PIKE NATIONAL FOREST - Every 30 seconds or so, the air is pierced by the deep rumble of a dirt bike or ATV.

In the distance, gunshots ring out, probably someone shooting illegally, too close to the road. And we’ve just come across our second unattended, still-burning campfire of the day, though it’s only 10 a.m.

“This is a typical day. I can’t get a half-mile up the road without running into something that eats up my time,” says Jon Pfeiffer, forest protection officer with the U.S. Forest Service.

Welcome to Rainbow Falls — not the Manitou Springs waterfall, but the incredibly popular off-highway-vehicle area 10 miles north of Woodland Park. On summer weekends, as many as 300 dirt bikes, ATVs and Jeeps race down the hundreds of miles of rough roads and trails — many of them illegal, user-created routes — that lace through the pine forests.

Pfeiffer brought me along on patrol May 22, one of the first beautiful sunny Saturdays of spring, to see for myself how heavily used the area is, the scars use has left on the landscape, and why the Forest Service says changes are in order.

Illegal trails

It doesn’t take long for a piece of natural ground to become a rutted, eroded, barren and illegal vehicle route.

“It takes an ATV one time to go up a hill, throw some dirt, chew up some grass and an hour later another person will see the tire tracks and go up there. It doesn’t take but a couple of times and all of a sudden we’ve got these social routes,” Pfeiffer says.

To illustrate, he takes me past any number of hillsides, which once had grasses and vegetation but are now nothing but crumbling, eroded Pikes Peak granite. It can take three decades for the land to come back, he says.

Signs at some areas warn people no vehicles are allowed, but the Forest Service can’t put signs everywhere. Last year the agency spent $15,000 replacing stolen and vandalized signs in the Pikes Peak Ranger District, Pfeiffer says.

Since 2005, vehicles in Pike National Forest have been allowed only on designated routes, but the word has not reached everyone.

“It has been kind of a new concept to a lot of people and there’s a lot of confusion going on still about the public lands,” says Justin Lilly, program coordinator of Stay the Trail Colorado, who spends many weekends at Rainbow Falls, talking to OHV users about staying on designated routes. “People are kind of confused as to where exactly they can go, what new rules are in place.”

The Forest Service is drawing up a travel management plan for Rainbow Falls and the Rampart Range, proposing to close 4.5 miles of motorized trails, build 5.9 miles of trails, designate two “open riding” parks and create a 14-mile single-track trail at the popular motorized recreation area near Devil’s Head in Douglas County. The Manitou Experimental Forest, to the south, would be closed to vehicles.

A draft plan is expected to be released this summer.

A few bad apples

On our sunny Saturday, the teenagers who went for a ride on their dirt bikes with their campfire still burning come back to find Pfeiffer waiting for them, with a $225 ticket. Trash is strewn about. There is a gas can 15 feet away.

They swear the fire was out when they left, and one mentions several times how his dad is a lawyer.

On a typical weekend, Pfeiffer sees 10 unattended campfires a day. In this case, he summons Forest Service firefighters to extinguish it, because the teens have no water.

“People get very excited about riding the roads and trails and they don’t think twice,” he says.

Dispersed camping is popular in the dozens — perhaps hundreds — of pull-off campsites that line the roads in Rainbow Falls. Every summer, more campsites appear, and those that exist push ever outward into the forest. With it come litter, wildfire risk and illegal shooting.

The travel management plan under consideration would involve fencing and designating many campsites, in an effort to stop the sprawl, at least for the first mile along the main road, Forest Service Road 348.

“In my mind, I just see delineating every single campsite and more fencing, telling the public, since they can’t seem to figure it out on their own, ‘here’s where you’ll camp, here’s where you’ll park and here’s where you’ll make a fire’,” he says.

OHV users say a small minority cause problems, and they point out that riders pay registration fees that fund work on OHV areas, and that many enthusiast groups clean and maintain the heavily used areas.

“It’s those people, those few bad apples, who really infuriate the club members and responsible users because they know their recreation opportunities are being put at risk by a few,” says Lilly.

The same problems are encountered anywhere you have forests in such close proximity to population centers, he says.

“Any time you’ve got a front country area like that, where you’ve got lots of different groups of people who visit those areas, you’re going to run into that,” he says.

Pfeiffer agrees.

“It’s probably a relative minority. Ninety-five percent of the public and most visitors are legitimate and obeying the rules and regulations.”