Battle is on to save Nevada’s open spaces

Tuesday, Sept. 14, 1999 | 11:29 a.m.

10 Years Ago

Congress declared 14 wilderness areas in Nevada, all of them U.S. Forest Service lands, in 1989. Since then, no further wilderness areas have been declared.

The current locations are:

As thousands of newcomers move into Las Vegas Valley, environmentalists fear that miles of wild places waiting for Congress to declare them as wilderness areas will disappear in a haze of development.

Wilderness champions statewide are enlisting the help of Nevada's two senators, Democrats Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, in a war to save Nevada's open spaces for the future.

Like the wars between cattle and sheep ranchers of the 19th century, the modern fight centers around who should have primary use of the land. But now it has shifted to protecting those wide-open spaces from overuse by cows, horses, off-road vehicles and love-it-to-death visitors from the cities.

Wilderness designation prevents anything -- even dirt roads -- from being built in those areas. It also protects the areas by limiting access. Motorized vehicles -- even those that don't need roads -- are banned.

Only 800,000 acres in Nevada have been formally designated as wilderness. Part of Mount Charleston is the only wilderness area in Clark County, thanks to legislation in 1989.

Among Western states, only Utah has a smaller amount of wilderness land. There, wilderness is a fighting word after President Clinton in 1996 forced the creation of the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.

In Nevada the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and Friends of the Wilderness have identified 15 million acres they would like to see become wilderness areas, all managed by a host of federal agencies. Already 4.3 million acres of Nevada land are designated as wilderness study areas, which provides the protection temporarily.

Advocates are making a push to permanently protect those acres and more this month, 35 years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, Melyssa Watson of the Wilderness Support Center in Durango, Colo., said.

There are plenty of good reasons to protect wild land from development, Friends of Nevada Wilderness board member John Hiatt said. Declared wilderness areas establish a benchmark for scientific researchers to measure environmental changes, Hiatt said.

In addition, the public favors keeping certain places wild, without roads and with the plants and animals roaming in their natural setting, Friends of the Wilderness organizer Anne Martin said.

Besides, wilderness areas record evidence of natural history. For example, before white men arrived in Southern Nevada, bighorn sheep roamed the surrounding mountains, but early settlers hunted the sheep into oblivion, Hiatt said. Those sheep trails are still recognizable less than 20 miles northeast of town, he said. Some of those trails are part of the Muddy Mountains, an area advocated as wilderness.

Miners and off-road vehicle enthusiasts have traditionally opposed wilderness declarations, because it keeps them off the land. Public land should be available to all of the public -- even those in motor vehicles, they have argued.

In the past decade, however, much of their opposition has been blunted through participation in Clark County's multispecies protection plan, which was created to preserve endangered desert wildlife and keep other species from becoming endangered. Two years of workshops threw environmentalists in the same room with advocates of greater wilderness access until both sides were finding common ground.

Don Dayton, president of the Southern Nevada Off-Road Enthusiasts and former president of the Lower Great Basin chapter of People for the West, explains now that his organizations are not against all wilderness areas.

Dayton, 63, said wilderness areas that are roadless and have no sign of man's intrusion are OK. "We oppose arbitrary wilderness," he said.

For example, the southern half of the McCullough Range is a true wilderness area, Dayton said, but the northern end of the mountains lies in an area used by jetliners approaching McCarran International Airport. That's not true wilderness, he said.

Wilderness also eliminates the disabled or those with weak hearts or lungs from enjoying the open spaces, said Dayton, who suffers from diminished heart capacity. "I can walk a short distance, but I can't hike."

The bigger problem for environmentalists may be money.

While the Wilderness Society asked for $15 million to acquire wilderness lands in Nevada in 1994, not much has happened since then. The Clinton administration proposed only $254 million nationwide to secure wilderness areas from the Land and Conservation Fund, fueled by fees from offshore oil drilling. Nearly $900 million goes into the fund each year from oil companies paying the fee.

One of the first areas environmental groups want to preserve is 1.19 million acres of the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada. Along with declaring it a national conservation area, the groups hope to protect the Jarbidge Range next door as wilderness. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had planned to tour the desert site last month, but had to cancel the tour.

The environmental groups believe they have the best chance of preserving the Black Rock Desert, site of the Labor Day Burning Man Festival. As a national conservation area it could continue to host the wild annual end-of-summer party. But it would be protected from development.

After that, sensitive areas in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas, the Muddy Mountains northeast of the city and the McCullough Range south of town are candidates to become wilderness.

These areas were designated wilderness study areas in 1989, so they have been preserved as if they were wilderness areas. But unless the designation becomes permanent, continued population growth threatens them, Martin said.

With environmentalists' hopes pinned on protecting the Black Rock Desert, the McCullough Mountain Range and the Muddy Mountains, Dayton has a different take on it. "Probably nothing will happen until after the 2000 elections," he said.

However long it takes, with enough public outcry, Martin said, Nevada's open places will be saved for the future. "Today we understand deserts are just as important as alpine forests," she said.

Not only important, but attractive. So much so that John Wallin quit his job at the Patagonia outdoor clothing company to create the Nevada Wilderness Project to spread the word about Nevada's wild spots. He says Nevada has more diversity than the John Muir Wilderness in Northern California. That wilderness "is rock and ice compared to Nevada," he said.

"The biological diversity in Nevada is a treasure that is worth keeping for future generations," Martin said.