Where no one fears the treads

At THE ENTRANCE TO CALIFORNIA’S BUSIEST STATE campground, I confront a sign: Street Vehicles Not Advised. Soft Sand. Treacherous Stream Xing.

Then I roll forward to the lady who takes my $10 for an overnight stay and eyes my two-wheel-drive Toyota skeptically.

“You may get stuck in the sand,” she says. Also, the temperature may fall below freezing. I will haul my own trash. There will be no picnic tables, no fire rings, no drinking water, no bathrooms. “Well,” she corrects herself, “there are portable toilets. But it’s primitive.”

These people don’t need to sweet-talk anybody. This year, every summer and holiday weekend has sold out: 1,000 camping parties per night.

Is it the scattered scrub and sand verbena that pack them in? The shorebirds? The waves? Nah. You could argue that it’s the dunes, which roll for thousands of acres, rising west of Guadalupe, subsiding south of Pismo Beach -- but that’s not quite it, either. The magic of Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area is this: In the 1,100 or so miles that make up California’s coastline, this is the last public land where you can not only camp on the beach but drive on it. In fact, you have to drive on it.

Once you’ve paid at the kiosk, you drop off the blacktop, veer south and splash through Arroyo Grande Creek as it trickles to sea. For 3 1/2 miles, the broad, hard-packed beach is a wide-open territory. So long as you steer clear of the webbing fences along the edge of the dunes, you can drive where you dare on soft or wet sand, bearing in mind that rangers have been enforcing the 15-mph beach speed limit more often lately.

When the going is good, the RVs, trucks, motorcycles and SUVs roll in like an endless Fourth of July parade, one that only gets louder when these people hit the dunes with their roaring quads, three-wheelers and motorcycles. By night, RVs outnumber tents.

To a rookie like me, it feels absolutely illicit to drive straight from street to beach sand, and just as strange to stop, pound in tent stakes, dig a fire pit, torch an artificial (yet ranger-approved) fire log, then watch the dance of latecomers’ headlights on my tent wall. Even on one of the coldest nights of the year, a 32-degree Wednesday in early December, there are 11 groups camping here tonight. On New Year’s Eve, there will be 90 times as many.

“I was raised here,” says Angel Lopez, a 34-year-old Santa Maria resident who sits astride a growling three-wheeler as the sun sinks low. Lopez starts to tell me how he brought his four kids up here right after dinner on Thanksgiving Day, but he’s interrupted by a small, impatient voice.

“Angel,” whines Brandon Moreno, 9 years old and itching to rev his bright red quad, “we’re running out of daylight.”

We love our motor vehicles. We love the beach. Put them together and you have something special. Ecologically unsustainable, maybe, but special.

Not that I could have told you any of this a month ago. This road trip began with a simple question to the state parks people: Which of their 278 parks has booked the most camping reservations this year? They went to ReserveAmerica, the state’s camping reservation concessionaire.

Now, this question ignores national parks, shoulders aside those sites with limited or no overnight capacities (some of which sell out crucial dates in minutes) and shrugs off those millions of day visitors who leave before dark. But the answer means something, and it knocked me sideways.

I presumed a Southern California beach would win and wondered which one. Yet here we are farther north, on the Central Coast. From January through November, the computer told us, the Oceano campground took 22,288 reservations (excluding drive-ups). The runner-up was Lake Perris, near Riverside, with 19,990. Carpinteria State Beach took 13,908.

I underestimated the car-beach thing, and, given the ATVs of Oceano and roaring motorboats on Lake Perris, I overestimated the appeal of quiet. Certainly I had forgotten the size, fervor and focus of the off-road crowd.

While the Sierra Club and others campaign against the damage wrought by off-highway play and governments trim acreage available to off-roaders, Californians are buying more and more equipment for that very activity.

At Oceano, Sierra Clubbers, off-roaders and state agencies have been tussling over how much space to leave for the threatened western snowy plover and the endangered California least tern. As it stands, the off-roaders have 3,600 acres of dunes and beach to play on, with up to 1,720 off-road toys at a time. From March 1 through Sept. 30, rangers close some nesting areas.

In early-morning chill, I scramble from sleeping bag to clothes, fire up a new log and stroll a bit toward the surf. In the stark, sideways light, I see all the tire prints in sharp relief, a vast pattern for 3 1/2 miles, a hundred yards wide, and snowy plovers hopping tread to tread.

“No surprise to us,” says Rey Monge, the area’s deputy district superintendent, when I mention the camping stats.

“Figures,” says a sentry at the ranger kiosk.

LaDona Sullivan, a regular, just nods. Sullivan, who doesn’t ride off-road, likes to camp on the beach with her kids next to her truck. She’s been coming to Oceano since her grandfather brought her 34 years ago.

“It’s overcrowded in the summer, it really is,” she says. “But if they ever close this beach, a little bit of me will die. It’s my sanity.”

An hour or two later, I pull up stakes and gingerly roll north across the soft sand and trickling creek. As I head out past the kiosk and up Pier Avenue -- it’s Thursday morning now -- I see the ATV merchants, left and right, setting up shop for another busy weekend.

One day in 10 or 20 years, the state or some judge will probably banish motorized vehicles from this beach, and the planet will be better off. But California culture, whatever that is, will be a little poorer.

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To read previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.