Nevada Dan: Calico Weekend with Friends of Nevada Wilderness

Panorama of the desert with South Donnelly Peak

Last weekend I got to go explore the Calico Mountains a little bit on a volunteer trip with Renee and the Friends of Nevada Wilderness. The purpose of the trip was to replace rusted out metal wildlife water troughs with a new rubber water trough made out of a repurposed tractor tire. We drove out from Reno on Friday afternoon. One of the major benefits of going on a volunteer trip was that I didn't have to drive, and, since the road to the worksite was bad, we went in a rented truck, of which I had the entire comfortable backseat to myself. It was pure luxury.

Mormon Dan Peak from Soldier Meadows Road

Cool cabin on our way to the work site.

Desert at Dusk

We stopped in Gerlach and picked up sack lunches and then continued driving north, eventually along Soldier Meadows Road. Past a looming rock mountain called Mormon Dan Peak we turned and drove up into the mountains on a wilderness access road, so it was the Calico Mountains Wilderness on both sides of the road. The Calicos are the mountain range that lines the western edge of the western arm of the Black Rock. I had never been in them before and, even though I should have known, I was still amazed by how beautiful they are. They seem (and this could be because it is spring), much more lush and well watered than I expected. The road passed a nice little cabin/camp that was private property but that had water and shade trees. Then we climbed higher, eventually arriving at the worksite at Buck Springs just about at sunset. Renee's agency partners, a BLM representative and the new stewardship coordinator for the Friends of the Black Rock were already there with their camps set up. We set up our camp quickly before the light was totally gone from the desert below us and settled in.

Camp on our first evening

Morning light on our first morning there

The only drawback to the whole weekend was that the place was crawling with ticks. Within a few moments of being their the BLM guy found one crawling on him, and all of use (there were 8 of us total) eventually found them crawling on us, although none really got deeply embedded that I heard about while we were there. Still, it made for a little bit of uncomfortable camping. The camp/work site intself was amazingly beautiful, lined by hills adorned with cliffs on all sides, one of which the very colorful volunteer Lou (short for Lucrecia, a Chilean woman who, at sixty-six years old, worked and hiked with us all weekend and then was talking about going on a five-mile hike on the afternoon after we got back to Reno) dubbed Buddha Rock, which eventually led to me renaming the spring Buddha Spring, a much better name in my opinion!

Putting in the new water trough.

The new water trough starting to fill

Working hard

Putting in posts to close an old road in the wilderness area.

Putting our initials in the fresh concrete. Notice my DM.

My project before and after pictures. It would have looked nicer if I had a few more tools. :-)

The next morning we got started working early. As I had experience, I was set to fixing the barbed wire fence around the spring enclosure while the rest of the group worked on installing the water trough. The work went really smoothly and, even though it was supposed to be a full day project, we finished it up by around one o'clock. Which left us the whole afternoon to explore. Minus the BLM guy, who had some monitoring to do, we all decided to hike up the mountains and try to reach Donnelly Peak (the highest peak in the Calico Mountains, and a really visible peak especially from the High Rock area). We didn't quite make it to peak, but we had a great hike among the rock faces and gardens of the mountains. There was also an abundance of wildflowers (especially, for some reason, tons of yellow paintbrushes). Aside from the beautiful views of the mountains, we climbed high enough to get views of the Granite Range to the southwest and amazing views of the playa below us on the east, the Black Rock Range, and the Jackson Mountains, especially King Lear Peak.

We all pitched in to make dinner that night when we got back to camp, but were exhausted so pretty much went to bed. The next morning we just packed up camp and started back to Reno. All together, an amazing trip and I was really glad to finally get to go with Renee on one of her volunteer trips—especially to a place I'd never been and that more than lived up to anything I could have expected!