Mountain Bikers Tearing Up O.C. Parks, Critics Say

Tom Maloney is losing his battle with trespassers on wheels. Too many mountain bikers at Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park in south Orange County flout the law by riding unauthorized trails, or cutting their own, damaging some of the county park’s most environmentally sensitive areas.

And Maloney--the park’s only ranger--admits he can’t do much about it.

Thrill-seeking mountain bikers shun the wide, rolling fire roads as too boring and instead shred the pristine wilderness, making their own paths. The problem is especially acute in Orange County, where rugged hills lure some of the professional sport’s biggest daredevils. One local guidebook dubbed Orange County’s 30,000 acres of wilderness parkland as “the mountain biking capital of the world.”

Unlike neighboring Los Angeles, where a vast network of mountain bike enthusiasts patrols voluntarily, Orange County has rangers at more than a dozen parks off the beaten path struggling to keep bike riders on official trails.

Examples are commonplace:

* Last year at Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, three mountain bikers were observed hacking through the brush with machetes, illegally clearing a trail that had been closed for replanting.

* At nearby Crystal Cove State Park, renegade riders rig barbed-wire fences so they can more easily slip onto restricted trails. Officials post warnings, but the signs are routinely ripped down.

* Exasperated rangers at Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park in the remote south county area recently resorted to calling out sheriff’s deputies to cite a man they say is an especially persistent offender. He pleaded guilty to trespassing 10 days ago and was fined $27.

The problems are most pressing at Aliso and Wood Canyons park, more than 4,000 acres of coastal hills and canyons bounded by Laguna Beach, Aliso Viejo and Laguna Niguel. The park’s remoteness attracts more than 100,000 users a year: hikers, trail runners, equestrians and mountain bikers.

Most stay on marked trails. Some, however, sporting souped-up bikes and cycling gear that allows them to tackle more rugged terrain, seek greater challenges. They stray onto off-limits trails or race down untrammeled ridgelines creating new routes. Maloney estimates that illegal trails--with fresh ones springing up weekly--outnumber legal ones three to one.

“I can see a remarkable decrease in quality of the habitat, just from all the ridge-top trails,” he said.

Many riders don’t realize they are breaking the law by straying off marked trails. Others don’t care.

The results are especially destructive: Nesting raptors are frightened off. Knobby tires mangle native vegetation. Habitat for the endangered gnatcatcher is further fragmented.

“I could catch them every day if I wanted to,” Maloney said of illegal mountain bikers, “but my time is limited and the results are sometimes discouraging.”

Currently, rangers don’t have authority to write citations. And sheriff’s deputies are called in for only the most belligerent offenders.

A proposal to give park rangers the ability to write tickets is under review. Another possibility is hiring deputies to ride with rangers.

But the park is so huge that cyclists easily elude Maloney and his pickup truck. Trespassers tend to ride when rangers are off duty.

Stepped up law enforcement is only part of the answer, said John Gannaway, lead ranger at Caspers Wilderness Park.

“We know we’re not going to be able to stop everybody,” he said. “But the mountain biking community is really close knit and we hope that when the word gets out that rangers are citing, most bikers will stop riding the illegal trails.”

Most riders heeded that message long ago, said Jim Meyer, executive director of Trails4All, a group made up of Orange County equestrians, hikers, trail runners and mountain bikers who work on volunteer trail maintenance projects. Groups such as Trails4All and the International Mountain Bicycling Assn. urge riders to behave responsibly by sticking to established trails and say the vast majority do just that.

“It’s not a mountain bike issue,” Meyer said. “It’s a people issue. I get really sensitive as a mountain bike rider when everyone is pointing the finger at us.”

Other users cause problems as well, Meyer said: Bird watchers and native-plant enthusiasts leave the trail, and runners and hikers often cut switchbacks and cause erosion.

A Recent but Destructive Trend

Mountain bikes are a fairly recent addition to the recreational landscape. They were invented in the late 1970s, and by the mid-’80s the activity edged out road biking in popularity. By 1993, 90% of bicycles being sold for adults were mountain bikes.

Orange County’s trails attract some of the sport’s top downhill professionals, who live and train there. Among them: Laguna Beach’s Brian Lopes, who last month wrapped up the 2000 World Cup championship in men’s dual slalom, and Newport Beach’s Tara Llanes and Capistrano Beach’s Leigh Donovan, who finished second and fifth in the women’s dual slalom.

Along the way, bike technology improved, allowing riders to handle increasingly severe terrain and, in the process, tear up more parkland.

With wider tires and full-suspension shock-absorbing systems, the rigs have more in common with motorcycles than their motorless predecessors. Downhillers in full-face helmets and protective body armor rocket down severe trails.

Aliso, Wood and adjacent Laguna canyons are among the favorite playgrounds. They offer a thrill ride for amateurs and necessary practice for professionals, but the trails that test downhill skills the best are illegal.

Donovan, the 1995 world downhill champion, said she has stopped riding unauthorized routes, but did so reluctantly because the alternative is to drive hours to ski resorts in the local mountains.

“We all want to ride the trails but if we can’t ride them, we can’t ride them,” Donovan said. “We’ll make it happen somewhere else. We don’t want to because this place is so great.”

Other riders aren’t so cooperative. They say developers have destroyed most of the area’s habitat to make way for housing, golf courses and roads. By comparison, bikers--even those on unauthorized trails--are treading lightly.

“I’ve been doing it since ‘87,” said Keith Eckstein, vice president of the Orange County-based SHARE Mountain Bike Club, “and the only damage to the environment has been the . . . toll road.”

Eckstein also downplayed concerns about the damage.

“At the end of all things, it’s just a bike ride,” he said. “You are just out there in the woods enjoying nature. You’re not damaging it, no more than a horse or hiker is.”

Land managers disagree, saying they have good reasons to close off areas, though the reasons are not always evident.

Crystal Cove is home to many archeological sites that hold artifacts from settlements of 800 to 2,000 years ago, said ecologist David Pryor, and a biker straying off trail could do serious damage to these precious ruins. Unauthorized bike trails often slice through sensitive habitat and fast-moving bikes may run over animals or scare them away, Pryor said.

One encroachment might not cause irreversible harm, but the effects are cumulative.

“They’re all little hits, little chinks out of the thing,” he said, “but when you add them all together, what are you going to get?”

That’s what a five-year study by the Nature Reserve of Orange County’s Recreation Ecology Committee will examine, starting next spring. A public-private partnership that presides over 37,000 acres of Orange County open space, it is mandated by federal and state law to help threatened species thrive.

The study will map area trails, measuring how they widen or narrow over time and the effects on plants and animals.