On April 22, at the height of dangerous fire season and in the middle of a drought, a group of illegal off-road vehicle users trespassed on protected parkland and started a large bonfire in a designated wilderness area where no motor vehicles are allowed, police said. Instead of following the rules or even using basic fire-safety measures, they began the Jones Road blaze that engulfed over 15,000 acres, burned down one large commercial building and prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents in Waretown from their homes.

As surprising as this was to the residents, it wasn’t the first time a similar group of people unconcerned with basic rules or common sense began a large wildfire in a drought, and it won’t be the last unless state officials move swiftly to enact measures like visitor maps and the elimination of illegal off-road vehicle routes within the state forests. With the proliferation of off-road vehicles in recent decades, illegal fires can be started far away from the view of park management and get out of control fast. Once started, they can be incredibly hard to extinguish and can cause great risk both to firefighters and to law-abiding park visitors and nearby residents. While fire is a natural part of the Pine Barrens ecosystem, the fires that have endangered so many lives in recent years were started because of a lack of control over illegal off-road vehicle use.

In 2019, the Spring Hill Wildlife started when a group of illegal off-road vehicle users trespassed from state property and onto private property and lit a bonfire that spread to over 11,000 acres and endangered the entire town of Chatsworth. While New Jersey has been far ahead of other states in the preservation of open space, it has been far behind in application of hard lessons learned in the 19th and 20th centuries by parks managers from Yellowstone to Yosemite and beyond. In “How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks,” author Harold Duane Hampton explains the hard lessons learned in the early days of the National Park system. These include empowering park superintendents with law enforcement authority and chain-of-command control over rangers, creating legal mechanisms to make sure issued citations stick, preventing political interference in park managers’ decisions, and managing how, when, and where visitors can enter and travel within the park.

The first step of managing any large public land area is a comprehensive visitor map, but that essential step has only just been taken in our largest state park, Wharton State Forest, and has yet to be achieved in Brendan T. Byrne State Forest, Bass River State Forest, Penn State Forest, and beyond.

While it often takes many years for the government to get its act together and establish what we all would consider to be common-sense solutions, emergencies like these fires can prompt action. Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Sean LaTourette and Assistant Commissioner John Cecil helped to establish a streamlined visitor map for Wharton State Forest that allows park officials to enforce rules against illegal bonfires and illegal off-road vehicle use so that the public and the natural resources of the park are protected. What we need to do now is to continue the success of the management of Wharton State Forest by establishing common-sense visitor maps for all state parks and public lands to help protect against tragedies from happening in the future.