Glamis Dunes

Picture in your mind you and a group of friends jumping on your dirt bikes and riding all day in a place that is so open you can loose yourself in the view. A place where at every glance there is a perfect double or table top jump. Natural kickers (kickers are extremely steep launching jumps) that throw man and machine so high in the air you wonder if gravity will do its job and bring you out of the sky. A place where the earth is so smooth and soft that you can cut through it like a knife cuts through butter. This probably sounds like some sort of adrenaline junkie's own Fantasy Island. In this case however, the island is real and it is called Glamis, located in Imperial County, California.

Glamis is the stomping ground to many of the top motocross riders in the United States. Pioneers of what we know as freestyle motocross have been expressing themselves in Glamis for years. Names like Mike Metzger, Seth Enslow, Tommy "Tom Cat" Clowers, Nate Adams, Brain Deegan and the Metal Militia. All these wild men of motorcycle mayhem come to play in this incredible sand box.

Glamis and the off-road enthusiasts who enjoy it are in trouble though. It seems that Glamis is home to Peirson's Milkvetch, a rare and near extinct flower that only grows in Glamis. With the discovery of this flower in the dunes, environmental groups like the Sierra Club are protesting and filing petitions to close the park down to off road vehicles. These actions as you probably guessed have a lot of people very unhappy. These dunes aren't just some riding spot, they have meaning. Some of the best freestyle motocross footage and crash footage caught on tape was filmed from these dunes. The film is called Crusty Demons of Dirt, their have also been records set and broken in that sand. The article doesn't say it, but Seth Enslow set a world record for distance jumping a motorcycle from a ramp to sand in those dunes. The jump was 178 feet.