BLM Volunteer

The Bureau of Land Management is assisted by volunteers.

External Resources

• Mike Bilbo, "Volunteers Add Presence On the Black Rock,", 1998.
• "Profiles of BLM's 2001 "Making A Difference", National Volunteer Award Winners. The Black Rock Desert Volunteers won an award in 2001. The website states: "A combined core group of 24 individual volunteers and representatives from seven volunteer and user groups, the Black Rock Desert Volunteers protect and enhance northwestern Nevada's Black Rock Desert, America's largest playa (dry lake bed). Among their innumerable contributions, the Volunteers help to educate visitors about the area's diverse natural, cultural, and recreational resources; operate visitor contact stations; and participate in resource management activities such as visitor-use data collection, wilderness boundary marking and monitoring, and GPS mapping of permitted events and their potential impacts. They also have contributed to land use planning efforts and environmental impact statements, assisted with volunteer training, and instructed "Leave No Trace" and "Tread Lightly!" ethics and techniques at large events such as the annual Burning Man arts festival. And getting their hands dirty is all in a day's work for these volunteers, too: in one day in 1997, for example, some of the Black Rock Desert Volunteers cleaned up an illegal dump on the western playa edge, piling up—by hand—nine tons of wood and 16 tons of metal, including 26 miles of barbed wire."