Program areas at Friends of Nevada Wilderness
Wilderness stewardship program: in partnership with the agencies, our volunteer stewards clean up, monitor and heal wildlands and improve wildlife habitat and recreational trail access. In 2023 we completed 39 volunteer stewardship projects with 515 volunteers, giving back a total of 235,574 of in-kind volunteer service. Volunteers monitored 28 springs, pulled invasive weeds, seeded native plants, knocked down mining claim markers trapping wildlife, monitored dark skies, and installed signs. Our trail crew maintained about 50 miles of Wilderness trails and the sheldon resource crew removed 17,000 pounds of waste metal from refuge wildlands.
Wilderness education and outreach program: we designed and printed two newsletters, produced the 2024 wild Nevada calendar which highlights our 40th anniversary, sent monthly e-newsletters and numerous alerts and event invitations to our supporters. We hosted the monthly wild speaker series, the wild and scenic film festival, the black rock rendezvous and national public lands day events and a dark sky festival, along with outreach at burning man. We participated in numerous tabling events and volunteer fairs with patagonia, local colleges. We created a website for our Nevada dmv save starry skies license plate. Additional stories, videos, and photos can be viewed on our website, instagram, facebook and youtube.
Wilderness legislation and planning program: in 2023 we celebrated the creation of the avi kwa ame national monument on march 21, 2023. We also continued work on the various components of the washoe and nye counties public lands bills. We have analyzed and provided comments public land proposals that would affect Nevada wildlands including the placement of the greenlink west transmission line through our esmeralda/fish lake area of critical environmental concern (acec) proposal and initial comments on the nearly 63,000-acre industrial esmeralda seven solar project also in our proposed acec. We also provided comments on the greenlink north transmission line proposal and the sage-grouse eis.