By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
A large group of people from all over the region worked together on Saturday morning to leave the Logandale Trails area much better than they found it. It was the latest public lands project put on by the local Partners in Conservation organization. About 75 people came to help in a clean up project for the campsite areas and other parts of the 45,000 acre trail system.
“With everything that we have had going on lately, this one kind of snuck up on us,” said PIC Administrator Elise McAllister who organized the event. “We didn’t get as much publicity out there as we usually do. But we figured we would just plow forward with it anyway. And we have been so pleasantly surprised with the great turnout this morning.”
The volunteer crowd gathered at 8:00 am at the main trailhead site. There they enjoyed a breakfast of coffee, hot cocoa and donuts from the Overton Lin’s bakery.
In attendance were members of three different regional off-road vehicle trail-riding clubs including Vegas Valley 4 Wheelers, Jeep FAM and Mesquite ATV Club. In addition, many attendees simply heard about the event in various ways and decided to come out on their own.
“We heard about it just on Facebook,” said Las Vegas resident Tracy Strunk who brought the family including his wife, Melissa and their two young children. “We like to come out here and ride the trails pretty frequently. But we also want to keep the area in good shape. So we decided to come and help out.”
Jeep FAM club member Mike Dominguez said that projects like this one were important to regional off-road clubs. He pointed out that Las Vegas is home to a number of large off-road clubs with excess of 100 members in each one. All of them use the Logandale Trails often, he said.
“We love to come out here and be able to use this fantastic spot,” Dominguez said. “And we recognize that we need to take care of it so that we can continue to use it.”
Worried that the turnout would be light this time, McAllister had spent some time on Friday afternoon walking from one Logandale Trails campsite to another, handing out fliers to campers and letting them know about the cleanup which was going on the next morning. Since it was a long holiday weekend, she said she was able to talk to a lot of people.
“I didn’t expect a whole lot from that,” she said. “But we actually had quite a few people come up and join in from the campsites. I counted at least 5 families that helped. There were probably more.”
A special focus of this project was an invasive weed called the Sahara Mustard. This plant is just starting to sprout at this time of year and volunteers were educated on how to identify it. They were encouraged to pull up as many of the fledgling weeds as they could find.
On hand was BLM Weed Management Specialist Aleta Nafus who gave a brief presentation to the volunteers on the plant. She explained that the Sahara Mustard is a plant that comes from Africa. It tends to take over large areas, replacing native flowers and vegetation and growing into large, thick stands that are difficult to navigate through. They are not edible to wildlife, and in many cases are thought to cause harm to some animals. Where they have established a thick presence, the plant also becomes a fire hazard, Nafus said.
Nafus added that the weed is very prolific and has moved into vast areas of the southern Nevada region. They can already be seen growing thickly on the roadsides along Interstate 15 and in other areas, she said. But they have not, as yet, achieved a big presence in the Logandale Trails area.
“We have been lucky that it hasn’t made it very far into the Logandale Trails area,” Nafus said. “So we are trying to keep it down here as long as we can. We are just seeing it start to appear in the low lying wash areas. And it usually spreads from there.”
Nafus said that the best way that off-road enthusiasts can keep from spreading the Sahara Mustard is to stay on the trails. The plants usually grow, not in the road, but along the roadsides.The seeds become sticky and will adhere to vehicles that pass through the plants. That tends to be the way that the seeds are spread, she said. Furthermore, when vehicles then drive off of the trails they loosen the soil which provides good condition for the seeds to germinate.
“When you drive off the road, you are also cultivating the soil and creating a nice little seedbed for this weed,” Nafus said. “Then the seeds on your vehicle drop in there and pretty soon you have a thicket of these weeds.”
The volunteers spent several hours cleaning up the area. PIC provided trash bags, tools, gloves and other items helpful to the project.
Volunteers were encouraged to bring their trashbags back to the trailhead site at lunch time. For each full trashbag turned in, they could try their hands on spinning the special prize wheel. The prizes included Logandale Trails t-shirts, hats, flags, frisbees and more.
“It was a great day,” said McAllister. “we filled a pickup truck full of bags of trash and weeds.”
“A lot of people did the weed pull,” she continued. “I was quite surprised as many of them are OHVers who like to ride the trails looking for trash. But it seems the message of trying to stop the Sahara mustard before it spreads was taken to heart.”
To close out the event, PIC provided a pizza lunch from Pirate’s Landing in Logandale, to all who participated.
