Page 7 - Summer 2014 magazine

Storm at Razorback Mountain — Photos by Friends of Black Rock High Rock

The Great Basin is brimful with rugged, high-desert country — arid Nevada sits right in the middle of it — but

all this idiomatic rough is not without its diamonds. The Black Rock Desert-High Rock Canyon Emigrant
Trails National Conservation Area (NCA) is one of those gems, hidden in plain sight.

A big name for a big place:1.2 million acres of rocketry, rockhounding and the annual Burning Man
mostly undeveloped basin-and-range topography in festival held on the bone-white playa. With the help of
northwestern Nevada, encompassing 900 miles of our partner organizations and indispensable volunteers,

primitive roads and the largest intact segments of the we’ve furthered our shared goal of preserving the re-
historic California trails left in the country. Emigrant gion and promoting appreciation for its historical, eco-
carvings and prehistoric petroglyphs adorn its canyon logical, agricultural, recreational and scenic resources.
walls, human screeds written over an age-old geologic
palimpsest. Fossils of mastodons, sequoia trees and
gigantic marine reptiles speak to cooler, wetter
epochs. Though the tune’s changed, the thrum of life

plays on. From the peaks of windswept ranges to the
baking basin floors, the ragged mountain clefts to the
verdant springs, desert species carve out their niches
and endure, even thrive.

We at Friends of Black Rock – High Rock have
served as stewards and advocates of this remote NCA
since its designation in 2000. It’s a land of many uses:

each year more than 200,000 visitors come for camp-
Volunteer noxious weed surveyors in High Rock Canyon.
ing, hunting, stargazing, off-roading, amateur
This year Friends staff and volunteers undertake the
first organized noxious weed survey within the NCA,
combing over more than a hundred miles of nameless
tracks and ghost roads in search of potentially trouble-

some species to report.
Collaborating with BLM and the Great Basin Land-

scape Conservation Cooperative, in late May we
Volunteers explore after removing a derelict water trough (Continued on page 13)
from the Calico Mountains. Page 7