Wild horses may be ridden out of Red Rock

Friday, July 16, 1999 | 10:48 a.m.

Critics of a proposed management plan for Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area say Southern Nevada's wild horse and burro herds will be stuck between Red Rock and a dry place.

The Bureau of Land Management's proposed changes for the conservation area call for moving about a third of the park's 71 wild horses away from the area's popular loop road and getting rid of about half of its 61 burros through an adoption program.

The horses would be moved to a swath of the conservation area that lies south of State Road 160, which is on the left side of the road as motorists drive toward Pahrump.

The remaining burros would be split between the area south of the highway and a significantly smaller area north of it.

BLM officials say the horses and burros, which are descendants of pack animals left to roam by miners and pioneers 100 years ago, have decimated vegetation and natural springs -- called riparian areas -- north of the highway.

Critics from the Las Vegas-based National Wild Horse Association say the BLM should have done more to maintain the riparian areas. They are calling for a management plan that leaves the animals where they are and provides long-range guidelines for keeping existing springs clean and developing new ones north of the highway.

They say it would be better than removing the animals from the areas where visitors are most likely to see them into an area with fewer natural water sources, Laurie Howard, association spokeswoman, said.

The southern area already is home to most of the wild horse herd. But it is large and too remote for most visitors, Howard said.

"This is it. If we don't win this one, we'll lose them all," Howard said.

The BLM is hosting open houses this week to let residents take a look at five proposed plans for managing the Red Rock area. They may submit written comments at the meetings. A public hearing is scheduled Aug. 24, and all comments must be submitted by Sept. 29.

The long-range plan will address a range of issues including increased automobile access and improvements to camping areas, recreational trails, trailheads and the visitors center.

It is the first master plan the BLM has ever written for Red Rock, which was designated as an 87,000-acre conservation area in 1990 and expanded to 197,000 acres in 1994. Before that it was a 68,000-acre BLM area called Red Rock Canyon Recreation Lands.

The hard part about developing the master plan is people don't always understand that a conservation area is not the same as a national park, David Wolf, BLM's Red Rock Canyon manager, said.

The two designations have different goals, and each conservation area has different reasons for existing as well, he said.

Red Rock Canyon has the most public access and recreational uses of any of the nation's seven conservation areas, Donn Siebert, a BLM natural resource specialist, said.

"Most conservation areas are really restricted," Siebert said. "In this one, we said we'd provide for recreation, and we're having more problems because we have to balance it."

The BLM's favored proposal includes the closure of most of the northern areas that are popular with mountain bikers and other off-road travelers, Wolf said. But changes governing where the horses may and may not roam have almost overshadowed all else.

One of the five options calls for leaving things as they are. That isn't viable because the BLM's first priority with a conservation area is to make sure the natural aspects are preserved and restored, and the horses and burros are doing irreparable damage, Wolf said.

Another proposal would place all the burros and horses in one small area, and another would completely remove horses and burros from the conservation area.

Federal land management officials prefer the scenario that calls for moving the horses south of the highway for 10 years, then moving some of them back after the riparian and grazing areas recover.

And wild horse advocates support the option that calls for leaving the horses and burros where they are and making improvements to the springs.

"I'm the kind of guy who visits the zoo and wants to open all the cages," said Charles Dargan, a Sun City Summerlin resident who attended the a open house Thursday evening. "They should leave well enough alone. We're encroaching too much on the natural beauty of the land."

But horses and burros have caused far more damage to Red Rock's riparian areas than people have, Wolf said.

"The natural springs have been severely damaged by the horse and burro activity. Some are actually destroyed," he said. "One (spring) was a mess of torn up mud. There wasn't any water. That's not right, and it's not appropriate anywhere on BLM land.

Moving the animals will allow rejuvenation of the grasses south of the loop road. The horses and burros didn't cause the original destruction, but they are preventing the recovery, Wolf said.

"The reason is (cattle) grazing 30 to 40 years ago, but with the horses and burros in there, the grass is never going to come back," he said.

The BLM fenced off a section of land about nine years ago just to see whether the absence of horses and burros would have any effect on the grass growth. The study area has shown "statistically significant" progress, Wolf said, adding that the study area wasn't as sparse as the areas now in distress.

Federal land managers are dreaming if they think the grass will come back simply because of the absence of equine animals, said Alan Levinson, a member of the BLM's Resource Advisory Council and owner of the Bonnie Springs resort located in the conservation area between Blue Diamond and Spring Mountain State Park.

"This area is low desert. It runs on a drought five of every seven years. It's never going to be green and beautiful out here," Levinson said. "And the horses have been here all this time."

Levinson is concerned not only about the wild horses being moved but about the privately owned trail horses being allowed to come into the park. The BLM's management plan calls for the establishment of up to five privately run stables that will rent horses to people for guided trail rides.

Three stable businesses currently operate in the area, one of which is Levinson's. The BLM receives $2 for each rider who rents a horse.

Levinson said he fears adding trail ride operations will damage an already burdened trail system by increasing human activity in the backcountry. He also said some of the other operators have built corrals and provided overnight sleeping quarters for 24-hour security personnel in areas designated for use only during the day.

And he claims tour guides aren't sticking to existing trails as agreed. He has aerial photographs taken in 1993 and this year that show wear and tear on existing trails and the blazing of several new paths over the six-year period. He planned to show them to BLM officials this week.

Wolf hadn't seen the photographs yet, but said Wednesday that the private stables are operating legally. The corrals within the conservation areas are temporary holding pens for horses that are trucked in by trailer each day.

And the sleeping quarters are for a single security guard who will be staying at the Oak Creek camping area that was closed to the public last year because it couldn't handle the number of campers who wanted to use it, Wolf said.

The company, Golden West, will pay BLM for the site and provide a guard who will keep an eye on the company's corral and also close the gate and keep an eye on things for the BLM, Wolf said.

"It gives us a site manager for free," he said.

Howard said it makes no sense to push out the horses that have called Red Rock home for decades in favor of money-makers that wear saddles. The people who pay for trail rides do so with the expectation of seeing the wild horses, but they won't because the trail tours don't cover the areas where they will be moved.

Short-sighted planning on the part of the BLM caused the habitat destruction in the first place because the horses being moved are pretty much trapped on the north side of the road, Howard said.

The horses typically eat south of the road and drink north of it, moving in a circular pattern as their needs dictate, she said. However they couldn't safely cross the highway so BLM officials built three tunnels underneath.

But people park, camp, hike and ride mountain bikes in and around the tunnels, leaving a human scent many of the horses won't go near, Howard said. They won't cross and are trapped on the north side as a result.

Wolf said the BLM doesn't have enough people, time or money to keep up with maintenance on all the springs in addition to policing all the backcountry areas to make sure trail users are following the rules. If it wasn't for volunteers like Howard's group, most of the maintenance wouldn't be done, he said.

Dargan was outraged that habitat maintenance didn't rate in a conservation area's budget.

"Somebody is dragging their feet somewhere," he said. "There's something screwy going on."

Members of Howard's group fear moving the animals is a first step toward getting rid of them completely. They suspect the BLM wants to get out of wild horse management at Red Rock.

Wolf said that's not up to him or his workers. Congress already has decided wild horses would be maintained in appropriate areas throughout the West, and BLM officials will comply with that.

"We want to manage wild horses where it's appropriate to have wild horses," Wolf said.

Deciding whether Red Rock Canyon is an appropriate place for them depends on one's point of view, Wolf said.

"We're in the middle of the Mohave Desert, and they're an introduced species. They're not a native species," he said. "Everybody can make their own decision on that."

Howard said the wild horses and burros are as appropriate to Red Rock Canyon as any other plant or animal living there. They have been there for more than 100 years.

"They're the symbol of the Old West," she said.

archive