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Written by Wild Nevada
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Thursday, 05 August 2010 13:23 |
This week two of us from the Nevada Wilderness Project have been in Salt Lake City at the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market show (OR Show) to campaign on behalf of Gold Butte, NV. The OR Show brings together everyone who works in the outdoor industry, from the fabric makers and designers of those high-tech jackets to company reps who buy and sell everything that is used in outdoor sports and recreation. It is a beehive of activity and business. We go to talk about our work in conservation.
The outdoor industry, particularly members of the Conservation Alliance, are committed to groups like ours and to helping protect spectacular, open spaces to recreate in and enjoy. They recognize that conserving these wild places makes business sense; having wildlands to recreate in is essential for their customer base. Member companies like REI, Patagonia, The North Face and Black Diamond all work with the Conservation Alliance to distribute grants to grassroots conservation groups like NWP.
Yesterday, the Conservation Alliance held a “Keep it Wild” event in which we were one of eight organizations invited to pair up with a company to ask the OR Show attendees to take action. NWP was hosted in the Horny Toad Clothing Company's booth, and we asked people to support our work in Gold Butte. We collected 250 postcards signed by attendees to give to Congresswoman Dina Titus letting her know that the outdoor industry cares about protecting Gold Butte, too.
After talking to people all day about the uniqueness of Gold Butte, NWP's Development Director Mackenzie Banta headed over to the Keen Footwear booth to give a quick presentation about Gold Butte to the crowd. It is heartening to talk with people involved in this multi-billion-dollar industry and listen to them talk about their passion for wildlands and the outdoors. They care just as much about conserving the stunning lands in Nevada as we do…
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Written by Wild Nevada
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Monday, 28 June 2010 09:56 |
Ever since NWP was founded in 1999, we’ve taken pride in producing top-notch maps. And they have been—and will continue to be—essential tools for getting our work done. With the help of software grants from ESRI and acquisition of a large-format printer through the aid of the Norcross Foundation, we routinely produce and share high quality, “industry-standard” maps with our Congressional representatives, partner organizations in Nevada, national conservation groups, government agencies and private industry. And this summer, we’re fortunate to have an intern with great skills—and the willingness to put them to use (over and over and over again) in a way that will allow us to be more efficient for years to come. Here's his story.
My name is Devin Creighton, and I am currently a senior at a university far removed from the landscapes and wilderness here in beautiful Nevada. I have been studying towards two bachelor's degrees at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, located about an hour’s drive northeast of Pittsburgh in southwestern Pennsylvania. My studies are in Environmental Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). A geographical information system captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography and database technology. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results.
As a student nearing the end of my college career, it became apparent that it was time to start applying my studies and start trying to find work in my chosen fields. So to get started, I began my quest for an internship. For weeks, I searched the web as well as contacts that my professors and fellow students recommended and had had success with in the past. After sending out several resumes and interviewing over the phone, I soon found in my local area that many internships had been developed into full-time positions, or organizations simply couldn’t afford to fund them in today’s economic climate.
Through the word of my older brother, who’s employed by Patagonia in Reno, I learned of the Nevada Wilderness Project, which is similar to many organizations I had been trying to get involved with at home. I checked out their website and came to realize, what better opportunity could there be to put my education to use--as well as experience a new landscape? So as an intern here at NWP, I get to witness first-hand the effort and thought that goes into preserving pristine areas and habitats as well as into the advocacy for “smart from the start” development of renewable energy. All of these are issues that interest me, and in the future, I would like to work in the areas of preservation and development.
I have been using the skills I acquired through my coursework in GIS to help the friendly folks here at NWP make their map-making efforts simpler and more efficient by revising a huge document pertaining to the roads of the state of Nevada. Many different government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, offer portions of this data to the public for download. But none of these agencies offer a complete and thorough collection of this information for the entire state. The project I am currently immersed in involves combining this information from different sources and attributing it relative to its primary use (Primary Highways, Paved Roads, Trails, 4WD access, Private Roads, and etc).
And why does a wilderness group need accurate and easily accessible road information? Upon the completion of this huge task, it will greatly reduce the amount of time needed for the production of maps that will be used in current and future conservation proposals. Roads are often necessary on these maps to give reference to where an area is located or to the amount of traffic that an area is subject to. They are often barriers or pose threats to many kinds of wildlife because of the affects they can have on the natural residents of a delicate landscape. This is an important factor to include and consider in proposals for conservation or preservation of critical habitats.
All of the different elements I have and will witness throughout the duration of my internship stay here at the NWP are extremely helpful and important to the growth of my knowledge about what goes on in the field, and into the efforts that go into the protection of an area. I am also learning more about the application, practice, knowledge and familiarity with GIS software and its application in the workplace. It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to work with such an easy going, well-rounded group of people on a daily basis.
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Written by Wild Nevada
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Wednesday, 09 June 2010 15:00 |
We want to let you know about a useful website called Advocates for Nevada’s Deserts and Mountains (www.nvdesertmtn.org). It’s a “one stop place to find out what is going on with Nevada’s desert and mountains.”
Website host Graham Stafford checks newspapers, reviews BLM and forest service websites, and surveys the web for articles pertinent to natural resources in Nevada. He then organizes them in appropriate issue categories such as Wilderness, ORV, Mining, Water, Wildlife, Energy, and more. The result is a well organized library of media coverage. Graham is also a professional photographer and most of the images on the site are his. They’re stellar. Check it out.
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Written by Wild Nevada
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Tuesday, 08 June 2010 13:34 |
Three or four times a year, the Nevada Wilderness Project staff in Reno, NV heads out to Mayberry Street, near the Truckee River and our office, to pick up trash. We adopted the stretch in '06 through the non-profit group Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful. Our first clean-up four years ago was beasty. In addition to the usual litter that people toss or that inadvertantly blows out of someone's reach, our stretch of Mayberry had lots of old trash--even tires--buried in the brush. It had been there for years. Now that we're a few years into it, we've made headway. The big, old stuff is gone and we mainly get out there to stay on top of the litter: fast-food bags, booze bottles, and plastic beverage containers of every size. We filled about four or five bags this morning.
We'll also take this opportunity to introduce Devon Creighton, who is spending the summer with us working on GIS and map-making projects. He's a senior at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, just northeast of Pittsburgh, and working on an Environmental Geography degree. He's the one normal looking guy in the photo below (yeah - second from the right. The one with regular pants).
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Monday, 04 May 2009 06:50 |
 John Wallin, NWP's founder, director and ring leader, is going to be on a Reno radio station this week... talking about Nevada's wildlands and the Nevada Wilderness Project (of course), but probably a few other things, too (Aces baseball? bluegrass? bighorn sheep?) He'll get to fill listeners in on NWP's new mission, conservation opportunities around the state and ways for people to get involved.
So we hope you'll tune in - should be a lively discussion because the show is hosted by one of KTHX's original "X" men, Dondo, who promises his show is "a mistake-riddled collage of music, random interviews, subliminal messages and other errata." We love that!
So we hope you tune in:
where: tune in to KTHX 101.1 FM
when: Thursday morning, May 7, 2009 at 8:30 am
what: John and the Nevada Wilderness project on the air waves
why: Because this cat is rockin' out and says "meeeooooowwwwwww! I feel good!"
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Sunday, 08 February 2009 13:31 |
 
Yes, despite rumors that the Nevada Wilderness Project is based out of a cave deep in the Big Rocks Wilderness Area, we actually do have offices with internet connections. So we're breaking into the online social networking realm with a Facebook page. If you, too, are on facebook, we hope you'll join the hippest new group, "Fans of the Nevada Wilderness Project." We will keep it updated with current news, cool photos, and, of course, you will be able to see all the other troublemakers who have joined our page.
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Monday, 01 December 2008 01:39 |
(Here's a post contributed by a friend of ours at www.thecleanestline.com... )  Jonah. That's the book’s title. Simple, direct. About as austere as the landscape it refers to. It’s part cowboy, part environmentalist, part roughneck, and part naturalist. It’s part photo-journalism and part poetry. It’s naked fact and nuanced understanding. And it’s the self-published product of a young Reno woman who, at 25 years old, has managed herself to live a bit of each of these lives. A Nevada native, Nikki Mann is the editor/photographer/publisher of Jonah. She is, among many other things, a biologist who was hired by an oil and gas development company to conduct wildlife surveys of potential drill areas to assist in permit compliance. Officially, her job consisted of assessing the biodiversity of areas such as Wyoming’s Jonah Field (for which the book is named) and submitting reports on the various species populations living therein. The purpose of these official reports was to help determine the impacts of oil and gas development. Government reporting is long on facts and lean on story. Mann has long since turned in her fact-laden reports, and Jonah is her attempt, along with cowboy poet Andy Nelson, to tell this landscape’s stories. Mann’s approach is an inspiring one, especially as our own state's conservation efforts move inexorably toward places within counties more resistant to wilderness and NCA protection initiatives. When it comes to environmental and energy issues, we no longer live in a time of easy conversations. It is rare when authors and editors dealing with contentious, complicated issues successfully resist the pull to align their texts with a particular side. With Jonah, Mann resists this pull admirably and instead, presents information in a way that honors all parties. Her blend of photos, detailed captions and Nelson’s deeply reflective poetry reveal how hard it can be to spend time with a ranching family and not begin to sense the depth of connection they’ve formed with a landscape they’ve depended upon for generations. It’s similarly difficult to view Mann’s intimate portraits of drill-rig workers (roughnecks) and not respect their commitment to family; one that drives them to earn their pay through long, mid-winter shifts on days when high temperatures struggle to reach -20F. And it’s hard to glean facts from the text and not sympathize with environmentalists who point out that Pinedale’s citizens—7,000 of them living at the heart of our country’s largest intact ecosystem—are breathing some of the dirtiest air in the country. Mann made a commitment to tell a story that needed to be told. It was through hard work and belief that the book came to be born. Here’s a bit of her story: Nikki Mann is a professional biologist, full-time ranch hand, working journalist, creative writer, horse-packer, self-trained photographer, and one of few women to complete grueling farrier training (blacksmithing horseshoes from raw stock). Raised in the decreasingly remote Red Rock area north of Reno, Nikki’s grown up with the zephyr (and the ubiquitous Nevada dust) always in her hair. Among her early environmental contributions, Nikki worked as a trail crew member for the Nevada Conservation Corps, building and maintaining trails at Great Basin National Park. Her former supervisor notes with a smile that Ms. Mann—herself barely more than 100lbs—often worked her much more physically imposing colleagues into the ground, and always with a spirit of complete collaboration, encouragement, and good nature. Another of Nikki’s notable Nevada adventures is a unique trip she conceived with her partner, Jeff Wohl, in 2006. Together, they assembled an expedition of the type rarely undertaken in modern America. Their aim was to get to know the high, wild lands at the heart of America in a way our modern culture first discovered it: on foot and on the back of a horse. So they built all of their expedition gear. From scratch. They stitched the leather of their packsaddles, nailed the wood of their pack frames and smithed the iron of their horseshoes. And in the still-snowy April air, they set off to cross the great open spaces of country stretching from northwestern Nevada clear to the Upper Green River plains, a distance of about 1,000 miles. Perhaps this is why Mann persisted after Jonah was embraced then abandoned by a list of partners and publishers. She is, after all, familiar with hardship and endurance, and understands the strength to deal with such elements comes only from a deeply rooted love of the land. Her connection to the Upper Green River Valley runs every bit as deep as the taproot of Nevada sage. Her dedication to honoring the voices participating in conversations about the Upper Green River Valley is palpable in Jonah's pages, and is one we can learn from as we approach a new stage of conversations about the future of wild Nevada. Her book is available at http://www.rafternjphotography.com/id1.html
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Written by NWP Board
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Friday, 19 September 2008 07:50 |
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Article written by Jill S. Heaton, Ph.D.
 Several weeks before our scheduled Nevada Wilderness Project board meeting in Belmont, Nevada I was driving west on Highway 50-The Loneliest Road in America. As I was quizzing myself on valley and mountain range names along the way, my profession is Geography if you are wondering what dork would do such a thing, I noticed on the Official Nevada Tourist State Highway Map the label “Geographic Center of Nevada.” Being the geographer that I am I immediately got very, very excited and knew that I had to visit the GCN (a.k.a Geographic Center of Nevada). As I sat there at the Bean Flat rest stop (i.e. rest stop #31) and contemplated my plan I noticed Belmont, Nevada on the map. Belmont is located at the south end of Monitor Valley, the GCN at the north end of the valley. What luck I thought. Just two more weekends away and I would be in Belmont.
So, I rounded up the dogs and hit the road knowing full well that I would be back in several weeks with fellow wild Nevada lovers who surely would want to visit the GCN with me. Just to show you how excited I was I emailed the board upon returning home...an excerpt read “Anyone want to carpool to Belmont?...I want to visit the Geographic Center of Nevada (W116° 37’ 56.0, N39° 19’ 48.0). Call me a Geographer!”
Anyway, moving on. It seemed like the entire weekend in Belmont, leading up to our departure on Sunday and planned visit to the GCN, was filled with friendly joking at my expense. But it soon turned on the others and they began to get excited too. We hit the road after breakfast on Sunday morning and began the drive north on Belmont Road (SR882) through Monitor Valley. Monitor Valley is stunningly beautiful. Its surrounding mountains are part of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, bounded on the west by the Toquima Range and on the east by the Monitor Range. This valley typifies northern Nevada…sweeping North-South pinyon pine and juniper tipped mountains, valleys of sagebrush seas, natural hot springs, few inhabitants, even fewer visitors, solitary ranch houses (in this case the Monitor Ranch…which just so happens to be up for sale), and the presence of a single lonely North-South road.
Using modern day GPS technology, I had previously loaded the geographic coordinates of actually two different “geographic centers”, an earlier 1962 set of coordinates (W116° 38’ 13.3, N39° 19’ 11.7) and a modern day set from 2003 (W116° 37’ 56.0, N39° 19’ 48.0) based upon more advanced geospatial technologies. What exactly is a geographic center? Imagine balancing the state of Nevada on the point of a pencil. The location at which the state would balance perfectly horizontally over that pencil is the geographic center, not leaning in any direction…like a perfectly spinning basketball. Unlike a population center, a geographic center can only change if the actual boundaries of the feature are changed, though we can get better at calculating the geographic center. With that in mind we chose only to visit the modern calculated location.
 As we traveled the well maintained, but dusty Belmont Road north I eagerly tracked our distance and direction to the center, regularly providing updates to Lynn… “just 18.5 more kilometers…only 10km to go…just a few more km and we should slow to pinpoint”, etc. Eventually we began approaching the perpendicular track to the GCN. I have to admit that I was getting a bit excited and probably called the drive off too soon, though to be honest we were all ready to get our butts out of the car and our boots on the ground. I mean seriously, we are the Nevada Wilderness Project in more than name. So, I called a halt to the drive and we began traveling a Northeast route…remember I got over anxious and could not wait for the near perfect east route.
The photo documentation ensued. I kept up a quick pace and for the most part John, Lynn and Brian hung in with me, I think mostly because they wanted to see my reaction when we arrived. As we got closer and closer I began to run, John began to run along beside me snapping photos the whole time. As we ran along I finally spotted the lone rusty 2ft piece of rebar sticking out of the desert floor. We had arrived!
It would be nice to say that we set there and contemplated the beauty of Nevada, extolling her numerous virtues, but we didn’t. What we did instead was simply enjoy Nevada. We rummaged through the geocache box, wrote in the log, set up a friendly game of Wiffle Ball and eventually left the ball behind for the enjoyment of others. All and all I cannot think of a more perfect way in which we could have enjoyed Nevada that day.
So, back to the title of this post. Contemplating the Navel: Why the Geographic Center of Nevada Matters. Because it exist, it is not paved, it is easily accessible, it is surrounded by natural beauty, solitude and silence, and finally, because our presence there for that very short time on a beautiful Nevada summer morning will in no way inhibit the next visitor from experiencing the same natural beauty, solitude and silence, and hopefully, a game of Whiffle Ball.
*Title provided by Helene Seelye.
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Wednesday, 30 July 2008 05:47 |
A new publication arrived at the Nevada Wilderness Project’s Reno office the other day. It’s called The Leopold Outlook, a redesigned “newsletter” published by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, which is based in Wisconsin -- Leopold’s home and inspiration for his most notable book, A Sand County Almanac. Their new publication looks like a magazine. It contains nice photos and fairly long articles that explore Leopold’s land ethic and conservation philosophy. People continue to be inspired by Leopold’s work, as well as by what many consider his greatest asset: an ability to allow his thinking and philosophy to evolve. He remained an eager student of the natural world and a critical thinker his entire life. In his introduction to this new publication, the editor of  writes, “What is the Aldo Leopold Foundation doing going to a longer print piece during this irreversible transition to the digital age? Haven’t they heard of websites, list serves, blogs, e-publishing?” They have, but decided that combining digital communications with traditional print will let them deepen the content, maintain a frequency of communication and build a more substantial relationship with their membership. And he writes, “…the types of issues we are facing today require more intense concentration, prolonged dialogue, and greater critical thought, not less.” This last statement is right on the money, but what about the other stuff? Is there really a need for environmental organizations to produce and mail a paper newsletter (or magazine, in their case) in addition to all the other digital forms of communications at our disposal? Newsletters have been on minds here at NWP. We’ve produced them pretty regularly for a number of years and are currently working on articles for the next one. We’re also thinking about new formats, designs and what purpose (maybe there isn’t one?) they will serve in the future. We’d love to have your opinion.
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008 07:43 |
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A recent news story by CBS Channel 8's news show, Las Vegas Now, sheds light on the rich cultural resources found in southern Nevada and, sadly, the vandalism and damage being done to them. The video clip is posted below. When watching it, you can’t help but think about the Gold Butte area and the some 2,000 cultural sites – such as thousand-year-old petroglyphs, agave roasting pits, and 19th century ranches that archaeologists estimate the region holds. Similar damage is being done to many of Gold Butte's irreplaceable cultural sites and to the land. It's good to see some mainstream TV news coverage of the issue. Wilderness advocates are working hard to get better protections in place for Gold Butte, and if you are interested in volunteering to help make this happen, contact the Nevada Wilderness Project. You can also read the most recent news coverage of Gold Butte in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ycNu9FLipU]
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