Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Submitted May 7, 2008
Partners In Conservation (PIC) held a barbecue dinner party on Friday, May 2 at the Logandale Fairgrounds. The party was held to recognize and show appreciation for the small army of volunteers that participated in the Desert Tortoise Fencing Project.
This huge project saw volunteer groups installing over 26 miles of retrofit tortoise fencing by hand along the I-15 across the Mormon Mesa. The project took six years and over 2000 volunteers to complete.
The purpose of tortoise fencing is to preserve wildlife habitat along the highway corridor. “By completing this project you have, in effect, created between 26 and 52 square miles of new desert habitat,” BLM Coordinator, Carrie Ronning told volunteers at the dinner. Ronning explained that a highway across the desert is like a sink, draining the habitat away for miles on either side. “Your work on this project will truly be a lasting legacy,” Ronning said.
Volunteering for tortoise fencing was no easy walk in the park. Groups of 20-25 volunteers would arrive at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings and would work about six hours at a stretch completing a 1000 foot segment of the fence.
“It isn’t easy,” said PIC Chairman Lindsey Dalley. “I was involved as a leader with one of the youth groups that volunteered, and let me tell you, it was hard work.”
Many types of community groups came forward to volunteer on this project. These included church youth groups, boy scout troops, school sports and music groups, FFA students and more. The groups were motivated to volunteer by the fact that it was a fundraiser for each these groups. Federal funding was available to pay to the groups $1 per foot of fencing that was installed. That totalled up to $140,600 in funds distributed to volunteer groups through the duration of the project.
Moapa Valley saw the largest number of volunteer groups on the project. Out of the 141 groups who volunteered, 52 came from the Moapa Valley. The Virgin Valley provided 46 volunteer work parties and the Las Vegas area had 43 groups work on the project.
BLM manager, Robert Wandell, said that the high ratio of rural volunteers was typical in these types of projects. “There are a lot more people in the urban areas but we find that volunteerism for these types of things is less there than in the rurals,” he said. “I think that it is because people in the rural areas have a deeper connection to the land.”
PIC Administrator, Elise McAllister of Moapa said that she was very happy with the success of the project. She was especially pleased with the high quality in the work that had been done by the volunteer groups. “Usually you might expect to find a drop off in quality of work toward the end of each group’s shift as they got tired,” McAllister said. “But that simply was not so here.”
McAllister said that this was a testament to the solid work ethic of the volunteer groups and the pride that they took in the job at hand.
Lindsey Dalley expressed amazement at how many groups and individuals had participated over the six years of the project. He paid tribute to McAllister in her work of coordinating all of the volunteer efforts. “Getting all of those groups together, organized and coordinating their efforts had to be at least as big a job as actually doing the turtle fencing!” Dalley said.
