June 2009

Welcome to the Desert E-Newsletter of the California Wilderness Coalition! As the weather heats up, we’ll be looking for cool ways to keep our campaign going strong. Read on for fun and interesting ways to stay involved in our effort to protect our wild deserts.

In this edition, you’ll find:

• Letters (and art) make a difference
• Host a party for wilderness!
• Spotlight on proposed additions to the Indian Pass Wilderness

Mt. Whitney and the Sierra Nevada. Photo by Sam Roberts.

Letters (and art) make a difference

Many of you have responded to our repeated requests for letters of support to designate and protect new wilderness and wild and scenic rivers in the California desert. Each personal, unique, letter that we receive gets counted and sorted by our field staff and hand delivered to our congressional representatives. So far we’ve received thousands letters! These letters play a crucial role, demonstrate our community support and illustrate the importance of preserving our wild lands to our elected officials, so keep ‘em coming. A big THANK YOU to everyone who has written a letter (or three)!

If you haven’t yet had chance to write a letter encouraging our elected officials to protect our remaining wild deserts, it’s not too late! Every letter brings us a little closer to preserving our wild spaces in the desert.

Please take a moment and write your letter now. Click here for sample talking points to paste into your own letter. Feel free to personalize the letter to reflect your own reasons for supporting wilderness protection for our wild places. Please email us a copy for hand delivery to lwilliams@calwild.org

Some of our youngest activists in El Centro, California have made their voices heard with these paintings of desert landscapes complete with messages to their congressman on the back.

If these kids can do it, so can you! Click here for an editable letter.

Art created for Congressman Filner by Yuri Oh, an El Centro student in a community art class.

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Host a party for wilderness!

Do you enjoy sampling tasty foods while chatting with friends, neighbors, and new acquaintances about the issues facing our desert?

The CWC is looking for people in San Bernardino and Imperial Counties to volunteer their home for a desert wilderness party. Hosting people in your home for an afternoon or evening of socializing, food, drink, and campaign actions like letter-writing can be a wonderful way to have fun, network, and help the campaign. Events like these often bring in new supporters and grow the wilderness network in our desert communities.

If this sounds like an event you’d like to host, or to help organize, please contact us. We are currently planning events for July, August, and September.

A Palo Verde tree is sillouetted against the sunset in the Indian Pass proposed wilderness additions. Photo by John Dittli.

Spotlight on propsed additions to Indian Pass Wilderness

Located along the Colorado River and the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge in Imperial County, Indian Pass Wilderness and proposed additions are flanked by the Chocolate Mountain range to the west and include Quartz Peak, elevation 2,177 feet, the highest in this particular wilderness. Despite the overtones of chocolate brown, this landscape has been known to produce yellows, reds, and blues within its geologically rich soil.

Many desert creatures make their home among the cholla and beavertail cactuses, ocotillos, palo verdes, acacias, ironwood trees and the rare California ditaxis. Desert tortoise, Yuma king snakes, Colorado River toad, Great Plains toad, tree lizard, burros, mule deer, and mountain lions, and the endangered Gila woodpecker live amongst the rocky outcroppings and sandy washes.

Indian Pass is an important part of the traditional homeland of the Quechan tribe, and the wilderness and proposed additions contain ancient trails, intaglios, rock alignments, sleeping circles, lithic scatter, and other evidence of the tribe’s long history in the area. Many of these cultural sites are nearly invisible to the untrained eye but are still used today by members of the tribe.

Despite the protection of much of the area as wilderness in the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, many important areas adjacent to the wilderness were left out because they were in private ownership at the time. Today, these previously checker boarded lands have been purchased by private donors and gifted to the Bureau of Land Management for conservation. Although these lands are ready for conservation, without formal wilderness designation, they remain unprotected and are at risk of development and unauthorized OHV degradation.

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