The Bureau of Land Management Black Rock Field Office has completed the Wilderness Management Plan (WMP) and Final Environmental Assessment (EA) along with a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) and Decision Document for 10 designated wilderness areas in northwestern Nevada.
These wilderness areas were established by the Black Rock Desert - High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area Act of 2000 (NCA). The Act provided special designation to nearly 1.2 million acres of public land in northwestern Nevada, establishing an 800,000 acre NCA and designating just over 750,000 acres as wilderness. About 380,000 acres of the wilderness is within the NCA.
"This is an incredibly important step forward in our overall management of these wilderness areas," said Gene Seidlitz, the BLM's Winnemucca District Manager. "This will allow for these areas to be managed and protected for future generations."
Management under the WMP will be generally similar to management since wilderness designation. The overall strategy for managing the wilderness areas is to achieve desired wilderness conditions through protecting, preserving, and restoring ecological function and natural appearances of the wilderness landscape with the minimum amount of management, interference, or manipulation.
Continued management actions will include: reclamation of closed routes; noxious weed control; authorization of guides; primitive recreation; and emergency stabilization and rehabilitation after wildfires. Additional actions that may be carried out in the future are: initiating comprehensive inventories of historical, cultural, and paleontological sites and restoration of aspen and cottonwood stands where they were eliminated by human activity. Access to and maintenance of authorized range developments will continue to be addressed in Grazing Permits, as required under the Congressional Grazing Guidelines.
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