Utility Terrain Vehicles aka side-by-sides look like the rebellious cousins of the golf cart family. UTVs are becoming more powerful and easier to drive than older-style ATVs. For an increasing number of Sedona visitors, they are a desirable way to see the red rocks and spend time with family.
But modern UTVs also have the enhanced capacity to drive through untouched areas — as well as be louder and faster than other vehicles — and those aspects are creating a conflict with other users of the national forest lands west of Sedona.
Arizona Game and Fish officer Lee Luedeker, who has served in the area for 48 years, said “the last 16 months have been the worst that I’ve seen” in terms of off-road driving in the Forest Road 525 corridor.
While the problem of illegal driving and resource damage is “not limited specially to the Sedona district or to the 525 area, it’s kind of a national phenomenon, I think we’re kind of at the spearhead of it in terms of intensity,” he said.
UTVs are just one class of vehicle among the swelling traffic west of Sedona, but UTVs receive particular ire from some, including DeAnna Bindley, who is finishing a house on Forest Road 152C aka Boynton Pass Road. Bindley is part of a group of residents off Boynton Pass and Forest Road 525 that has been lobbying the U.S. Forest Service and local governments to do something about noise, dust and reckless driving in the area.
“The [UTVs] consider this their amusement park and personal racetrack,” she said.
Bindley and neighbors use adjectives like “horrifying” and “crazy” to describe the noise and traffic levels on some weekends. During a weekend in March, Bindley said, “I was sitting in my living room crying” because of the incessant noise.
Bindley is not taking the situation passively. Armed with a radar gun and decibel meter, she has been watching the road and making videos of speeding vehicles and the dust clouds that shoot up then slowly waft north along the prevailing winds toward the red rocks.
She’s such an old hand with the radar at this point, she confidently calls out speeds by sight.
“He’s going about 35 mph,” she said on a recent Saturday afternoon as she eyed a UTV driving by, as one did every 30 to 60 seconds.
“It’s a constant, constant thing,” Bindley said. “The dust is awful. I believe that it is dangerous.”
Bindley is not alone in her crusade. The residents of the unincorporated islands of private land west of Sedona are bombarding USFS personnel with reports of near-misses with reckless drivers and photographs of off-road damage.
Last week, a UTV performed a U-turn in Bindley’s front yard.
Sedona Red Rock News did not have to look long to directly observe reckless driving by UTVs in the area. In one incident, two UTVs raced side by side from a stop at the intersection of Boynton Pass Road and FR 525. On another occasion, a UTV pulled off 525 northbound and drove parallel to the roadway through the desert before pulling back onto the road.
Bindley is aware that some may say she chose to build next to the forest road, so how can she complain now, but she said she’s fighting for the environment and not just herself.
Dust is one effect of the increase in motorized recreation. All vehicles create dust on the road, but Bindley believes that UTVs’ ability to drive at higher speeds and more aggressively on rough terrain creates more dust than other vehicles. Bindley’s neighbor Sue Davis has lived off Boynton Pass for over 20 years, long enough to have a story about chatting with John F. Kennedy Jr. when she stopped next to his convertible on Boynton Pass Road. Davis’ house off Boynton Pass Road is visibly tinted by the dust. Bindley thinks that’s a health issue for Davis and other residents.
In many places along the road, dust coats the piñons, junipers and scrub oaks. Many of these plants are visibly struggling or already denuded of greenery.
In May of 2020, Brindley hired an arborist with SavATree in Phoenix to evaluate the trees, and the company wrote in an assessment, “unless dust control is achieved, the health of the trees along this stretch of Forest Service Road 152C will continue to decline. Hundreds of trees up to 20 yards from the road are now dead or declining and hundreds of other trees are at risk due to the heavy dust accumulation on leaves, branches and bark.”
Craig Swanson, president of Keep Sedona Beautiful, has seen the tree problem and believes it has emerged “within a couple of years.”
“In five years, they will be dead and the dust will spread further,” he said.
Ranchers Becki and Dustin Ross, permit holders for the Windmill West allotment from the USFS, are also having problems with the level of motorized recreation.
“Some ranchers have wolves, some have [mountain] lions, we have four-wheelers,” Dustin said.
UTVs and RVers driving in unauthorized areas are disrupting cattle’s access to water on the range, Becki Ross said. When vehicles drive or park too close to stock tanks, they cut cows — and wildlife — off from the water access. Loss of grass around stock tanks from illegal driving also causes them to fill with silt faster, Becki said. The traffic is also concentrating cows into quieter parts of the range.
“The quieter areas of those pastures are experiencing higher than normal use by our cattle, which is a big concern for us,” Becki wrote in an email.
The Rosses are also concerned about the loss of grass from off-road driving.
“The crushing of the soils when OHV drive off road affects the productivity and visual quality of the land. Grasses and brush growth is stunted or stopped,” Becki said.
One of the charms of the Bear Mountain area is that it looks wild, but some are concerned the current intensity of motorized recreation is impacting wildlife in the area. Lauren Broberg, who lives near FR 525, said she is not seeing deer or pronghorn as frequently as she used to.
“The pronghorn antelope population out there is a sensitive population because it is genetically isolated, so we try to keep disturbance and harvest out of that group, as far as hunting, very strictly controlled,” Luedeker said.
Luedeker said there are no wildlife impacts “we can document as far as strictly biological parameters,” but he said there have been troubling incidents in the last year. Just last week, a hot-air balloon company reported a dead pronghorn on the side of 525. Luedeker also said that a large percentage of the pronghorn herd in the area is fitted with radio collars, and two collared pronghorn went missing in 2020. Luedeker said it’s not clear whether the pronghorn were lost to natural predation or human activity. While predation is a possibility, adult pronghorn are challenging prey for local predators, as they are the second-fastest mammal in the world and the fastest over long distances.
Non-motorized users of the forest roads west of Sedona are not happy about the increased traffic and unethical behavior of drivers, either.
Long-time resident Serge Wright said he used to ride horses west of Sedona.
“It was beautiful to ride out there years ago,” he said, back when 525 was called Twin Trees or Two Trees by locals, for two massive piñons that grew at the intersection with State Route 89A, before they were cut by ADOT. “That area now is just so impacted and inundated with RVs and ATVs.”
Birgit Loewenstein, a KSB trustee, said she used to bike on the forest roads, but now “it’s impossible. You can’t enjoy this road.”
Today, a few hardy bikers still ply FR 525 and Boynton Pass Road. In one of Bindley’s latest videos, from March 6, she captures two bikers disappearing in a cloud of dust as a Jeep drives past and then two UTVs pass them from behind. A truck then approaches the opaque cloud of dust from behind. The viewer has to hope the truck is driving defensively because it’s impossible to see what’s happening behind the dust.
To underscore the point, she adds a caption, “I wonder what happened to the people on bicycles?”
In the next installment of the 525 series, the NEWS will report on the response to the increased UTV pressure by local governments and land and wildlife agencies.
