The government is shut down but the great outdoors are still open right? Well Gina Borchers and her sister thought they were so they decided to duck under the locked gate at Red Rock Canyon to go for a hike. After all, how could you close down land that we all own? It wasn’t long before the two tourists from Southern California ran across a park ranger who decided to make a federal case out of it.
Borchers said she and her sister, Donna Kanehl, 53, were ticketed by a Bureau of Land Management officer for “creating a nuisance” by entering the closed Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area on Saturday. “Obviously we were bad, bad old ladies with our visors and our water bottles,” the 55-year-old said.
The citation could wind up costing each of them $275, though Borchers is considering challenging hers in federal court. “We were not trying to get away with anything. We were walking,” she said. “We’re not the kind of ladies who get into trouble.”
The two were staying in Las Vegas for a dental convention and were staying at the Luxor. They had been planning to hike for an hour or two, but about 20 minutes into their walk they heard the ranger’s voice over a loud speaker on his vehicle. “I thought he was going to tell us to be careful or watch out for rattlesnakes,” Borchers said. She works for the city of San Clemente, Calif., so she knows a little something about how government employees can — and should — interact with the public. “The ranger had many responses to choose from and with us, he decided to choose a particularly harsh one,” she said. “He was all puffed up and angry.”
The ranger asked them if they had seen the “Area Closed” signs. Then he asked them for their identification. When the ladies told him their IDs were back in their car, he drove behind them “at one mile an hour” as they hiked back to retrieve them, Borchers said. “The whole walk of shame.”
She insists they did nothing to provoke the officer. “We were very, very apologetic,” she said. “He scared us. We may have peed a little bit, but we didn’t mouth off.” Borchers said she tried to take the fall for both of them. After all, it was her idea to ignore the signs and cross under the gate. “I stupidly thought that just meant the visitor center and the road were closed. I stupidly didn’t think that meant everything is illegal,” she said. “I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong.”
But she certainly wasn’t alone. The closure has pushed visitor traffic to other parts of the almost 200,000-acre conservation area, but it certainly hasn’t kept people out. Borchers said she met several other tourists over the weekend who reported being treated rudely by Red Rock rangers, though none of them received citations.
