I just came back from an event in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California, where I was driving the new Ford Raptor pickup truck.
The park is hugely popular with off-road fans, and there are trails cut all through it specifically for that purpose. To test the new trucks, we raced across a course -- as high as 75 mph in my case, and some went faster. We plowed through sand dunes and climbed hills. We watched other park users on ATVs and dirt bikes racing across the desert floor. You must stay on the trails, but beyond that, you can do pretty much whatever you like.
But one problem I had was that the course was oddly marked. The signs that would normally indicate a left or right turn well in advance were tied to the small bushes that we were driving around. The reason? The Ford team couldn't pound stakes into the ground to hold the signs.
Yes, even though we could do whatever speed we wanted, run our trucks across the dunes, or climb the same hill however many times we wanted, putting up a stake on that very same trail (and then, of course, taking it home afterwards) would have required applying for an environmental assessment, waiting two weeks for the assessment to be done, and then getting all the proper paperwork in order. For a two-inch-wide, six-inch-deep hole in the middle of nowhere.
