Frenchman Mountain is seen from the Las Vegas Wash at the Clark County Wetlands Park in this Feb. 5, 2020, photo. Frenchman and nearby Sunrise mountains would become federal conservation areas if state and local lawmakers and friends of the eastside twin landmarks get their way.
Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Long fed up with the carpet of bottle shards, coats of spray paint and rotting heaps of trash that mar the bases of Frenchman and Sunrise mountains, lawmakers and friends of the eastside twin landmarks are pushing to get the mountains federal protections that could put them on par with Red Rock Canyon in conservation.
Champions of Frenchman and Sunrise mountains think they’re culturally and geologically just as worthy as their counterpart to the west. The expanse they hope to set aside includes the colorful Rainbow Gardens, where the black root of a 15 million-year-old volcano pokes through tilted red, white and green sedimentary layers. It also includes Gypsum Cave, which holds some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in the Western U.S. and is a sacred site to the Paiute people. Then there’s the exposed portion of the Great Unconformity, a meeting of the earth’s layers that stretches across North America mostly buried but sees the light of day here, allowing visitors to easily put their hands on a rare portal looking 1.2 billion years into the earth’s record.
“This is national-park-quality geology that screams out for interpretive signs and designated trails,” said Steve Rowland, a retired UNLV geology professor who has studied the peaks for decades.
The Nevada Legislature called Frenchman and Sunrise “natural treasures” in a recent resolution to forward to Congress, which has the power to add the lands to the National Park Service system. The Clark County Commission will consider a similar resolution at its meeting today.
Like Red Rock Canyon, Sunrise and Frenchman mountains are currently under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. Unlike Red Rock, they aren’t “national conservation areas,” a BLM designation in a system similar to the National Park Service’s structure. Without this higher status, they don’t have extra resources to patrol and protect the area from illegal dumping and other disrespectful and destructive activity that trashes the landscape.
Red Rock received national conservation area status in 1990, which gave it the funds to maintain what is now a world-renowned outdoor recreation destination.
“You go back 40, 50 years ago, people would dump old cars at Red Rock Canyon and use them for target practice... there were a lot of problems there until the federal government increased the protections for Red Rock Canyon and it’s become the treasure we have,” state Sen. James Ohrenschall, who sponsored the state resolution, said during a March meeting of the Senate Natural Resources Committee. “I believe the same potential exists … on the eastern side of our valley.”
Commissioner Tick Segerblom, who represents the east side, agrees. “This could be something comparable,” he said.
As its name reflects, Sunrise Mountain gets a halo at daybreak. Frenchman Mountain, about three miles to the south, has the Great Unconformity, a feature with a somewhat enigmatic name but a moniker not too dramatic for geologists like Rowland.
About 1.7 billion years ago, granite and schist from deep within the earth’s crust pushed up to the surface, he explained. As sea levels rose, sand and mud from the advancing ocean covered this exposed surface and sandstone formed, about 500,000 years ago. The “truly ancient” and the “relatively old” meet here, Rowland said.
In geologic terms, the surface of the granite and schist is an “unconformity.” This isn’t the only one on Earth but Rowland said it’s “great” because it represents such a long time interval — 1.2 billion years, which is more than one-quarter of the age of the Earth.
Most of it remains deeply buried. Some is visible deep within Grand Canyon. At Frenchman Mountain, it’s a short walk from Lake Mead Boulevard.
To celebrate this, the Citizens for Active Management of the Frenchman-Sunrise Area, of which Rowland is president, and some Boy Scouts crafted interpretive panels in the 1990s to install along a trail to explain the significance of the feature. But vandals just didn’t appreciate what geologists consider a stunning natural ledger of the earth’s history. After a few years of constant abuse, the markers were removed.
In a written pitch to protect the Frenchman area, Citizens for Active Management calls the current state of the land a “disgraceful blight” and an “embarrassment.” Beneath the litter and vandalism, though, is “an underappreciated, underutilized, fantastically scenic area.”
Geology professors from Las Vegas and around the world take their students to Frenchman Mountain and Rainbow Gardens, Rowland said. Beyond the Great Unconformity is visible rock from hundreds of millions of years before the time of dinosaurs to relatively recent times of no more than 66 million years back. The more contemporary rock, by the geologic time scale, is better preserved here than in Grand Canyon.
“There is no other place on Earth where so much of Earth history is so well-exposed and accessible,” Rowland said.
According to the National Park Service, a “national park” is the top designation under the extensive NPS structure, with diverse resources over a large area. Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Zion and Yosemite are examples of national parks.
One notch below a national park is a national monument, generally smaller and with fewer but still-significant attractions. The NPS also manages “national recreation areas” geared especially toward active use. Lake Mead is within a national recreation area.
Nevada had three sites added to the national monument list from 2014 to 2016. The closest of these to Las Vegas was Tule Springs Fossil Beds in the northwestern corner of the valley. The others were the remote Basin and Range, roughly 1,100 square miles of vast open spaces in mountains and valleys straddling Lincoln and Nye counties, and the rugged Gold Butte near Mesquite.
