Diane Beck
North Group Conservation Co-Chair

The South Spit of Humboldt Bay is a desolate, four-and-a-half-mile-long narrow peninsula of land that separates the southern part of Humboldt Bay from the Pacific Ocean. A rough county road runs up the middle to the South Jetty, next to the bay entrance and ship channel. This year, ownership of the many disparate parcels of the spit was consolidated in a gift to the State of California, and the state gave the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) the right to manage the peninsula. It is an outstanding opportunity to enhance and restore a wonderful beach-and-dune ecosystem and to enjoy a long, semi-wilderness, easily accessible expanse of Pacific Coast beach.

The North Group has very high regard for BLM's Arcata Field Office. Its Draft Management Plan for Headwaters Forest Reserve, for instance, is superior and very well wrought, in the face of demands from various user groups. But its South Spit Interim Management Plan contains, to us, a fatal flaw: It proposes to allow off-road-vehicle riding on the ocean waveslope. The North Group is urging it to change its mind.

Management of the South Spit was handed over to BLM with a Deed of Conservation Easement. The Deed states, "It is the purpose of this Easement to preserve, protect, enhance, and restore the conservation values of the Property; to provide dispersed recreation for the general public; and to prevent any use of the Property that will significantly impair or interfere with such conservation values." Included in the Deed is a mandate "To prevent any activity on or use of the Property that is inconsistent with the purpose of this easement." It seems to us that OHV waveslope riding is incompatible with such conservation values, especially when referring to the federally listed western snowy plover.

Even if vehicles actually remain on the wet part of the waveslope, plovers (adults and chicks) feed on the organisms under and around the organic debris left on the beach with the tide. And keeping OHVers on the waveslope with but four hours of patrolling a week demonstrates an extreme form of wishful thinking. The Interim Plan sets out the numerous ways in which the plover is adversely affected by vehicles. BLM seems satisfied to rest its case for managing for waveslope vehicle riding on the South Spit on Humboldt County's Beach and Dune Management Planproduced in 1995, when no one in the county wished to deal with the existing problemsand on the California Coastal Conservancy's South Spit Management Plan (1997). During the scoping meetings for the latter, waveslope riding was a given and never brought into the discussion. The scoping meetings took place in Loleta and were not well attended by anyone but locals, who were primarily concerned with issues pertaining to the homeless and Native American sites.

Thus, BLM intends to allow waveslope riding on the basis of two very weak legs, two plans in which waveslope riding on the South Spit was inadequately considered in the face of other salient issues or was not questioned at all.

Vehicle riding on beaches also detracts from the recreational experience of most other beach users, whether walkers, picnickers, bird watchers or equestrians. The large majority of beach users do not want to see vehicles at all on beaches.