You would think it’s easy to keep people from wandering across barren stretches of wasteland littered with unexploded ordnance, but apparently that’s not the case for a military test range in the Arizona desert, especially during peak tourist season.
Yuma Proving Ground police have had to crack down on trespassers on the 1,300-square-mile range, where the services test their latest experimental tech and regularly conduct live-fire training exercises — both of which are inherently dangerous and make it a less-than-ideal place to meander aimlessly. Officials said in a press release that “instances of trespassing have been stubbornly persistent in recent years.”
“After more than 80 years of existence and plenty of posted no trespass signs, you might think people would steer clear of these areas. But you would be wrong,” reads the release.
The Army traces its roots to the area as far back as 1850, but the site has been a formal training area for all the services since World War II, when troops rotated through before heading for combat in the North African deserts. After the war, the military continued to use the land for testing aircraft, munitions, armed helicopters, and precision navigation tech.
Nowadays, the services conduct routine training in the desert landscape, and regularly use it to test defense tech like counter-drone weapons and high-tech lasers, which officials noted can cause “serious eye injuries” to unwary trespassers.
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Mark Schauer, a spokesman for the Army Test and Evaluation Command, which manages the range, said a “significant majority” of range trespassers are winter visitors who come to the area and are “off-highway vehicle enthusiasts.” Due to the size of the Proving Ground, however, “it would not be feasible to fence all of it off,” he said.
The press release was put out ahead of President’s Day weekend, when tourism is high and Yuma’s population “roughly doubles in winter,” Schauer said.
Sgt. Gregory Harper, a conservation law enforcement officer at Yuma Proving Ground, said in the release that he mostly runs into “genuinely good people,” who “are cooperative and their intent isn’t bad, but that won’t protect them from the hazards on our ranges.”
Throughout his career, Harper has had to pull people out of abandoned mines. In 2024, he joined multiple law enforcement agencies in a 12-hour rescue mission of a woman who broke her ankle at the bottom of a 200-foot-deep mine shaft.
Schauer noted that the 2024 incident happened about a mile and a half outside of the Yuma Proving Ground border, but there are abandoned mines all across the range.
The Defense Department estimates that it’ll cost $45 million to clean up dozens of sites with unexploded ordnance on Yuma by 2045, according to ProPublica reporting.
