side, dirt bikers like the Duck wanted freedom to ride wherever the plants wouldn’t stop them. On the other, conservationists wanted to protect the desert from the impacts of off-road recreation. The Bureau of Land Management, trying to regulate the desert for the first time, got caught in the middle.

Through it all, the desert paid the price. The Barstow-to-Vegas saga reveals how impunity helped make Southern California an epicenter of anti-environmental rhetoric and action that forged today’s anti-environmental moment. 

Barstow-to-Vegas was a classic desert race, the kind that bikers liked because it posed a near-impossible test of endurance, persistence and skill with only two-thirds crossing the finish line. You couldn’t preview the 155-mile course, so you had to rely on a sketchy map, scant flagging and your own wits. Along the way, you faced prickly plants, lots of sand and the desert elements. 

Professionals typically led the pack, but most racers were amateurs — working men like the Phantom Duck from all around the rapidly-growing Los Angeles area who wanted to get out for the weekend. They wanted to see if their self-modified bikes could measure up against the pros, or at least conquer the desert. The race quickly grew from 300 racers in 1967 to 3,000 racers by the early 1970s.

By 1970, Bureau of Land Management employees felt that they “were losing control of the off-road-vehicle situation,” according to Craig Tocher, who had worked in the bureau’s recreation program. The bureau had recently issued one of the first studies of the impacts of off-road vehicles on the California landscape, and the damage to desert soils, flora, and fauna was extensive. Working without any real input from conservationists in these first couple of years, the Bureau of Land Management found that motorcycles accelerated erosion in desert washes and collapsed burrows of the desert tortoise. 

In 1973, the Bureau of Land Management started working with the American Motorcyclist Association to regulate desert races, eventually issuing permits with rules designed to curb off-course racing, damage to public property and serious injuries.

But the 1974 Barstow-to-Vegas event organizers didn’t abide by permit terms. Riders veered off course, affecting 50% more land than the bureau-approved race plan had intended and encroaching into sensitive habitat and protected historical and cultural areas. 

It shouldn’t have surprised anyone when the race’s permit was denied in 1975; nonetheless, the Phantom Duck — later revealed to be Fontana electrician Louis McKey — and about 25 other dirt bikers embarked on the “unorganized” trail ride, protesting Bureau of Land Management policy. Dirt bikers came to see themselves at war with the bureau and with “city people” who were trying to take away recreational access to desert lands.

“I’ll be damned if I let (my dirt bikes) sit and collect dust in my garage,” wrote one biker in a November 1975 letter to Cycle News, a popular Long Beach-based weekly. But the Bureau of Land Management only gained new enforcement authority thanks to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. A 1978 letter in Cycle News called the regulation “Bureaucratic BS” and “Environmental blackmail.”

Dirt bikers were upset, too, that mining companies and other corporations seemed to be allowed to destroy desert land, but they were not. 

The protests grew. In 1977, more than 100 riders showed up for the Duck’s “unorganized” Barstow-to-Vegas protest. Advertising for the 1978 race outpaced publicity for all previous events combined. Ten days before the fourth unsanctioned ride, the Bureau of Land Management called the Duck and his friends to court to stop them from organizing the unpermitted ride. 

In defense, the Duck’s team argued that the ecological protections threatened their First Amendment right to protest. Judge Warren Ferguson didn’t buy it.  “Nobody — nobody — has a constitutional right to ride a motorcycle over lands owned by somebody else,” he said, ordering the Duck and his friends to cancel the ride.

The bikers ignored him.  A reported 600 riders (many with plastic ducks taped to their helmets and “QUACK QUACK” license plates) and 2,000 spectators showed up along the course.

“What Duck?” Dirt Bike magazine editor Rick Sieman (aka Super Hunky) said they’d say to Bureau of Land Management rangers who accosted them. “We’re just out here for a trail ride with some friends.” After the ride, the Bureau of Land Management hauled the bikers back to court, but the judge let them walk free — he said he didn’t want to ruin their lives with the possibility of an indictment for conspiracy.  

Soon the Reagan administration took up the Barstow-to-Vegas cause. Dirt bike events, including a revived Barstow-to-Vegas, continued to tear up the desert with little environmental review.

Later that decade, Sieman and others started the Sahara Club, an off-roading group whose name explicitly antagonized the Sierra Club. The club’s “Top Ten Shithead List” targeted the Sierra Club, Democratic politicians and Bureau of Land Management employees. Its newsletters regularly listed names, license plates and phone numbers of Earth First! members and showcased cartoons denigrating U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s desert protection efforts. 

Where dirt biking activists had railed against mining and grazing interests in the 1970s, the Sahara Club embraced a new alignment of populism and the corporate right, joining with “wise use” groups, which represented corporate interests on public lands.

‘Wise use’ of the desert

The phrase wise use itself was clever branding, twisting the words of U.S. Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot to emphasize the economic value of public lands and argue that nature had no value in and of itself. Wise use epitomized the anti-environmental 1980s, and the backlash against regulation and proactive government. 

Fifty years later, much of the desert is now formally protected. In January, a federal judge sided with conservationists in a decades-long battle over designated off-road vehicles trails in the desert tortoise’s Western Mojave habitat.

Barstow-to-Vegas has been defunct since its last run in 1989. But its tracks show the enduring impacts of motorcycle use on the desert. In December, the Forest Service announced plans to nullify rules limiting ATV and motorcycle access on trails, and the Trump administration has broadly cut federal authority to regulate environmental degradation in a move commentators have likened to the wise use era. 

The Duck’s story lives on, too, in debates about what to do with a bunch of angry men. The Barstow-to-Vegas court case mirrors the bizarre rhetoric of Trumpian legal proceedings: all bluster and constitutional claim, no content. The case’s resolution — clearing a few young white men so as to not ruin their lives — led only to more vitriol and hatred in the Sahara Club newsletter. 

Perhaps the Duck is riding again. 

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.

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