The California bikers who fought to preserve the wilderness

By Julia Cizek, especially for CalMatters

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In 1975, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the Phantom Duck of the Desert started the engine of his motorcycle in Barstow, California, in violation of federal orders. He and his friends 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 recently denied a permit for the 10th annual Barstow to Vegas race, the granddaddy of dirt bike racing. The duck and his companions were enraged.

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

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

Barstow-to-Vegas was a classic desert race, the kind bikers loved because it presented a near-impossible test of endurance, perseverance and skill, with only two-thirds crossing the finish line. You couldn’t survey the 155-mile course, so you had to rely on a sketch map, scant markings, and your own wits. Along the way you encountered spiky plants, lots of sand and desert elements.

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

By 1970, Bureau of Land Management officials felt they were “losing control of the off-road vehicle situation,” according to Craig Tocher, who worked in the bureau’s recreation program. The bureau recently issued one of the first studies on the impact of off-road vehicles on California’s landscape, and the damage to desert soils, flora and fauna has been extensive. Working without real input by conservationists in the first few years, the Bureau of Land Management found that motorcycles were accelerating erosion in desert basins and collapsing desert tortoise burrows.

In 1973, the Bureau of Land Management began working with the American Motorcyclist Association to regulate desert racing, eventually issuing permits with rules designed to limit off-piste racing, damage to public property, and serious injury.

But the organizers of the 1974 Barstow to Vegas event did not comply with the terms of the permit. Riders veered off course, touching 50 percent more land than the bureau’s approved race plan called for, and trespassing on sensitive habitats and protected historic and cultural areas.

It should have surprised no one when permission to race was refused in 1975; however, Phantom Duck—later revealed to be Fontana electrician Louis McKey—and about 25 other dirt bikers took to the “disorganized” trail, protesting Bureau of Land Management policy. Motorcyclists 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 dirty bikes) sit and gather dust in my garage,” wrote one motorcyclist in a November 1975 letter. News cyclea popular Long Beach weekly. But the Bureau of Land Management only received new enforcement powers thanks to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. 1978 Letter. News cycle called the regulation “Bureaucratic BS” and “Environmental Blackmail”.

The bikers were also upset that mining companies and other corporations seemed to be allowed to destroy desert land, but they weren’t.

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

In defense, the Duck team argued that environmental protections threatened their First Amendment right to protest. Judge Warren Ferguson disagreed. “Nobody — nobody — has a constitutional right to ride a motorcycle on somebody else’s property,” he said, ordering the Duck and his friends to cancel the ride.

The bikers paid no attention to 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?” Dirty bike Magazine editor Rick Seaman (aka Super Hunky) said they would tell the Bureau of Land Management rangers who approached them. “We’re just here to hang out with friends.” After the ride, the Bureau of Land Management brought 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 conspiracy charges.

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

Later that decade, Seaman and others founded the Sahara Club, an off-road car group whose name explicitly antagonized the Sierra Club. The club’s “Ten Biggest Fools List” targeted the Sierra Club, Democratic politicians and Bureau of Land Management officials. His newsletters regularly listed names, license plates and phone numbers of Earth First! members and showed cartoons denigrating US Senator Alan Cranston’s efforts to protect the wilderness.

Where dirt bike activists opposed mining and grazing interests in the 1970s, the Sahara Club embraced a new alignment of populism and corporate law, aligning itself with the “wise use” groups that represented corporate interests on public lands.

“Wise use” of wilderness

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

Fifty years later, much of the wilderness is now officially protected. In January, a federal judge sided with conservationists in a decades-long battle over the designations off-road vehicles trails in the Western Mojave Desert Tortoise Habitat.

The Barstow-to-Vegas has been defunct since its last run in 1989. But its trail shows the lasting impact of motorcycle use on the desert. In December, the Forest Service announced plans to rescind rules restricting ATV and motorcycle access to trails, and the Trump administration has broadly reduced federal authority to regulate environmental degradation in a move by commentators have been likened to the era of reasonable use.

The story of the Duck lives on in debates about what to do with a group of angry men. The Barstow-to-Vegas lawsuit echoes the strange rhetoric of Trump’s legal proceedings: just bragging rights and constitutional claims, no substance. Solving the case—freeing several young white men from ruining their lives—only led to more fury and hatred in the Sahara Club newsletter.

Maybe the Duck rides again.

This commentary is adapted from an essay created for Plinth Public Square.

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This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.