Bureau of Land Management Volunteer Feature

Volunteers Add Presence
On the Black Rock

By Michael Bilbo
Outdoor Recreation Planner/Winnemucca
Field Office Volunteer Coordinator

The Black Rock Desert, northwestern Nevada takes up 727 square miles - the largest playa or dry lake bed in the U.S. It has everything: hot springs, solitude, off highway vehicle activity, the site in 1997 where British driver Andy Green officially broke the world land speed record and punched through the sound barrier at 763 MPH, the annual site of Burning Man - a week long arts

Volunteer Jason Sumiye views the interpretive sign developed by volunteer Chuck Dodd on the Applegate-Lassen National Historic Trail.

festival attended by about 12,000 people, 150 pristine miles of the Applegate-Lassen National Historic Trail which carried one-half the '49ers to California 149 years ago across a harsh barren land, places to jump off with a hang glider, places to ride horseback on a full-moon night, amateur rocket launches to 100,000 feet, wind, dust, beauty at sunset.

It has visitors, and that population is growing. We estimate that last year over 120,000 people visited the Black Rock Desert region and its great playa. Ours is the first culture in history to provide its massive population recreation in desert lands, lands that emigrants thought useless and forbidding, lands that native Americans called home. Today, our culture provides that recreation opportunity in comfortable high-performance vehicles out and back. Yet, after all the warnings, many come unprepared, or, just simply, too many come.

Into that equation, add the land managing agency, the BLM, and try to imagine how to manage, with very little resources, such a huge area with diverse resources. To address this, the BLM is preparing the Black Rock Desert Management Plan. Among other aspects, it calls for management of large-scale events, off-highway vehicle controls in areas being hammered, heavy emphasis on environmental education through the Tread Lightly! and Leave No Trace programs, extensive photo monitoring, visitor use data collection, a 3-year area-wide photomonitor study, and increased BLM presence.

Bring on the volunteers.! Indeed, a dedicated cadre of volunteers has risen to the task of taking care of that mighty chunk of land out there. John Ryczkowski, Captain, Reno Fire Department, stopped by our Visitor Contact Station at the Playa's southern end last year. "How can I help?" says he. "Well," I respond, "We have a photomonitor project that needs direction." What an amazing fellow! He grabs the bull by the horns and goes after the project. Soon, he has the entire region mapped on his computer and ready for placing and GPS'ing photomonitor points. Into the scene comes professional photographer Chandler McPherson and virtually single handedly places John's concept into action by getting out and figuring out how to set up the points. Forty-five points later and hundreds of hours under their belts, with a growing photomonitor crew, those two volunteers are leading the way.

The user groups wanted to know how to help, so, under group volunteer services agreements, Aero-Pac Rocketry Club, Desert Survivors, two local ranches, the High Rock Trekkers 4-wheel-Drive Club, Burning Man, and the Oregon-California Trails Association are now signed up. Six organizations and 60 individuals have responded to our call for assistance and we are getting results. We are determining the percentage of growth since 1992 when the last

The BLM's management plan for the area calls for extensive photo-monitoring. Here, volunteer Freddie Osterhagen, left, and Chandler McPherson drive in a photo monitoring point on the Black Rock Desert.

good visitor profile was put together. People now know who manages the land and where to go for help. Visitors now know of Leave No Trace and Tread Lightly! The volunteers are out there working that desert. During last year's National Public Lands Day, Aero-Pac, the High Rock Trekkers, Desert Survivor, the Jacksons (a ranch family whose father homesteaded the region in the 1920s) and several individuals all came together to accomplish an amazing cleanup of an old trespass on the western playa edge. In one day those volunteers piled up by hand 16 tons of metal and 9 tons of wood. Included in the metal pile were 26 miles of barbed wire they took down!

While these volunteers are certainly deserving of recognition, that is not their motive. They're in the program to take care of the land and keep it healthy. The Burning Man organization is building backcountry byway-style kiosks and vandal resistant visitor registers for sensitive resource areas. Instead of standard BLM visitor registers, the Oregon-California Trails Association is placing books in the Burning Man-supplied register boxes that are styled after 1849 diaries and have diary excerpts in them, inviting the public visiting the Applegate-Lassen Trail to add their part of history to the dialog.

The other groups and individuals will be out on Labor Day, giving up their holiday to collect visitor data, patrol and be of assistance and add presence - real presence. As one manager put it, "It's great, it is just great!"