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CityLife: Tarnished Treasure - Gold Butte |
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Tarnished treasure
Gold Butte has 350,000 acres filled with petroglyphs,
historic sites and sensitive wildlife. Visitors just love it - to deathLas Vegas CityLife
Friday July 25, 2008
A day trip to Gold Butte fills your head with a jangling
medley of disparate images and impressions. A lizard skittering into the scrub.
Sandstone cliffs and ridges crawling with ancient petroglyphs.
Fluorescent paintballs melting in the dirt.
A yawning sinkhole dubbed Devil's Throat, whose twisting, cylindrical shape
really does seem to hint at some diabolical intent. Headstones marking the
graves of long-dead gold prospectors. Midden piles hiding pottery shards
centuries old.
Tire tracks branded into a pristine hill.
But perhaps this says it best. After we spent a long day of rumbling around the
unpaved roads of Gold Butte -- a nearly 350,000-acre natural and cultural gem
south of Mesquite, cradled by Lake Mead -- one of our final stops is Whitney
Pockets. It's a series of rock formations whose nooks and crannies made ideal
dwellings for native tribes.
It's also where the Civilian Conservation Corps did some of its Depression-era
busy work. Ah, those resourceful CivCon guys. In one area, they walled off a
portion of a natural alcove to create ... well, theories vary. A small, au
naturel studio apartment? A smokehouse? A walk-in cooler?
Regardless, visitors have found a different use for this little piece of
history. It hits you when you walk into the alcove: the stench of an outhouse.
Assessing the scene, Nancy Hall, president of Friends of Gold Butte, offers a
doleful shrug. "Rather than do anything about the fact there aren't any
bathrooms here, they put up a sign that basically says, 'Don't go to the
bathroom in the cave.' It took us about six months of sending the BLM pictures
of poop and toilet paper for them to put that sign up. We were kind of hoping
for bathrooms."
In addition to people literally shitting on history, half of the stone wall has
been torn down to supply rocks for a nearby campfire pit.
Spent fireworks litter the ground.
"There are probably 2,000 cultural sites in the Gold Butte area. I really
feel like we've got Sedona beat all to heck," says Terri Robertson,
founder of Friends of Gold Butte. As she talks, she's piloting her Toyota
4Runner over a pitted asphalt road that rattles our joints and loosens our molars
-- no back road, mind you, but the main drag into Gold Butte. With her green
flip-flops and grandma's sweetness, Robertson may seem like an unlikely
explorer, but the longtime preservation activist knows Gold Butte as well as
her own backyard. "We've got these huge panels we call billboards because
they're so high in the air -- 60 feet up, 60 feet long, and figures two feet
tall. They're just beautiful on red sandstone. Just gorgeous. But it's not just
petroglyphs here. It's living areas. Trails where they traveled for hundreds of
years. And the mining aspect is a huge piece of American history."
As we pass a spread of small ranches on the right, the road feels like it's
about disintegrate in a jaw-snapping climax. Then, there it is: The welcome
sign to Gold Butte, dubbed, unpoetically enough, an "Area of Critical
Environmental Concern."
The fact that the sign's actually there surprises Hall. "It's usually
knocked down, but it looks like they reinforced it with some beams. When they
originally put it up a year ago, it didn't last beyond a few months." They
suspect it's either kids or anti-government yokels who keep ramming the sign
down.
"Nancy bet me it would be knocked down," says Robertson.
It's a good bet to lose, anyway. But there'll be plenty of damage -- and beauty
-- to see inside.
Who's watching over Gold Butte? No one.
Sure, the designation as an "area of critical environmental concern"
sounds like it might confer some protection. Not quite. The BLM has one
resident ranger covering the vast area (as well as Mesquite proper) that
comprises hundreds of miles of roads and hundreds of thousands of acres. (By
contrast, 197,000-acre Red Rock National Conservation Area has 12 staff
positions, nine of which are currently filled. The 48,000-acre Sloan Canyon
National Conservation Area has three of its nine positions filled. The catch is
that, for all its merits, Gold Butte isn't a national conservation area.)
Just as likely as running into that lone officer in the Gold Butte back roads
is seeing an interpretive sign -- you know, maybe one informing people that the
land they're tearing up on their four-wheelers is protected desert tortoise
habitat, or explaining to the joker who scratched the name of his favorite band
on a rock panel the difference between graffiti and tribal rock art.
"It really does need a person who's fully committed to that area,"
says Gayle Marrs-Smith, the BLM's project manager for Gold Butte. She adds that
after a grueling, 10-year process of starts and stops and public meetings and
reports, the area is finally due to get signs this fall, and will also benefit
from a full-time BLM "roads coordinator" whose sole duty will be
maintaining signs.
You know, for when people shoot them or ram them with their trucks.
There are also sights like this: A rolling, scrub-dappled hillscape ...
braided, scarred and crosshatched by countless tire tracks.
Who's watching over Gold Butte? Everyone.
Groups such as Friends of Gold Butte and the Nevada Wilderness Coalition are
asking Nevada's congressional delegation to designate Gold Butte as a national
conservation area. It's a few big steps above the largely bureaucratic
designation of "area of critical environmental concern," because the
federal designation would necessarily be packaged with a management plan -
which would presumably mean beefed-up federal funding, which would presumably
mean more staff, more signs, better road management, and -- get this -- even
bathrooms.
"It's designated an area of critical environmental concern, but that
doesn't give it any teeth in order to get the attention it needs," Hall
explains. "The more visitors that come here, the more impacts that are out
here. We're pleading to get the ball rolling, because the management plans are
going to take some time." U.S. Reps. Jon Porter and Dean Heller, whose
districts cover the area, express a certain calculated enthusiasm for the idea,
but are also careful to show deference to the area's rural residents in Moapa
Valley, Mesquite and Bunkerville who fear that a federal land grab will rob
them of a longtime playground.
It's federal land on paper, sure, but to fifth-generation Moapa Valley resident
Elise McAllister, Gold Butte is like a family heirloom. A member of Partners in
Conservation -- a group that believes public lands are for public use -- she's
worried that crowning Gold Butte a national conservation area would turn the
place into a don't-touch museum with off-roaders left on the sidelines. She
also channels the fear that roads will be radically scaled back to give the public
less access rather than more.
"People in rural communities have a strong emotional attachment to
roads," explains McAllister. "As a whole, they've always said, 'All
these existing roads that were in existence for years and years were already
there. What's the problem with keeping them?' There seems to be this
incremental creep of losing access. Rural communities have a lot of traditional
families, a historical connection with a lot of the areas there, where people
used to ranch and mine."
With locals casting a jaundiced eye on federal employee and do-gooder alike,
it's led to a balancing act, a détente of sorts between preservationists and
more recreation-oriented groups.
And it's a delicacy the BLM is keen to acknowledge, since the roads planning
process for Gold Butte was sunk shortly after it initially got under way in
1998. What happened? The BLM almost had a revolt on its hands when it started
talking about closing roads without consulting the local community.
"The whole process got derailed because we didn't do a good enough job of
including the rural community in discussions," says the BLM's Marrs-Smith.
The agency tried again in 2003, and recently it decided to close 94 miles in 11
of the BLM district office's areas of critical environmental concern. Moapans
and Mesquite off-roaders can't rightly complain of a nefarious federal land
grab, though, since the BLM left 806 miles of roads in place.
"Most of the people we communicated with in our scoping and outreach
understand that it can get really out of control if you don't have a network of
roads people agree that they're going to use."
The BLM has seen it firsthand, noting in last year's report on road closures
that from 1998 to 2005, 53 miles of new roads were cut by irresponsible
off-road use.
Welcome to Gold Butte, population: 0.
Population: Old mining equipment, rusting in the sun.
Population: Concrete pads where buildings once stood.
Population: Headstones for two miners, Art Coleman and Bill Garrett.
But, once upon a time, this area was crawling with prospectors, who formed the
basis of a town that boasted a population of 1,500 at its peak in 1907. But the
ore ran out and the boom was short-lived.
But through a narrow, rocky pass that nearly upends the SUV, there is the most
intriguing artifact of human ingenuity. It's an arrastra, a grooved stone disc
nearly the size of a subcompact. A mule (or a man) hooked to a center pole
would drag a rock around the groove to crush ore.
Surveying the hills scarred and battered by tire tracks, Robertson sighs.
"My dad was a miner and a hunter," says Robertson. "And in the
old days if you were out here by yourself, doing what you needed to do to live,
you grew to appreciate the land. Even the people that recreated, they didn't
destroy like what we have going on now, and it's really happening across our
nation. Off-road use, and the ability of these new vehicles to go anywhere you
can or want to go, no matter where it is, is just causing mass destruction.
That's why we were hoping to at least get signage out there, so people at least
know the importance of what's here."
OK, maybe it's the way the heat is washing everything in blur, ripple and haze.
But the word dancing really does pop into mind when you're staring at the
sprawl of petroglyphs on this hulking sandstone outcropping. As in they seem to
be dancing across the rock.
We're at an area called Falling Man, so named for a signature petroglyph that
seems to memorialize -- in almost comical fashion -- some poor tribe member's
ancient pratfall. Across this rust-hued monolith are squiggles and hydras,
spirals and bighorn sheep. There's an image of a fat man. A character
brandishing what are either some very large dinner forks or evil claw hands.
Crosses and mysterious Y-shaped figures and circles with dots. A roadrunner
wearing a hat. That's what Robertson says she sees, anyway.
Says Hall: "People are always asking me what the petroglyphs mean, and I
say, whatever you make up. Nobody really knows -- and nobody can say you're
wrong."
A roadrunner with a hat sounds just fine.
Robertson is a veteran when it comes to protecting and preserving public lands.
A tireless behind-the-scenes worker, she was instrumental in getting both Red
Rock and Sloan protected with acts of Congress. In those cases, she found
herself pitted against developers with seemingly bottomless pockets. Now she
finds the resistance tied into a long-simmering distrust of the federal
government.
"We thought Gold Butte would be a shoo-in, she says, "because it's
already designated an ACEC, so all we're wanting to do is change the land
designation."
But the phrase national conservation area kind of gives area residents such as
Gene Houston the creeps.
"Based on what has happened in previous NCAs, my concerns are mostly about
public access," says Houston. He's on the board of directors for Partners
in Conservation as well as on the Moapa Valley town board. "Sloan was the
last one done, and they basically shut the area off to all public access. I
believe in conservation, but I struggle with exclusion being the only method of
conservation."
Houston wants to see the access rights of off-roaders enshrined in any federal
bill's language -- not just in the BLM's management plan, which he fears would
be easy to change.
"I've got no issue with creating a management plan, as long as all the
stakeholders are addressed," he says. "These are still public lands,
for the use of the public."
The sheer number of petroglyphs in Gold Butte -- the damn-near joyous
profligacy of them -- makes you wonder if Indians of a thousand years ago had a
word for "information overload."
"Oh, this is just a drop in the bucket," Hall says.
We scramble up and over sheaves of sandstone ribboned with pink, orange and
lavender. Then we pick our way around a rocky pass, hopping over tenajas --
natural cisterns as big as beach balls, dug out of the stone by time and
erosion. Hundreds of years ago, they might have supplied water to Paiutes, but
at this hour, in this season, they're as dry as chalk. Up a bit, across a
series of sandstone loaves, hunches a boxlike rock -- a petroglyph
"billboard" if there ever was one. Across it are a jumble of rabbits,
tortoises, corkscrewy snakes. Bighorn sheep and human forms. Arched icons
suggesting rainbows, ovals hinting at cradleboards.
Nearby is a piece of graffiti of decidedly less interest to archeologists: Some
stoner of a bygone era scratched "RUSH" onto a rock.
"This area's not a secret anymore," says Hall. "People come from
all over, so you have to have some kind of management for it, because there are
so many visitors. All we are really saying is make it clear you shouldn't touch
the petroglyphs because of the oils in your hands. Stay on the trail. No
singing, no throwing rocks -- wait," she says with a laugh. "Those are
kid rules. You camp for two months with a 12-year old, you have a lot of
rules."
But the joke is apt. It is about the kids.
"People think we're environmentalists" -- she gives the word an
ironic groan -- "who are trying to shut people out. That doesn't have
anything at all to do with. I want my granddaughters to be able to take their
kids out here and there be something here for them to see. That would be really
cool."
Back near the car, we notice somebody's ripped a joshua tree out of the ground.
Who knows what all the petroglyphs mean. But it's clear that other, less
mysterious signs have an effect on visitors as well. Back at Whitney Pockets,
where visitors have turned an old Civilian Conservation Corps project into a
bathroom, early evidence is that the feeble sign -- taped to a stick and jammed
into a coffee can full of rocks -- is changing a few minds. Where the original
wall was destroyed to supply rocks for a fire pit, visitors have been piling up
stones as if to remake what's been destroyed.
"This whole wall was torn down, and since that sign was put there, people
are trying to build it back up," says Hall. "It's kind of neat that
after they put the sign up that people started doing this, because it shows
they didn't want to lose that. I think if they would have known how important
this site is, they wouldn't have taken it down to begin with."
One down, countless to go.
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