Coyote Crossing

I’ve joined the Board of Directors of the Mojave National Preserve Conservancy, a “friends of” group whose mission is to “preserve, protect, and promote the unique natural beauty, ecological integrity, and rich cultural history” of the Preserve.

It’s a new organization — founded this year — and as such is running on a very lean budget. No paid staff, all labor volunteered. Membership donations received this far have covered the costs of printing promotional material and a few other ancillaries.

We need to grow. We have a lot of work to do.

The Mojave National Preserve, at 1,534,819 acres, is the third-largest unit of the National Park Service outside Alaska. In the lower 48, only Yellowstone and the Preserve’s neighbor Death Valley National Park. The Mojave National Preserve covers very nearly as much land as Yosemite and Joshua Tree national parks put together. And yet the Preserve’s budget, in FY 2007, was less than $6 million. That comes out to a little less than four bucks to manage each acre for a year.

That land is not exactly easy to manage. It includes 695,000 acres of designated wilderness, 783,000 acres of designated desert tortoise critical habitat, a threatened species (the tortoise) and an endangered species (The Mojave tui chub), 1,300 archaeological sites, 3,500 open mine shafts, and all of it seen by between five and six hundred thousand visitors a year. The Preserve’s staff has performed admirably given the magnitude of their tasks, but as hard and efficiently as they work, they can’t get everything done without help. Across the country, National Parks have long relied on non-profit partners to help them get their work done, expand their reach, educate visitors and potential visitors, and preserve the land. But though it has been around for 15 years, the Mojave National Preserve hasn’t had a non-profit partner to help it out, until now.

I’ll be putting together a newsletter for the Conservancy, and welcome your submissions of artwork, photos, essays and poetry, and anything else you may have been inspired to create by your visits to the Mojave National Preserve. We’ll also be looking for volunteers to help in various ways.

And of course, we need your membership! Joining costs a mere $25, and brings privileges such as

• an opportunity to participate in a hands-on mule deer study at Mojave National Preserve
• an exclusive spring wildflower walk with Preserve Superintendent Dennis Schramm, a botanist by training
• an invitation to a very special “star party” in April 2010, hosted by astronomers from NASA
• an opportunity to participate in “Photograph Mojave Day,” a community arts event hosted in the Mojave National Preserve

A life membership is $500.

As you tally your tax-deductible contributions for 2009, please consider making a generous donation to the Conservancy. It’d be great to meet Coyote Crossing readers at the Conservancy’s get-togethers. When you do join or donate, drop me a line to let me know.

3 comments on "Protecting the Mojave Preserve"

1 comment on "Prime Desert Woodland Reserve"

Borderlands, Continental Divide produced by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology from iLCP on Vimeo.

[Cut-n-pasted from the originating site:]

The International League of Conservation Photographers sent a team of world-renowned photographers, with writers, filmmakers and scientists to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico to document the wildlife, ecology, and effect of immigration and the border wall on this landscape. This region is a shared conservation treasure of international importance that harbors some of the most biodiverse landscapes on the continent. Many species here are found nowhere else in the US, and nowhere else in Mexico and some are found nowhere else on Earth.

Check out the BLOG  and follow the photographers along the border and visit our exhibit site and our partner sites with Sierra Club  and Art for Conservation  for more information on the wildlife and people of the borderlands. To support this project, purchase prints from our exhibit here .

If you’re in southern Arizona, you can check out the photos at a number of public exhibits. The Sky Island Alliance has a schedule.

2 comments on "Continental Divide"

We got a call last night from The Raven’s daughter to tell us her kitty Otter Pop was very sick. Shortly afterward she called us again.

He was strange and though he and Nosy didn’t really get along, he was a good boy. He tried sometimes to hide the fact that he was good: a little Napoleon Syndrome at play, I think. Every once in a while I had to pick him up and humiliate him with kisses and baby talk and making him dance. He tried awfully hard to pretend he was insulted. He had something to prove.

He was four years old. We’ll miss him.

11 comments on "Otter Pop"

She told me later she’d tried to climb and a piece came off in her hand. Not surprising: this is the loose, friable rock of the Ricardo Formation, lakebed sediments that accumulated from the Miocene through the Pleistocene. My map calls it “loosely consolidated” and it is indeed only loosely solid.

0 comments on "The Raven and Red Cliffs"

3 comments on "Red Rock Canyon Sunset"

Today, about 4:15 pm. One desert as seen from another.

0 comments on "Red Rock Canyon State Park"