Riding the Nellis Dunes

Sun Buggy takes drivers on tours of rugged desert terrain

Photos by F. ANDREW TAYLOR/VIEWAbove, the wind whips the flag on a dune buggy operated by a Sun Buggy Fun Rentals guide. Below, the buggy kicks up some sand at Nellis Dunes during a May 11 ride. F. ANDREW TAYLOR/VIEWRobert and Ronald Gary cruise the Nellis Dunes during a May 6 tour led by Sun Buggy Fun Rentals. The brothers were visiting from Toronto. Advertisement

Ninety minutes of careening across the Nellis Dunes in a dune buggy leaves you with a fine coating of dust everywhere. You'll feel vaguely crunchy and want a shower. Then you'll want another. You'll also want to hop right back in the buggy and go again.

Sun Buggy Fun Rentals has been operating from its office at 6825 Speedway Blvd. for three years. Previously, it operated a similar operation in California, and owner Randy Jordan expanded here, leaving two of his sons to run the California operation.

"Technically, these aren't dune buggies, they're three-quarter-scale off-road racers," Jordan said. "But most people don't know what those are, so we call them dune buggies."

The office is multipurpose, serving not only as a base of operations for the tours and rental orientation, but also as a fabrication plant. It also includes a room for private functions.

Although Sun Buggy offers packages for off-road adventures in the Valley of Fire and at the Amargosa Dunes, the Nellis Dunes are by far the company's most popular offering. The Nellis Dunes, sometimes called the Vegas Dunes, are 15,000 acres of off-road trails and open land northeast of Nellis Air Force Base.

If you've driven Interstate 15 north out of town, you've probably seen them, even if you didn't know what they were. A glance to the right as you pass the Apex Industrial Park in North Las Vegas often will reveal a few off-road enthusiasts tooling around in four-wheelers or quads. On the weekends, the four-wheelers can number in the hundreds. Many of the drivers eschew helmets or other safety gear. Sun Buggy employees see a lot of injuries, but not to their clients.

"Since we're out here, we see a lot of people who've gotten hurt on those things," Jordan said. "We're usually the first one on the scene, just because we're out here so much."

Sun Buggy won't rent four-wheelers or quads at the Nellis Dunes for a few reasons. Many of the riders are experiencing off-road driving for the first time, and four-wheelers require some practice to handle. They're also more physically demanding. Sun Buggy builds its buggies to be safe and relatively care-free.

"We're really safety conscious here," Jordan said.

To achieve this, the company builds buggies wide and low. The fabricators start from the ground up, welding a combination frame/roll cage for maximum strength and stability. The company is constantly making refinements to the design.

"I designed these things so you can do things where you think you're gonna die doing it, and you walk away from them," Jordan said. "It's a lot more radical than you'd think. It's not an amusement park ride."

The buggies are hard to roll, although company representative Scott Bradford said that it happens perhaps once a month. He's quick to point out that virtually every time a buggy has been rolled, it's because the driver veered off the trail and stopped following the guide.

"We had one guy here working on a TV show. He took off from the guide and managed to roll one," Bradford said. "He caught air, rolled six times and ripped off all four tires. Then he unbuckled and just got out. On a four-wheeler, you're the first thing to break. In a buggy, you're the last."

Sun Buggy does rent four-wheelers for more sedate tours in the Valley of Fire. Those tours are more about site seeing and getting to areas inaccessible by a regular vehicle and too far out to hike to comfortably. Bradford pointed out that the company modifies some of the four-wheelers, making them wider and adding a roll cage to protect the operator's legs. He was pleased to note that the manufacturer agrees with the changes.

"One company sent us something that wasn't exactly a recall but a strong recommendation that we make some modifications to them," Bradford said. "They were the same changes we've been making in them from day one."

Like most companies, the current economic difficulties have had an impact on Sun Buggy, though that effect has been minimal.

"We had to change a few things in marketing, get a little more aggressive with it, and it worked. We're back up to the same numbers we were last year," Bradford said.

A trip with Sun Buggy to the Nellis Dunes begins with an orientation video. The company's priorities are getting people out on the trails for a good time and making buggies. Making videos is lower on the priority list, so the basic orientation video includes admonitions not to drive too close to the ocean, which hasn't really been much of a threat here for quite a while.

One piece of business that's different in Nevada is that all drivers need to sign a form verifying that they've been instructed about desert tortoises. According to the Bureau of Land Management, the dunes are a low-density area for the tortoises, so the chance of encountering one is slim. The form makes visitors promise not to intentionally drive at them, or pick them up. Desert tortoises urinate as a defense mechanism and could dehydrate and die if they can't find water quickly enough after doing so.

Sun Buggy's owner likes to think of the company as a good steward of the land, performing regular cleanups of others' trash.

"People don't realize how rare a place like this is," Jordan said. "We like to take care of it and encourage others to do the same and drive responsibly so we'll still be able to use it."

After the orientation, drivers are fitted with helmets and goggles, and everyone hops on the transport van that takes the customers three miles to where another Sun Buggy employee waits with the buggies.

Customers strap in with shoulder straps and a seat belt and are given instructions on basic dune buggy driving. Most of it is common sense; don't hit rocks bigger than your foot. Keep the gas on as you go up a hill and let off on it when you crest the hill to give yourself a chance to orient yourself to the next part of the trail. Keep at least 10 feet between buggies, and don't drive anywhere the guide doesn't.

The vehicles take off down the trail, traveling single-file. All are equipped with a tall flag, as if each was a private putting green. The flags come in handy for keeping track of the rest of the group. Often, all you can see of the vehicles in front of you is a flag heading off in an unexpected direction.

Once out on the trails, the immensity of the dunes becomes apparent. They stretch nearly as far as the eye can see when you're on the crest of a hill and become an obscuring mass of gullies when you're below the crest.

The instructors point out that it's almost certain that everyone will get stuck at least once on the tour. It's easy to let up on the gas too soon or hit a hill at the wrong angle. At that point everyone stops, and the guide pulls the stuck vehicle off the dune it's hung up on, usually just by muscling it by hand.

Although Sun Buggy has a 35-mile trail worked out, most customers only cover a piece of it in the 90 minutes. Driving up sand dunes, sliding around loose gravel corners and dropping off hills aren't skills most people use on a daily basis. It would take an expert driver to cover the whole course in 90 minutes.

Bradford said the company expects a certain amount of wear and tear on the vehicles, and as long as you're following the guide and that guide's instructions, customers generally aren't libel for that wear and tear. Flat tires, blown shocks and fouled carburetors are par for the course. Recovery vehicles are generally out within minutes with a replacement buggy.

It would be way too big a chore to fix them in the field, so disabled vehicles are brought back to the shop for repairs. Sun Buggy also strips the buggies down to the frame periodically and refurbishes them. The company keeps five mechanics busy in its shop.

A bill currently in the U.S. Congress, H.R. 765, would preserve the Nellis Dunes for off-road vehicles while transferring the land to Clark County control. The land currently is under the control of the BLM and could, in theory, be traded off and developed. In practice, the land is directly under the flight path of Nellis Air Force Base, which regularly flies vehicles loaded with live munitions over it, so it's an unlikely spot for development.

The county's preliminary proposal includes fencing the area off and charging a usage fee, which would be used to maintain and enforce trails. Currently, it's a fairly unregulated place, and most of the drivers seem to like it that way.

Jordan thinks it's unlikely the bill will pass, particularly in the current economic times. Sun Buggy sticks to established trails already. Little would change for its day-to-day operations. It would just be more expensive to operate the business.

For the time being, it remains open territory at Nellis Dunes, and Jordan likes it that way.

"We take 'em out there, run 'em like scalded cats for 90 minutes and bring 'em back happy," he said.

Sun Buggy Fun Rentals can be reached at 1-866-728-4443 or on the Internet at sunbuggyfunrentals.com. Buggy tour prices begin at $200.

Contact Sunrise and Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.