North Stillwater HMA

Location: The North Stillwater Range Herd Management Area (HMA) straddles the Churchill/Pershing County line as well as the Winnemucca Field Office and the Carson City Field Office boundary line. 

Size: The area consists of 176,800 acres of BLM land and 2,127 acres of a mix of private and other public lands for a total of 178,927 acres.

Topography/Vegetation: The Stillwater Mountain Range, which is included in the HMA, is a north-south trending mountain range and is bordered on the east by Dixie Valley and Spring Creek, on the north by the East Range, on the west by Buena Vista Valley, and on the south by White Cloud Canyon. 

Elevation ranges from 7,474 feet at Cornish Peak to 3,458 feet in Dixie Valley. Precipitation is less than 10 inches annually and temperatures can reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and well below zero in the winter. The area is comprised of approximately 132,428 acres in the Winnemucca Field Office area of which 1,582 acres are private land and 130,846 acres are public land. The Carson City Field Office portion consists of approximately 48,600 acres of public land and 640 acres of private land.

Vegetation types range from pinyon-juniper and juniper - sage types in the higher elevations, to sagebrush - grass types at moderate elevations to shadscale - scrub and greasewood types in the valley bottoms. Poisonous plants that are known to occur in limited quantities in the North Stillwater Range HMA are deathcamas, larkspur, loco weed, lupine, halogeton, and horsebrush. These species appear in limited quantities throughout the range. 

Many of the wild horses in this HMA spend the winter and most of the spring months on the west side of the mountain range in the vicinity of Logan Spring and the mouth of Big Ben Canyon. As weather warms, the herd moves up to higher elevations where they remain until the weather drives them down again.

AML:  138-205