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I am looking towards this upcoming pres day weekend with regret and sadness in my heart, not my usual uncontrollable excitement that this week usually brings and can't be cured till the motor home cabinets are shaking open bombing down the entrance road. My family and I are sitting this one out as well as our whole group, and it has had a weird affect on me, I'm very very pissed about it, and I consider myself easy come,easy go. For years this week and the weekend have been the one trip, if for whatever reason and I could only get one in, (which never happens) Presidents' Day was it. It seems that this hostile curse that this Blm henchmen have been pursuing has finally worked on this duner, I'm done, and it's hard to say that. When the BLM starts marching into camps at night for no good reason, detaining and searching families domisile (your motor home), blatantly harassing anyone for absolutely no probable cause, I'm done. You see my friends, we can't fight this, we've been walking these lines and it is just getting worse, and yet your normal activity in the dunes still goes on, (no helmet, no whip, no lights, drinking) all the stuff that's been happening for years with the same effect, but yet the presence of law enforcement has gone up 10,000% for the same amount of visitors for any given weekend, yes the off weekends too. So what's happening? In my opinion, there is so much law enforcement, that they are creating problems because either they are being told to do so, or the BLM has been given the budget for the manpower and those guys better go out there and find something to do or jobs (ie superviser jobs and money will be cut). We can have discussions till the cows come home about the specific details in regards to, visitor traffic numbers, incidents, reason for this, this happened, blah blah blah, but the common fact remains, for a pretty small piece of desert, with really no activity for most of the year, with the same amount of people visiting, we've been subjected to a law enforcement increase and interaction frequency that is to me, absurd. We cannot fight the BLM, it's only going to get worse, and I think very quickly, I've done my homework, and I have educated myself about search and seizure on federal land, all the use laws, the whole nine yards, and actually the citizen has a lot of rights, but we are dealing with an Enormous entity with infinite funding, and if you get caught up in a pissing contest over a reason why a BLM agent searched you motor home, found nothing and detained you, came up with some BS and either arrested you or cited you, your gonna lose, and they know this and they also know that you usually don't know your rights and your not going to do anything about it, nor can you unless your feeling like you need to spend a lot of time and money in court. I'm sorry to be so negative and run on,but I'm sad to see a place that I love and has been a big part of my life for decades, turned into a tence, conflict rich, hostile environment. On the other side, I recognize the need for proper management and enforcement of laws for the area, there is a positive side to it to some extent, but in my opinion we have crossed over to the other side, the excesses of mismanagement by the BLM have turned the good they used to do into pulling your wife over on quad cause we can't see the sticker and while we are at it how bout this and this and attitude and meanwhile there goes a crappy wannabe pre runner truck full of beer and meth, 20 min later,after its all said and done and nothing, carry on citizen. and it happening times 10, to a lot of people you just don't hear all of it. So, how say you? Am I wrong? Am I just an old man that wants to left alone in the past? Am I hypersensitive? Have a safe weekend, and don't let the ranting of this guy get you down.

So we just headed home a couple hours ago and on our way out we had some trouble from the BLM. We arrived early Thursday morning and there were no rangers when we arrived. On our way out my brother stopped to buy a pass and the BLM began circling his truck and trailer... He has a Chevy and is towing our quad and Teryx on a flat bed. They began questioning him on registration for the quad and Teryx... Honestly our mistake for not having our registration tags on the quad so they wrote us a ticket but then the BLM took it to far... They spent 5 minutes examining the hundred dollar bill that my brother used to pay for the pass because they thought it was fake. They asked my brother if he was intoxicated to which he responded that he has been sober for over 90 days and even showed them his sobriety chips. They called him a liar and made him take a field sobriety test and AFTER determining that he was indeed sober they said they would be nice and not impound the quad if he agreed to let them use a drug detection dog to search his truck. WTF?!! So after yet more searching and using their dog they still came back empty handed when they found nothing in the truck. Then they questioned my brothers tinted truck tail lights.. He had to pump his brakes for them and told them he installed LEDs to make sure the tail lights were legal. They then again said they didn't believe that he was actually sober and sent him on his way. As someone who has been coming to the dunes since I was an infant this just seems ridiculous. Anyone else remember the days of free entry? I am ok with supporting the dunes but that just seemed like an abuse of power... But I was happy to see a watered and freshly grated don't road on the way out:)