Monday, Feb. 20, 2017 | 2 a.m.
The story begins almost 250 million years ago, with the ocean and geology and gypsum. It starts with the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area under an ancient sea
Monday, Feb. 20, 2017 | 2 a.m.
The story begins almost 250 million years ago, with the ocean and geology and gypsum. It starts with the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area under an ancient sea, at a time when what is now Utah marked the continent’s coastal boundary.
Movements in Earth’s crust eventually pushed the land up, and when water dried in pocketed lakebeds, it left salt and sometimes gypsum.
Millions of years later, humans found the soft sulfate useful to make wallboard, plaster of paris and classroom chalk, and it is still excavated down the road from Red Rock, following a history of mining activity in the region. But opportunities for commercial activity have diminished since the 1960s, when Congress began withdrawing land for public use to protect an area that drew hikers, bikers and climbers to its rust-toned Calico Hills.
Make your voice heard
Attend the County Commission meeting at 9 a.m. Feb. 22 in Commission Chambers. Proponents or opponents can give public comments, which are not submitted in the official record. The meetings are streamed online.
Much of that protected landscape became the Red Rock Canyon NCA. About 2 million people visit each year, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the public resource. Its most prominent sight might be the escarpment, an orange face of Aztec sandstone with bands of peach and reddish-brown. The layers are an inverted geologic map of Nevada, the result of a thrust fault that pushed older rocks — some from the ancient ocean — above the more recently formed strata of rusted red.
“We don’t have Lake Tahoe. We have Red Rock,” said U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas. “And now you’re putting 5,000 houses up there?”
Titus’ rhetorical question cuts to an issue Clark County has been grappling with for years and is expected to consider at a meeting on Wednesday: whether to approve the plan for a master-planned community of 5,025 homes near Red Rock.
It follows mudslinging from all sides since October, when county planners unanimously recommended denial of the project.
Ahead of the vote, the county is caught between what it sees as two litigious parties and fending off accusations that it is favoring the rights of a well-connected developer over conservation of public lands. It also finds itself inside a maelstrom of precedent in a conflict that dates to 2002. Some commissioners are bracing for the issue to be taken to court, no matter their decision on Feb. 22.
Behind all the legal and political wrangling is a common Western tension, pitting commercial development against a band of conservationists prepared to stop at nothing.
‘FIGHT EVERY STEP OF 