Plan for moving horses criticized

Jace Radke

Monday, July 19, 1999 | 11:39 a.m.

Terri Robertson has been an active citizen for 30 years when it comes to the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

In the 1960s and '70s she was a part of a group known as the Red Rock Resources Citizens Advisory Committee, which worked with the Bureau of Land Management on taking care of Red Rock.

Robertson's old committee isn't around anymore, but she is, and she is letting the BLM know what she thinks of its plan to move one-third of the park's 71 wild horses.

"I don't think they need to be moving horses anywhere," Robertson said Sunday at the Red Rock Visitors Center, where the BLM was hosting an open house to provide the public with details of five proposed draft management plans for the area.

The BLM is proposing that about 23 wild horses be moved about four miles away from the area's popular loop road for 10 years so that grazing areas can recover. Along with the horses the BLM would get rid of about half of the area's 61 burros through adoption.

Other choices include leaving the horses and burros where they are, placing them in one small area or removing horses and burros from the area altogether.

"I haven't worked all these years to see Red Rock turned into a BLM dude ranch, and that's what we're headed for," Robertson said. "We need to keep the horses and the natural beauty here and keep the services, like campgrounds and horse stables, out."

The drafts of the BLM's management plan, the first master plan for Red Rock that the BLM has ever written, call for the establishment of up to five privately run stables that will rent horses for guided trail rides. Three stable businesses are already operating in Red Rock, and some citizens say they don't want to see anymore.

"I'd like to see them keep the wild horses and burros and get rid of some of the other uses that tear the place up like mountain biking and horse riding off trails," Summerlin resident Richard Steele said. "I go out every Wednesday and pick up bags and bags of garbage and beer bottles along trails, and it's not the horses putting that there."