“All you can do is hear it,” he said. “Like a mixture of thunder and gunfire, just rolling through the mountains.”

Karie Rubertus, 46, an office manager, said she was jolted awake by gunfire while camping a few years ago at Rainbow Falls in Colorado, near the spot where Mr. Martin was killed. When she went to explore, she said, she spoke to a group of motorcyclists who had been firing guns most of the night and asked them to take a break. She said they had walked with her, unasked, back to her camper. She woke her husband, and they left immediately.

“One of the most scary experiences ever,” she said.

Here in the Lake Mountains of Utah, Bureau of Land Management officials want to permanently ban shooting because, they say, it is jeopardizing hundreds of petroglyphs that Native Americans pecked onto sandstone outcroppings and boulders as long as 10,000 years ago. Advocates say the mountainside is an open-air museum, one where bullets have struck the petroglyphs, chipping and cracking the runic swirls and wiry images of people and animals.

Image A family photo of Glenn Martin, a camper killed by a stray bullet last month in Pike National Forest in Colorado.

“We’ve had serious damage,” said Kevin Oliver, district manager for the bureau’s West Desert district. “The shooting was so dense we had to do something.”

There have also been about 130 wildfires here over the past decade, some caused by bullet ricochets or exploding targets igniting dry cheatgrass. One bullet flew across the range and hit a bedpost in a nearby home, and land officials said high school students on a bus had to take cover to avoid careless gunfire. Cleanup crews have hauled away 20 tons of trash a year — refrigerators and car parts, clay pigeons and sofas, even bowling pins.

“Anything you don’t want in your garage, you take out there and shoot,” said Mr. Acerson, a retired state transportation worker.