New Danger in the Wilderness

By Frederic Golden

Robbers, armed groups and pot growers menace park lands

Thousands of nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

When the great naturalist John Muir wrote those idealistic lines in 1898, the nation's parks and forests were peaceful retreats where a visitor from the city might not encounter anything more ominous than the mournful moans of a lovesick moose. No more. Today Muir's pristine wilderness is becoming increasingly dangerous. Not because of any natural menace, but because of human malevolence. In almost all national parks and forests, crime is rising sharply, especially the violent kind.

On a recent weekend in Oregon's Dunes National Recreation Area, carousing, boozing, drug-using dune-buggy jockeys brawled so fiercely that officials had to set up a field hospital to treat the casualties. In Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a ranger was assaulted one night when he inspected a parked car and chanced on a kidnaper and his victim. Everglades National Park in Florida has become a major thoroughfare for illegal drugs from Colombia and elsewhere. Arizona has robberies, assaults, rapes and sex parties in its Salt River area, and the Wasatch Front in Utah is the scene of drug feuds, arson and marauding motorcycle gangs. On a single summer day in Yellowstone National Park, when as many as 30,000 people visit natural wonders like Old Faithful, Park Service officers must stay on the alert for violations that range from speeding to burglarizing parked campers. Says Chief Ranger Thomas Hobbs "You learn that not only nice guys travel"

Since 1969, reports the General Accounting Office (GAO) in Washington, violations of federal law in U.S. parks and forests have tripled, exceeding the increase in the number of visitors (101 % for parks 45% for forests; during the same period. The biggest jump has been in assaults, up 400%. Vandalism is up 220%. In the past decade, timber thefts have soared by 700%. The GAO, as financial overseer of federal properties, warns that the rising crime rate may be undermining the very usefulness of many wilderness areas as retreats for recreation.

No part of the federally owned parkland has been hit harder than California's Angeles National Forest, 693,000 acres of rugged, thickly wooded wilderness in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles. The forest has long been a catch basin for urban crime. Says Administrative Officer Roger Fischer of the U.S. Forest Service: "It's the biggest dumping ground for dead bodies and stolen vehicles I've ever seen." During the first five months of the year, authorities reported eleven rapes, 27 aggravated assaults, 66 burglaries and 139 thefts and robberies, including 14 stolen cars.

Crimes occur at almost any hour. Even as he took a visiting reporter on a tour of the forest's scenic San Gabriel Canyon, Sergeant Dick Phillips, a deputy with the Los Angeles County sheriffs office, which shares law-enforcement responsibilities for the area with the U.S. Forest Service, stumbled on three young men who were arrested by another officer for trying to jimmy the lock on a camper. As deputies led the manacled trio off to jail, Phillips sighed, "Crime does pay here, because they know there's very little law here.''

Much of the lawbreaking is pointless. In an almost psychotic eruption of anger, vandals started up a bulldozer one night in the Angeles forest and flattened a $20,000 concrete-block rest room. For no apparent reason, three youths shot and killed a good Samaritan in the San Gabriel Canyon area who had stopped to help them get their car out of the mud. Aside from ordinary criminals, there are self-styled paramilitary organizations that flock to the forest to practice with their firearms. Some stage mock World War II battles, even wearing authentic American and German uniforms. Once, when Phillips drove up to halt a skirmish, the commander of the "German' troops called out Achtung! and his group snapped to attention. Phillips and his fellow deputies have also encountered religious cult activities, including Satan worship. Dressed in black robes, devotees of the devil chant their mumbo jumbo before candlelit rock altars and dismember various animals, usually birds such as crows, doves and chickens. On one occasion, Phillips found the disemboweled remains of a coyote hanging from a tree.

A great many offenses are drug-related. The Angeles forest's remote campsites are used as labs by drug makers who regularly cook up batches of PCP, a common, easy-to-concoct street drug also known as angel dust. A bigger problem is the widespread cultivation of marijuana on federal and state parkland, which nets growers at least $1 billion in California alone. To protect their illicit crop, squatter pot farmers in the Angeles forest and elsewhere resort to patrol dogs, electronic warning systems and such Viet Nam-like tactics as ringing their fields with explosive booby traps, planting sharpened bamboo stakes in hidden pits, and draping lines of eye-level fishhooks from trees. They have sabotaged Park Service vehicles and taken potshots at spray planes and helicopters.

The epidemic of crime has cast the Park Service's rangers in a new and uncomfortable role. Patrolling the wilderness in their forest-green uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats, they can no longer limit their jobs to protecting the woods from careless campers or people from the wilderness. As one young ranger at Yellowstone puts it, "Now we have to worry about protecting people from people.''

With reporting by Joseph Pilcher/Los Angeles

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