Sand Flats Road leads steeply out of the Moab Valley, switchbacking up to the mesa top, where trails lead between and over ochre sandstone domes, fins and bowls. Campgrounds are tucked against pink and buff cliffs. Juniper trees and desert shrubs grow on the slopes and cling to boulders and crevices in the rocks.

The Sand Flats Recreation Area is a place where four-wheel drivers and mountain bikers enjoy the challenge and pure fun of the rolling, swooping terrain, especially where the surface is high-traction “slickrock,” the local name for sandstone turf. The area is beloved for its views looking down on the Moab Valley and Colorado River, or up to the La Sal Mountains, which, when capped with snow, contrast dramatically with the red sandstone. Wheels aren’t necessary to enjoy the views – they’re accessible by hiking, scrambling or from the comfort of a camp chair.

The area is managed jointly by Grand County and the Bureau of Land Management, which owns the land. The partnership is one of a few of its kind, modeled after a similar local/federal partnership in Mill Creek Canyon outside of Salt Lake City. County employees staff an entry booth and collect fees that sustain operation and maintenance of the campgrounds, pit toilets, trash collection and patrols.

It looks much different than it did a few decades ago; community members have both fond and sad memories of Sand Flats’ former days.

“You can’t believe how bitchin’ it was here – the freedom there was here,” said Dale Parriott, who has lived in Moab since the 1970s but remembers it long before then. He visited his grandparents in Moab every summer as a child; the first time he visited Sand Flats was as an 8-year-old in the early 1950s.

“At 8 years old, my big deal was I wanted to ride in a Jeep,” Parriott said. His grandparents kept an old Army Jeep to access mining claims they had. “Everybody had a uranium claim in those days,” he said. Uranium mining was a boom industry in Moab starting with discoveries of the mineral in the 1950s. His dad took him and his 5-year-old brother for a Jeep ride at Sand Flats.

“We rode around on the slickrock up there, it was probably 20 minutes, but it was the world to me. I fell in love with the place right then,” Parriott said. He knew he would come back to Moab. “It’s the only place I ever wanted to live.”

In 1963, between high school and college, Parriott spent the whole summer in Moab. With friends, including local mechanic Andy Anderson, he explored the area now famous as the Slickrock Trail on motorcycles and scooters, years before it was mapped out and marked as an official trail.

Parriott is from California, and he attended college and started a family and career there. But it didn’t suit him.

“There’s a law for this and a law for that” in California, he said. The final straw was when he got a ticket from a highway patrol officer for failing to have an off-road sticker on his motorcycle – even though the bike was in the back of his truck, with the motor removed. He fought the ticket in court and won, and three days later sold his home in California and moved to where he’s always wanted to be.

It was the late 1970s, and Moab wasn’t the tourist hub it is today. There were only about 10 people that were interested in riding dirt bikes in the desert, Parriott said. On Sunday afternoons, they used sandy washes, cow trails and old mining and ranch roads to explore the big empty spaces.

The uranium boom went bust in the 1980s, and many Moabites left. Residents who lived through that era recall empty houses and closed storefronts.

Bill Groff was a helicopter and airplane pilot working for a mining company in the early ’80s. His brother, Robin, and his dad, John, also worked in the mining industry. In 1982, all three lost their jobs within six months of each other. Rather than leave, they opened a bike shop.

“How I ever talked my dad and brother into doing this, I’ll never know,” Groff said. He was the cycling enthusiast of the family at the time, pedaling a road bike on pavement.

The Groffs opened Rim Cyclery, which is still in business and is the oldest bike shop in a town now teeming with them. They placed an ad in Bicycling Magazine, which had a directory for shops all over the United States. “Finest bike shop in Southeast Utah,” they claimed in the ad – indisputable, as it was the only bike shop in the region.

Mountain biking started as a niche sport in California when bike buffs started adding extra gears to their single-speed beach cruisers. The Groffs soon got interested in this new type of bike. Groff says it was either him or his brother – he can’t remember which – who first rode a mountain bike on the Slickrock Trail at Sand Flats. Up to that time, it was mainly a motorized-use trail, but it turned out to be ideal terrain for mountain biking. Robin pushed for Rim Cyclery to carry the new kind of bike. Groff, the road cyclist, resisted at first, but they ended up stocking early mountain bike models.

“He was right,” Groff said. With a little publicity, the Slickrock Trail soon became “the premier ride” for mountain bikers, he said.

In 1985, the brothers hosted a gathering they called the Fat Tire Bike Festival. Later that year, a new publication called Mountain Bike Magazine described the gathering and featured Sand Flats on the cover of its first issue. The following year, the Fat Tire Bike Festival got bigger. People came to ride trails all around Moab, meet elite athletes and industry insiders, compete in a Halloween costume contest, win prizes, parade through town and party.

Not everyone loved the visiting bikers, but, Groff said, “There wasn’t anything else going on, other than the Jeep Safari.” The Jeep Safari, which continues today, is an annual spring gathering of off-road enthusiasts. Trails in Sand Flats have long been on Jeepers’ bucket lists.

Through the 1980s into the 1990s, Sand Flats steadily gained popularity as a destination for motorcycles, Jeeps and mountain bikes. It had also long been a place for locals to camp and for teenagers to blow off steam.

“Kids had been partying up there for years,” Parriott said. As Sand Flats gained attention, it wasn’t just local kids coming to get drunk and leave a mess. A lot of the trail users were partiers too, and teens from Colorado and the Wasatch Front were joining the scene during their spring breaks.

“For a long time, it was free camping, it was a free-for-all,” Groff said. “That’s were all the keg parties were.”

It was getting out of hand. Parriott remembers an incident in which a young Moab local terrorized out-of-town Sand Flats tourists by driving a truck through their campfires. That was the turning point, he said, that prompted a general impression that the area was being trampled. But there are reports of other “final straws,” especially what became known as the Easter Weekend Riots. A 1996 article from the Chronicle of Community describes a Mad Max-style scene.

“In the course of one wild evening, sheriff’s deputies and federal agency rangers had to flee Sand Flats when drunken crowds began throwing bottles and rocks,” the article reported. “The campers tore up ancient juniper trees to fuel their bonfires, drove with abandon across the fragile desert landscape, and used the whole outdoors as their toilet.”

“It was the Wild West,” said Andrea Brand, who has been the director of Sand Flats for nearly two decades. “It was pretty insane.”

Concerned community members and federal land managers formed the Canyon Country Partnership and came up with a management plan for Sand Flats. In 1994, Moab resident Craig Bigler, in the role of facilitator for the new partnership, hired a Sand Flats crew. They created a brochure and opened the entrance fee booth, installed toilets and barriers to keep traffic on roads and trails, and cleaned up litter. They sold firewood to discourage visitors from burning trees.

It wasn’t a 180-degree turnaround. Brand moved to Moab in 1988 and began working at Sand Flats in 1998. Even after the partnership took on management of the area, she remembers bullet holes in the fee booth window, visitors having their tents shot with paintballs, limbs ripped off trees for fires and huge amounts of trash, sometimes including items like abandoned couches.

“It was very depressing back then to see the destruction,” Brand said. “Every patrol, there would be tree limbs in the fire rings. Our trees are ancient trees, and they’re shade for those campsites.”

It took relentless public relations campaigning, education and, in the end, law enforcement to start to change the way people acted at Sand Flats. In the early 2000s, two BLM rangers started making regular patrols in Sand Flats. Brand credits them with ending the partying scene and making it safe for families. And some of the wayward youths from the old days bring a new perspective when they come back as adults.

“We still have a lot of those same people that have grown up and matured, and they come back with their families,” Brand said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I came here in the ’80s and ’90s – I was part of the problem.’ ”

Today, Sand Flats seems clean and orderly. The dedication and work of land managers and community members have helped keep the popular destination feeling like a welcoming place.

Sand Flats’ managers have taken steps to make it easy for visitors to follow the rules. That includes marking trails very clearly, so people have no doubt about where they can park and camp, Brand said, as well as other “little infrastructure things where you don’t have to tell someone what to do because it’s designed right, so it’s apparent and obvious what they’re supposed to do.”

Even those who loved the freedom of “the old days” are impressed with the operation of Sand Flats now.

“When the county partnered with the BLM, I was not for it,” Groff said. “I thought it was going to stymie everything. It didn’t – I was wrong on that one. They’re doing a fabulous job.”

Parriott agrees. He’s been on the Sand Flats Stewardship Committee for several years and has been impressed with Brand’s work.

“Sadly, humans always take a little bit more than they should,” Parriott said. “Without an intelligent structure, when you get a mass of people, it doesn’t work anymore.”

Those who knew Sand Flats in the early days may feel a twinge of nostalgia for the times before signs and kiosks and a fee booth, but visitors today can still feel the freedom of wide-open spaces in the incredible scenery and engaging trails at Sand Flats Recreation Area.