Storm clouds gathered over Bald Knob, snuffing out a full moon and cloaking the national forest in darkness.
John Price, a law enforcement officer for the U.S. Forest Service, parked his SUV on a secluded dirt road. A cold April rain began to fall as he settled in for a stakeout.
Nearly an hour had passed when, close to midnight, the glare of approaching headlights sliced through the trees.
As Price watched from his hiding spot, a jacked-up Suzuki Samurai with oversized, knobby tires headed for a mudhole the size of a small pond. The driver gunned his engine, sending the Suzuki spinning, sliding and slinging mud.
Price jumped out and walked briskly to the Suzuki, shining his flashlight into the startled faces of five teenagers inside.
“What you’re doing right now is illegal,” Price told the driver. “You can’t be up here ripping and tearing.”
It is a scene that frequently plays out deep in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests: rogue four-wheelers looking for fun; federal agents looking to stop them.
Since November, Price and a second district officer have caught about 80 people in the act. It is a federal offense to drive off a Forest Service road, and a sport known as mud bogging translates in U.S. District Court to a charge of damaging government resources.
More and more four-wheelers are driving their souped-up rigs into the woods these days, creating a conflict between recreational and environmental interests in the national forest.
Mud bogging is causing serious ecological damage, and authorities have decided that beefed-up law enforcement alone can’t solve the problem.
District Ranger Cindy Schiffer is considering closing, at least during the winter, some of the 545 miles of roads that run through the national forest’s Eastern Divide Ranger District, a 370,000-acre expanse that stretches from Botetourt County to Tazewell County.
Hikers, hunters, campers and others — who often take a dim view of mud boggers — rely on the dirt and gravel routes to access public lands. But even their lawful driving is contributing to the road damage, especially from January through March, Schiffer said.
“We’re trying to maintain the system,” she said. “We’re not trying to shut people out of their national forest.”
With the impending closures comes the realization that, unlike a decade or two ago, vehicular access to the national forest backwoods is no longer limited to pickup trucks and station wagons.
“How many of those souped-up vehicles were out there 20 years ago, with tires the size of a small compact car?” Schiffer said.
“That’s what’s going out in the woods now. People are looking to throw mud and do doughnuts and drive through the creeks.”
Damage is costly
Under the cover of darkness — and sometimes the influence of alcohol — mud boggers began to show up in March on Patterson Creek Road, a nine-mile stretch of unpaved road in Craig and Botetourt counties.
They veered off the road, plowed through the creek bed and did what Price calls “Dukes of Hazzard doughnuts” in meadows that the Forest Service had cultivated to attract wildlife.
Damage was estimated at $30,000. The creek remained clouded with sediment for days, and it could be up to a year before the area is returned to its natural state, Forest Service officials said.
The road was barricaded and will remain closed indefinitely. Meanwhile, 39 people are facing charges in state and federal court. Virtually all of the charges involved SUVs and trucks. Forest officials say that although there are some problems with all-terrain vehicles leaving their designated trails, the damage they cause is not as severe as larger vehicles.
Although mud bogging is undoubtedly doing the most harm to the national forest, legitimate use on designated roads is also contributing to the problem, Schiffer said.
During the winter months, when a cycle of freezing and thawing is followed by spring rains, even the most well-intentioned motorists are degrading the softened roadbeds.
Before the most recent problems, Schiffer decided to conduct a road-by-road review of the Eastern District. This summer, she plans to release a proposal detailing which roads will be closed, and for how long.
After a period for public comment, Schiffer will make a final decision.
Most closures will be for the winter months, when the potential for damage is the greatest while public use of the national forest is at its lowest. Still, there’s concern among outdoor enthusiasts.
“Patterson Creek has a lot of hunters that go in there during deer season,” said Gary Lynch of Roanoke, who has been hunting and camping in the area since he was 19.
If it remains off-limits, he said, “that’s going to make a lot of people upset.”
Club bucks stereotype
From behind the steering wheel of his four-wheel-drive SUV, Martin Morrison surveyed a downhill stretch of boulders, plotting the best route along a portion of the Potts Mountain Jeep Trail known as “the stacks.”
Then he eased his red Suzuki into gear, sending it lurching over the rocks like a slow-motion mechanical bull on wheels.
“It’s rock we’re driving across, so it’s not going to go away,” he said. “This road here, we can drive on it for 20 years and it’s not going to change.”
Morrison is president of the Southwestern Virginia Four Wheelers, an organization that advocates responsible off-highway driving in the national forest and on private lands.
On a recent Saturday, about a dozen members of the group picked up trash and cleared brush while traversing the Jeep trail in Craig County. The convoy of high-lift Jeeps and Suzukis took care to stay on the road and, for the most part, steered clear of the occasional mudhole.
Morrison bristles when mud boggers are called “off-road enthusiasts.” He prefers the term “yahoos.”
Publicity about the damage caused by a few lawbreakers “hurts us because that’s what the public sees,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t put the group as a whole in a favorable light.”
Schiffer, the district ranger, said four-wheelers such as those in Morrison’s group are the responsible ones. “Unfortunately, the folks that are following the rules end up suffering because of the ones that choose not to,” she said.
Seasonal closures don’t concern Morrison, but he worries about more sweeping changes. It can take a full day or longer to hike into some of the more remote areas, he said, and that’s not an option for all of the users of the national forest.
“I like trees,” he said. “I’m all for wilderness areas. But what I’m not in favor of is locking it away so nobody can see it. There has to be an access. There has to be some sort of balance.”
Off-roaders and ‘street cred’
“Here’s the problem,” John Price said, pointing to a path of rutted tire tracks that ran straight up a steep embankment off Patterson Creek Road.
“Those tire tracks become an invitation to the next knucklehead. He might say: ‘That guy had a Ford and he couldn’t make it, but I have a Chevrolet.’ So he’s going to give it a try.”
Maybe it’s the TV commercials that promote tough trucks scaling mountain peaks and splashing through creeks. Maybe it’s because the Eastern Divide district is so close to population centers in Roanoke and Blacksburg.
For whatever reason, the national forest is attracting a growing number of visitors who might feel more at home at one of the Roanoke Civic Center’s sold-out monster truck shows.
“A lot of the off-roaders will identify themselves as fishermen and lovers of the outdoors,” said D.J. Gerken, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “But for others, it may be that this [four-wheeling] is the only time they get outdoors.”
The appeal for some off-roaders is to coat their high-rise vehicles with as much mud as possible, then drive through town the way some people cruise their Mustangs and Corvettes down Williamson Road.
“That’s a lot of street cred,” Price said of a souped-up sports car. “Well, this is mountain cred. Once you get your buddies out there and you start slinging a lot of mud, your cred goes way up.”
A native of Craig County, Price did some four-wheeling of his own in his younger days. He knows it’s how young men can impress dates, having met his own wife that way.
It’s not like he’s trying to give every four-wheeler a hard time, Price said.
Drunken drivers and unrepentant mud boggers are different.
“We’ve got some people out here who are just meatheads,” he said, “so it is fairly satisfying to jack them up.”
‘It’s just a way to have fun’
It was a Friday night in the national forest, and Price had gone more than halfway through his shift without writing a single ticket.
That finally changed when the Suzuki Samurai filled with teenagers arrived at the mudhole on Bald Knob in Alleghany County.
With no paved roads — much less a backup — for miles around, Price took no chances as he approached the muddy SUV. “Get your hands up,” he demanded.
It soon became clear that neither the driver, 18-year-old Josh Harmon, nor his four passengers were armed. Nor was Harmon drunk, a sobriety test determined, despite the Bud Lights and wine coolers that Price found in a cooler in the back.
After Price wrote Harmon a summons for underage possession of alcohol, the conversation turned to mud.
Harmon had just assumed that four-wheeling was OK, he said, seeing as the mudhole was already there.
“It’s up here because people have been taking their Jeeps and coming up here and raising Cain, tearing it all to pieces. That’s why it’s up here,” Price said. “They come up here and rip it and tear it and spin it to death.”
But there’s not much to do in his hometown of Covington, Harmon explained a few minutes later, when Price had stepped away. So he and his friends had decided to do some mud bogging after leaving the bowling alley.
“It’s just a way to have fun,” he said. And when you get back to town with your vehicle covered with mud, “people look at you.”
Before letting the 18-year-old go, Price told him he would likely be charged with damaging government resources. “You probably will be seeing the judge on that,” Price said.
Judge gets the picture
When a mud bogger came to federal court last week to plead guilty, Magistrate Judge Michael Urbanski laid down the law: The punishment is up to six months in jail, or a fine of up to $5,000.
Or, if you’re a first-time offender such as William Shell, you can pay $355 — the cost of a truckload of gravel used to repair the mess you made.
Shell readily accepted the offer, which federal authorities have been making in most of the mud bogging cases. If Shell pays up, the misdemeanor charge against him will be dismissed.
But if he frequents another mudhole, Urbanski warned the 20-year-old, he could wind up in jail.
Last year, the judge took a ride through the national forest with Price to get a better sense of what has become a common case in his courtroom. “It’s a real problem out there,” Urbanski told another offender Thursday.
Outside the courtroom, Shell said he had learned his lesson.
Price hopes the word will get out that mud bogging on federal land is a crime. If it does, he believes, then maybe the gaping holes left in the landscape might have time to heal.
“Mother Nature can’t get ahead of the curve,” he said, “unless we’re out here writing tickets.”
Staff writer Mark Taylor contributed to this report.