Experience Conglomerate Mesa with Board Member John Louth. Conglomerate Mesa is a unique roadless landscape under review for exploration by a large mining company. Friends of the Inyo continues to challenge mining in this area after rising development interest in 2008. Rich History Waves of colonization by Europeans brought the first mining conflicts in this area. You will see their signature in charcoal flakes made from pinyon pine carried to ore processors at Cerro Gordo. The same forest provide local tribes with pine nut harvesting sites and hunting grounds. Today Friends of the Inyo advocates for the continued protection of the…
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Death Valley National Park needs citizen science volunteers to help with annual monitoring of endemic plant species at the Eureka Dunes! Surveys will take place April 16-19 and April 23-26. Monitoring will be strenuous, requiring climbing to the tops of tall dunes and hiking up to five miles each day. Volunteers are encouraged to commit to an entire four-day monitoring period if possible. Volunteers will camp with park staff at the Eureka Dunes Campground—bring your own water! Space is limited: two volunteers are needed for the April 16 survey and six volunteers are needed for the April 23 survey. Email…
Death Valley National Park needs citizen science volunteers to help with annual monitoring of endemic plant species at the Eureka Dunes! Surveys will take place April 16-19 and April 23-26. Monitoring will be strenuous, requiring climbing to the tops of tall dunes and hiking up to five miles each day. Volunteers are encouraged to commit to an entire four-day monitoring period if possible. Volunteers will camp with park staff at the Eureka Dunes Campground—bring your own water! Space is limited: two volunteers are needed for the April 16 survey and six volunteers are needed for the April 23 survey. Email…
The West Mojave Route Network Project (WEMO) Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement and draft Land Use Plan Amendment was released on March 16, 2018. The plan aims to manage dispersed recreation visitation over an extensive area in the Mojave Desert. In the Eastern Sierra this includes BLM lands near Olancha, Keeler, Darwin and Owens Lake. The draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement evaluates routes in the planning area and proposes a comprehensive route network that attempts to balance access with the protection of sensitive resources. Unfortunately, the new draft plan falls short- designating a spaghetti network of 6,300 miles of OHV…
Friends of the Inyo is using a 360-degree camera to show our wild backyard in a whole new way. Google for Nonprofits donated rental of this new type of camera, and I ran to the field to test it with an enthusiastic office dog. Google’s donation allows us to create and share scenes of our favorite places and events on their Google Maps platform. Friends of the Inyo also retains full ownership of the images. To test the camera unit we set out walking to one of my favorite quirky locations near Bishop. The unit resembles an upside-down walking stick…
Flash Foxy Clean up! The third annual Flash Foxy Women’s Climbing Festival stewardship event was an incredible success. One hundred and thirty-five women volunteered their time to pick up hundreds of pounds of trash, protect native plant seedlings, remove an old fence, and clean up campsites in the Buttermilk and the Volcanic Tablelands. Graffiti on Buttermilk Boulders One of the highlights of the day was a graffiti removal project led by our friends at the Bay Area Climbers Coalition and Touchstone Climbing. Volunteers decked out in stylish Tyvek suits used paintbrushes to apply a product called Elephant Snot (!) to…