Friday, Nov. 11, 2005 | 7:49 a.m.
The Spring Mountains make a rugged backdrop to the neon of Las Vegas, offering a cool jewel for weary urbanites looking for recreation in summer and winter.
However, the mountains are falling victim to their very popularity. Throngs of visitors choke the roads up Mount Charleston in the winter. Developers are throwing up condominium projects near fragile alpine habitats.
In the summer, visitors can start forest fires that leave hundreds of acres charred for decades. Off-road vehicles are tearing up fragile habitat on the mountains' sharp slopes.
The challenges are evident to Carlos Cornejo, who watches over the Torino Ranch, a private inholding surrounded by the 316,000 acres of the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Cornejo said he frequently ejects trespassers from the ranch, which in the summer is home to Camp Sunshine for disabled young people.
Last year fire came right to the edges of the ranch. Off-road vehicles frequently trespass. Hunters illegally seek the elk and other animals that treat the ranch as a haven.
"There's more and more of that happening," Cornejo said. "I try to make sure that no harm comes to the creatures that come here."
Earlier this year, developer Brett Torino sold 120 acres surrounding the 40-acre ranch to the Forest Service in an effort to block any future development at the site. The $15.7 million sale, Torino said, would keep the private pocket from being scarred by intensive development.
Observers with an interest in the Spring Mountains welcomed the move, but say some of the same issues that worry Cornejo are affecting other parts of the mountains.
Two groups with very different agendas complain that the Forest Service, the land manager for the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area, is failing to protect the environmental resources of the mountains.
Environmentalists charge that the Forest Service's policies lean toward fulfilling one side of the agency's mission: providing recreational opportunities. The other part of the agency mission, however, is conservation, and that is not getting enough attention, they contend.
Las Vegas environmental activist Hermi Hiatt, who has studied plant populations in the Spring Mountains' Lee Canyon area, said the focus on recreation has affected the Mount Charleston blue butterfly, a rare subspecies threatened by loss of its habitat, the alpine meadows.
A California group recently filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to stop habitat destruction on Mount Charleston to protect the butterfly, which lives in only about 50 acres on the mountain. The butterfly habitat is mostly in and around the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort.
Hiatt believes that Forest Service planners are focused on the needs of recreational users.
"It's the planning people who have been running the show rather than resource people," Hiatt said. "That is a real problem."
The ski area, at the top of Lee Canyon on the northwest slopes of Mount Charleston, is one of the Spring Mountains' "biodiversity hotspots," she said. Hiatt said she was "specifically frustrated with the Lee Canyon ski area permitting" that allowed the resort to repair ski runs on butterfly habitat.
"Biologists are out of the loop of the resource assessment," Hiatt said. "That's the real problem. ... Recreation has a higher priority than conservation."
Representatives of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association rarely agree with environmentalists, but they share some concerns over the Forest Service's management of the Spring Mountains.
Julene Haworth, government relations specialist with the industry group, said one issue for the homebuilders is that the Forest Service and its federal partners, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, do not share information readily.
"It's been totally independent and information is not shared," she said. "That's been a huge problem."
As an example, the homebuilders point out that no one from any federal agency has informed them that there is a problem with the Mount Charleston butterfly.
Homebuilders and other developers pay $550 an acre to the county for habitat mitigation under the Clark County Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plan, a groundbreaking federal-local partnership that essentially allows development to go forward without individual permits from the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Without the agreement, developers would have to ask the service for a permit under the Endangered Species Act every time a new building would go up in the desert. The money gathered under the habitat plan is supposed to go to environmental mitigation, helping the 78 plants and animals targeted by the plan.
Haworth said, though, that instead of environmental mitigation, the money is going to federal salaries.
"We're subsidizing federal salaries," she said. "The focus should be on how to maintain a healthy habitat. If the habitat is healthy, the species will be there."
Irene Porter, the homebuilders association executive director, said the habitat plan's success is critical not just for the developers, but for the entire community. Without it, construction would grind to a halt.
"You collapse the economy of the Las Vegas Valley," Porter said.
Federal officials say the criticism fails to take into account work that the Forest Service is doing to protect habitat in the Spring Mountains. Tim Short, U.S. Forest Service district ranger, said people may not be aware of some of the agency's initiatives.
"There is a significant amount of resource conservation work that is being done by the Forest Service and by a number of partners," Short said. "Our goal is resource conservation, protection and sustaining the resources of the Spring Mountains."
Launce Rake can be reached at 259-4127 or at [email protected].
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