A wire fence put up around Saguaro National Park West has upset some residents of Continental Reserve, but park officials says the fence will stay.

Jim Davis / Arizona Daily Star

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Residents in the Continental Reserve area in southwest Marana are upset about a barbed-wire fence the National Park Service recently began installing where Saguaro National Park West borders the neighborhood.

"We had no idea this was going to happen," said Steve Huff, whose home on West Thelon Court is at the end of a cul-de-sac that opens out onto the park.

The roughly two-mile stretch of fencing started going up along the northeast corner of the park in late April, chief ranger Bob Love said.

Love and Saguaro National Park superintendent Sarah Craighead told concerned residents who attended a meeting held May 14 at the Marana Municipal Complex that the fencing is part of an effort to fence in the entire park.

"Most of our boundary is fenced in already," Love said, noting that the area that touches Continental Reserve is part of a parcel of land that was added to Saguaro National Park in 1999.

"It was just a matter of funding and priorities before we got this done."

The intent of fencing the park, Love said, is to control access, preventing off-road vehicle use and hiking through open desert. Openings are left for existing hiking and equestrian trails, he said.

"It's kind of a standard practice of national parks," Love said, noting that the fencing fits well with the park's comprehensive trails plan, which it has been working on for more than a year.

Controlling where and how people hike through the park can help maintain its beauty and viability, said Carolyn Campbell of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection.

"It's better for the resources when people stay on the trails," she said.

But some residents, like Huff, wonder why the fence is necessary near their homes, especially when their homeowner's association requires all yards to be walled in.

"The fence doesn't really prevent anything," Huff said.

Maureen Connolly, who has lived on Thelon Court for more than three years, said that she occasionally sees a car park at the end of the cul-de-sac so hikers can trek out to the desert.

Now with the fence in place, she said, those hikers end up walking through the area behind her yard to reach the nearest opening in the fence.

"It's more abusive since they put the fence up," Connolly said of the off-trail hiking.

Huff said he'd like to see about a 100-yard section of the fence taken out near Thelon Court. Doing so, he said, would prevent the fence from affecting people's view of the park and allow he and his neighbors to continue their practice of going out into the desert to pick up wind-swept garbage.

With the fence in, Huff noted, "you can't get to the other side of the desert to pull the garbage out. And they're not going to do it."

Love said it is unlikely the National Park Service would remove any part of the fence, though he said his office did commit to finding a way to lessen the glare coming off the wire and the fence posts near Thelon Court.

"That way it will blend in with the natural environment a little better," Love said.

Marana Mayor Ed Honea said he understands residents' concerns. However, because the park is not part of the town and is owned by the federal government, Honea said, Marana has no say in the matter.

"It's federal land; they're a higher agency," Honea said.