Friday, Sept. 9, 2005 | 11:15 a.m.
Nearly 50 years ago a man stumbled into the Southern Nevada outdoors. Howard Booth has been exploring the region and nearby places ever since.
Friday, the Sierra Club, the nation's largest and oldest environmental organization, will honor Boulder City's Booth, a retired Nevada Test Site worker who has for decades worked to preserve the special outdoor places of the Southwest.
The organization is honoring Booth with the John Muir Award, its highest honor, in an event to be held today in San Francisco.
"It's kind of overwhelming," Booth said Thursday at his home in Boulder City. "There are so many good candidates out there. The committee might have been a little addled when they chose me, but I'm of course very pleased and flattered that I got it."
Booth's work to help create protected, federally designated wilderness and conservation areas in the Southwest was noted. Booth, a spry 78, was involved in the campaigns that created the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, wilderness areas at Mount Charleston, the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area, Lake Mead National Recreation Area and wilderness areas in other parts of Nevada and Utah.
Like new residents and visitors even today, Booth did not know of the region's stunning mountains, valleys and vistas when he first arrived in Southern Nevada.
"I got here in 1957," Booth said. "I thought Las Vegas was a place to gas up the car, a kind of barren area. Within a couple of years, though, I realized this place is really the hub of the outdoor universe."
Vicky Hoover, chairwoman of the Sierra Club's California-Nevada Wilderness Committee, which works to make more public land in both states off-limits to development, said Booth has played a quiet but key role in successful campaigns.
Since 2000, about 2 million acres in Nevada has been designated as wilderness or as part of conservation areas, she said.
"There has been more wilderness designated in Nevada than the rest of the country combined," Hoover said. "Howard has been so active in a very quiet way.
"I feel this is also a recognition on the part of the Sierra Club that Nevada wildlands are very important to the club nationally and to the country."
Dennis Ghiglieri, a long-time activist with the Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra Club, which covers all of Nevada and mountainous eastern California, said he has known Booth since the mid-1970s, when Ghiglieri first became active with the chapter.
"Howard was already a stalwart of the conservation community in Las Vegas at that time," Ghiglieri said. "His long term interest in conservation has never wavered. Neither has his interest in the outdoors.
"He's just interested in every facet of the natural world and he's also knowledgeable in about every facet of the natural world."
Ghiglieri cited Booth's work to designate as wilderness swaths of the Spring Mountains to the west of Las Vegas, including parts of Mount Charleston, as particularly important contributions. Federal wilderness is permanently off limits to most mechanized transportation, construction and other potentially disruptive uses.
The work involved quietly lobbying lawmakers to include the areas in a sweeping 1989 wilderness bill in Washington, D.C.
The work "preserves one of the premier areas of Southern Nevada and one of the area that has the most endemic wildlife in the state. It is quite a unique area."
But Ghiglieri's recollections of Booth aren't always associated with the wrangling over laws. Most of the time, his friend has led him up, down and over some of the West's daunting terrain.
"He's a great explorer of the Southwest. He knows practically every area."
Booth worked as a meteorologist at the Test Site until retiring in 1982. In 1995, he married Ursula Booth-Wilson, who is also an active Sierra Club member. The pair can sometimes be spotted among the rocky crags that are usually the home of bighorn sheep.
While the John Muir Award is, according to the group, "the highest award conferred by the Sierra Club" marking "a distinguished record of achievement in national or international conservation causes," the honor is just that -- there is no big cash payment.
Recipients receive a life membership in the Sierra Club, but that was already a part of Booth's long-term plan.
What the award does is give him some added incentive to keep working on the issues close to his heart.
Booth said he sees the conservation of remaining wild areas here and elsewhere as the Sierra Club's most important goal. The pressures of population and technologies that allow motorized transport deep into wild areas are stressing those areas as never before, he said.
While Las Vegas has been the nation's fastest growing major urban area and has put a huge strain on nearby wild places, the problem affects both the country and the global environment, he believes.
"We can't expand the wilderness beyond what is there, the opportunities, and yet the population is increasing and technology is providing new ways to explore those areas," Booth said. "It is the population increase that threatens the natural places."
Ultimately, "we have to start looking at the population issue," he said. "We need more wilderness. We've got to have more of these areas protected as the population goes up."
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