Counting heads at dunes By Jonathan Athens, Staff Writer
Friday, April 6, 2007 9:16 PM PDT
PRESS FILE PHOTO
Off road enthusiasts relax at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area in this file photo. A Phoenix-based company photgraphed the area from the air Saturday in order to to get a more accurate count of how many people use the popular site.
GLAMIS Duners at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area today might want to smile when they look up at the sky.
Without knowing it, off-highway vehicle users will have their picture taken from a plane.
This isn’t a covert government surveillance project, nor is it a law enforcement crackdown.
It’s about getting a count of how many visitors come to the dunes as part of ongoing efforts to assess activity there.
More than 1 million off-highway vehicle enthusiasts visit the area each year for outdoor fun, and their economic contribution to the region is the subject of a survey that was conducted in 2005 is expected to be released sometime this year.
The United Desert Gateway, a nonprofit group that promotes desert recreational activities in and around Imperial County, has hired Aerial Mapping Co., a Phoenix-based firm to fly over the dunes and take high-resolution pictures.
Photos from the one-day mission, UDG President Nicole Gilles said, should give them an accurate count of how many people will be there today.
“We’ll be one mile above ground and you can still make out everyone down there,” said Dave Vaughn, the photographer who will be taking the shots.
Vaughn will be flying in a single-engine prop aircraft that has a 400-pound camera mounted in its belly. The lens is 12 inches wide and the digital photographs are so detailed they can capture a 6-inch shift in elevation, he said.
Although the pictures won’t be so detailed as to capture distinguishable facial features, they will be able to provide an accurate count, he said.
“It’s always better to be dealing with real numbers or as close to real numbers” as one can get, said Jerry Seaver, founder of the American Sand Association, the organization that represents the interests of off-highway vehicle users.
The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for tracking visitor counts at the dunes. The agency does so using magnetic counters that are buried underneath Gecko Road and other pathways to the dunes.
But that methodology has its shortcomings it does not account for visitors who come and go on errands, Seaver said.
The agency reported there were just over 1.4 million visitors during
2005-2006, and for the most recent season, the agency reported an increase of about 30,000 visitors, he said.
Seaver said organizers of this aerial photographing effort hope it will help the BLM come up with another methodology for assessing dunes activities.
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