Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry, and fierce as the animals.

-Edward Abbey

Using modern vertical mulching techniques, our "disappearing roads" project seeks to hide unnecessary or illegal vehicle tracks in the desert so that they can re-vegetate.

Publicity and participation in these projects help educate the public about the reasons to avoid creating new tracks when driving off-road. If the desert can be protected from off-road abuse, it will eventually regenerate and heal itself.

How can you disappear a road? Once a target road is identified, it only takes seven volunteers about three hours to make it disappear. They approach the road as a painter might, observing the color, line, and texture of the surrounding landscape. They then gather dead plants and brush and use them to create the same patterns on the road surface as far as the eye can see from the road start. The canvas is finished by gathering and spreading the gravel and stones of the same color and size as the surrounding desert. Suddenly the road beginning "disappears" so that off-road drivers no longer see it as a place to turn off.