Ossabaw Island --- On a sandy road cut through a thick forest, Jim Simmons and his crew of wildlife rangers drive day-trippers around one of the last beautiful, mostly untouched places left in Georgia.

They are about to get a historical and ecological tour of the island --- and a crash course in conservation politics.

The group of 17, mostly retirees from the Savannah area, is among the first to benefit from a new state policy giving more people a chance to see the barrier island. After years of restricting visits, the state this year began allowing tourists on Ossabaw, a 15-minute boat ride from Savannah's outskirts.

So far, interest has been lukewarm, but more than 2,000 people --- including scientists and hunters --- could visit the island this year.

The question is whether Ossabaw can sustain that much curiosity.

A lot could be ruined. It's the site of more than 150 federally protected loggerhead turtle nests every summer. It has about 17,000 acres of fragile salt marshes, 10 miles of deserted beach and more than 200 archaeological sites, including ancient Indian oyster shell burial grounds.

Savannah resident Judy Jennings, a Sierra Club volunteer who chairs the conservation committee for the Georgia coast, says the state is pushing the limits. She's been to Ossabaw, but is concerned that too many visitors could endanger habitats for rare birds, such as the tiny American oystercatchers that shuck oysters with their long, pointed beaks.

"You want to rush up and see it, but by your mere presence, you're diminishing its value," Jennings says.

State Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) advocated for more access during months of public hearings.

"This is state property, and we don't want it restricted to just a bunch of elitists," Johnson says.

Years ago, when Ossabaw was privately owned, intellectuals, artists and scientists were about the only people who could get on. That persisted even after the state bought it in 1978.

"I don't want to see regular Georgians denied access to one of their resources, understanding that a balance has to be struck between unrestricted access that could be damaging to what they want to see," Johnson says.

Public park forbidden

But the deal that brought Ossabaw into state ownership stipulated it would not be turned into a public park or dotted with campsites, as happened with other Georgia barrier islands.

Simmons, who has managed the island for the Department of Natural Resources for about five years, understands the debate. He's spent many dark mornings listening for songbirds and countless afternoons driving visitors from one end of the island to another, stopping for photographers to catch an alligator or a tri-colored heron in their lenses.

"We're really trying to show why we're so protective of Ossabaw," Simmons says in his North Carolina drawl, as he drives down a sandy road lined by live oaks with craggy limbs covered in Spanish moss. "If you can get people to a place like this and give them a real world look at the environment rather than a 30-minute ad from the Sierra Club, then you've really accomplished something."

The paradox --- that it may take people visiting Ossabaw to ensure its protection --- is well understood by the nonprofit that brings its own select visitors to the island.

The Ossabaw Island Foundation, which was started by the island's former owner, is trying to raise more than $2 million to restore its past, including three tabby slave cabins coated in oyster shells that date from the 1840s. Last year, the foundation completed a two-year, $300,000 restoration of the Club House, a 4,000-square-foot home built by a wealthy New Yorker around 1890.

State-sponsored visits to Ossabaw are "going to build a constituency for Ossabaw," says foundation coordinator Elizabeth DuBose. "How can you feel passionate about a place that you can't visit?"

Benefactor perturbed

She may have started the foundation, but this is not an opinion shared by the island's 90-year-old benefactor, who, by all accounts, sold her beloved island to Georgia under extremely generous terms 25 years ago.

Eleanor Torrey West worries the state's new visitation policy is threatening the island she has spent most of her life trying to protect from what she calls greed.

West credits the earnestness and easy manner of Georgia's former Gov. Jimmy Carter, who sat on her floor to talk during a two-day visit, with her willingness to sell Ossabaw to the state. She tells a story of turning down an unsolicited, name-your-price offer from Aristotle Onassis while he was married to wife Jacqueline.

They could have gotten at least twice as much, but she and her brother's heirs settled on an $8 million price tag. The state paid half, and Coca-Cola magnate Robert W. Woodruff donated the rest.

Under terms of the sale, and in the executive order making Ossabaw Georgia's first Heritage Preserve, the island is only to "be used for natural, scientific and cultural study, research and education, and environmentally sound preservation, conservation and management of the island's ecosystem."

The agreement specifically left out public recreation. And West, "Sandy" to her friends, contends that's just what the state is allowing --- in disguise --- by hosting educational programs for as many as 650 day-trippers and weekend campers a year.

"They're unqualified," West says of the state's attempts at education.

She also doesn't like the addition of a nature trail that has numbered markers and explanations of different ecological features. It doesn't belong on Ossabaw, West says.

Sitting on a window seat, her smart blue eyes and silver hair are lit up from a large picture window overlooking Ossabaw Sound. Horses and semi-wild pigs --- which some say descend from those brought by Spaniards 400 years ago --- mill about outside.

Around her, the pink stucco Spanish Revival mansion, built by her parents in the 1920s, appears exactly as it did in photos of that era. Every desk, chair and painting is in place. What's missing are the family members and guests, butlers, maids and chauffeurs. The home, where West lives alone, is a fading reminder of its former glory.

But West, entering her 10th decade, is ever hopeful.

Last month, the Garden Club of America awarded West one of its coveted national medals for her lifetime work in environmental protection. She shared the stage with other award winners, including a Rockefeller. West, whose quest to leave the island wild has been spotlighted in National Geographic, hopes the award will add credibility and bring renewed interest in protecting Ossabaw.

For his part, Simmons doesn't like the criticism directed toward him and the state's stewardship, but he has a wary respect for the gentle doyenne whose family gave an invaluable gift to the state by selling Ossabaw.

"You just can't even put a price on it, can you?" Simmons asks. "It would have to be worth at least $100 million."

Only the deserving

When West's parents bought Ossabaw Island in 1924, she was not yet a teenager. The Ford-Torreys of Detroit were among the so-called robber baron families --- wealthy industrialists who bought Georgia's barrier islands and are largely responsible for their lack of development. Carnegies, whose business was steel, once owned most of Cumberland Island, south of Brunswick. Tobacco lord R.J. Reynolds once owned Sapelo Island. Little St. Simons Island once was owned by New York pencil magnate Philip Berolzheimer.

West's father was a doctor, and her mother's father was the owner of Pittsburgh Plate Glass, which manufactured windows for skyscrapers. The family made Ossabaw a winter retreat after their Savannah home burned.

It was West who first opened the island to a steady stream of visitors, sharing it with those she saw as deserving of its gifts. Starting in 1961, she poured her personal fortune into several projects that brought thousands of intellectuals and artists to the island to study its salt marshes, write books and poetry, paint and find inspiration. People like writer Ralph Ellison and composer Aaron Copland were given room, board and peace to do their work. Atlanta writer Olive Ann Burns, author of "Cold Sassy Tree," worked on her first book on Ossabaw.

In its heyday, the family had 18 employees taking care of their guests.

West's dream --- which she continues to hold passionately --- is the cross-pollination of great thinkers and creative talents from every possible discipline on Ossabaw. Her world apart, she believes, can nurture solutions for the world outside.

"Imagine it," she says as if coming up with the idea for the first time.

By the late 1970s, West's fortune was tapped out. She needed to sell the island, and the state stepped in. The additional cash rejuvenated West's artists' and scientists' colonies through the early 1990s until the money ran out. In 1994, West started the Ossabaw foundation to continue her work. It became a nonprofit in 1999.

But the foundation, like the mansion, is only reminiscent of Ossabaw's golden era.

Guests still must work on some type of project to receive an invitation from the foundation, but they're not world-famous like their predecessors. They also have to fend for themselves. The foundation has one caretaker on the island.

Up to 22 people can stay in rooms with multiple bunk beds in the Club House, but they have to bring their own food. This spring, about a dozen University of Tennessee education students camped on the island for three weeks. They studied its ecosystem, shaping their curriculum from nature.

'They trashed Wassaw'

The day-trippers, who had to find their own way to the island by boat, are torn about their role.

Retired Savannah doctor Frank Johnston, 75, says Ossabaw should be open to more people, especially children. "Let people come see what's here."

But in the next breath, Johnston says, "They'll trash the damn place. They trashed Wassaw," a neighboring island that's part of the National Wildlife Refuge and is open to visitors during the day.

Also among the group are six friends who shared a boat from Skidaway Island, a nearby barrier island where some homes in plush golf course communities sell for $1 million. One of them, Carol Nickels, a retired Atlanta real estate agent, relishes her few hours on Ossabaw.

She wades into a tidal pool up to her bluejeaned thighs to get a closer look at fiddler crabs, shrimp and other small sea creatures captured for a lesson by the state guide.

"It's fabulous," Nickels says. "If they don't keep access to it limited, there will be too many people. . . . We're just kind of learning what we can do and what we can't do."

GETTING ON OSSABAW

> To get permission to visit, contact the state Department of Natural Resources or the Ossabaw Island Foundation. Go to these Web sites: www.ossabawisland.org and www.dnr.state.ga.us. On the DNR site, click on Wildlife and General Information.