FRIENDS OF AVI KWA AME NATIONAL MONUMENT MISSION STATEMENT
PURPOSE: The Friends of Avi Kwa Ame help ensure protection of the ecological, cultural, historic, and recreational resources of the Monument area through community engagement, advocacy, interpretive & educational programming, support of academic research, site stewardship, and restoration efforts.
VISION: We envision the Monument being co-stewarded by the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and affiliated tribes as an integrated and interconnected landscape with adjacent protected areas in a way that can best respond to climate change, engage the local communities, and provide for responsible recreation use.
YEAR IN REVIEW
YEAR IN REVIEW
It’s been over a year since we started Friends of Avi Kwa Ame, and we are excited to share some of the amazing accomplishments we have achieved with the support of over 100 founding members, our amazing board of directors, volunteer staff and over 200 volunteers. Check out our first Year in Review for a summary of our successful restoration and conservation efforts, scientific research and educational outreach projects.
FRIENDS OF AVI KWA AME NATIONAL MONUMENT BOARD OF DIRECTORS
-
Ron began volunteering at Walking Box Ranch in May 2018. He served as an assistant tour guide with BLM and helped with maintenance of the grounds. The history of the ranch and its connection to the motion picture industry and early Hollywood is of particular interest to Ron, whose late father had acted in movies and become acquainted with several silent era film actors through his service as a “good will ambassador,” volunteer and photographer at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Country Home and Hospital in Calabasas, California.
Ron is now the president of Friends of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, which encompasses Walking Box Ranch, and he also serves as president of the Board of Directors of Friends of Sloan Canyon.
Prior to retiring from his practice and moving to Henderson, Nevada in 2017, Ron was a trial lawyer for 40 years in California.
-
Alan O’Neill’s career in conservation has spanned over 56 years, including 34 years with the Department of Interior and National Park Service, 10 years as founder and Executive Director of the Outside Las Vegas Foundation (now rebranded as Get Outdoors Nevada), 2 years as Director of Content for ePark Guide, and 10 years as an advisor and consultant to the National Parks Conservation Association, assisting them with their Nevada work. He presently serves on the Board of Directors for the Friends of Sloan Canyon and Friends of Avi Kwa Ame and on the Regional Open Space Trails Workgroup. O’Neill’s last assignment with the National Park Service was as Superintendent of Lake Mead National Recreation Area where he served in that role for 13 years.
During his tenure at Lake Mead, he was also tasked with serving as the National Park Service coordinator for implementation of the California Desert Protection Act, first Superintendent of the Mohave National Preserve, and international work in Israel and Jordan to explore new park opportunities. During his tenure with the National Park Service, O’Neill engaged in numerous initiatives and campaigns that helped lead to protecting key resources around the country, areas such as the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Kentucky and Tennessee, Little Miami Wild and Scenic River in Ohio, Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, and the California Desert Protection Act, the largest piece of conservation legislation ever passed by Congress. Here in Nevada, O’Neill played a key role in the establishment of the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument and the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. He also helped formulate the concept and the legislation creating the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act and engaged in most of the Nevada Public Lands legislative initiatives passed by Congress, including getting 9 wilderness areas established within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. O’Neill has had a long history of involvement with trails in Southern Nevada and helped established the Regional Open Space & Trails Workgroup and the Regional Open Space and Trails System and its expansion, now branded as Neon to Nature.
O’Neill is the recipient of numerous awards from federal, state, and local governments and nonprofit organizations for innovative program development and leadership and as a tireless advocate for conservation and sound stewardship. Among his awards, he received the Department of the Interior’s acclaimed Meritorious Service Award for career accomplishments, Vice President Al Gore’s Hammer Award for reinventing government, Nevada’s Battle Born Progress Legacy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Nevada Conservation League’s Harry Reid Lifetime Achievement Award.
-
Judy is a former Director of Friends of Walking Box Ranch. She has lived in Southern Nevada since 1962 and has enjoyed recreating on the beautiful desert lands for many years. She was a founding member of the UNLV Natural Science Scholarship Association and helped plan and participate in nature trips throughout the region for 40 years.
She and her husband own a home and property near Searchlight and have long been enamored by the land that now comprises the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
-
Kim Garrison Means is an artist, naturalist, and third generation Searchlight resident. She is the director of the Searchlight Mystery Ranch art and ecology research station, co-curator of the Spirit of the Land arts exhibitions, and was a community organizer during the Avi Kwa Ame monument campaign. Specializing in environment-themed art projects for communities, Kim also teaches college art classes and facilitates research in the monument area for biologists, writers, artists and historians. Along with her collaborator, Steve Radosevich, she is co-editor-in-chief of the Gold Beam, the first publication dedicated to celebrating the land, history and communities of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
-
Paula Jacoby-Garrett has a long history with the area that encompasses Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. In 2007, she began working with the Walking Box Ranch project. As part of her duties, she helped secure oral histories with key individuals, historic photographs and artifacts for collection and promote the site to the public through tours and outreach. Today as an educator and public lands advocate, she continues to promote the vast benefits of these lands to the community and works to spread awareness to others.
-
Kassidy Whetstone is a public historian and born and trained in Southern Nevada. She specializes in collections work with research interests in Southern Nevada, western, and environmental history. She also serves as a historical consultant for research projects documenting the rich history of Southern Nevada and the Mojave region. She has been active in UNLV’s interpretation and stewardship of Walking Box Ranch collection materials since 2019.
-
Nattaly Jeter, CPA, has more than twenty years of experience as an accountant. She has worked with both privately and publicly-owned international entities. She has a strong technical background in both U.S. GAAP and IFRS performing audit and conversion services for various private and publicly-listed entities under both U.S. GAAP and IFRS. She is responsible for the production of Global IFRS and sustainability publications and responds to technical queries received at the Global level. She has also authored and instructed numerous IFRS trainings courses at a global and U.S. national level.
She and her husband reside in Searchlight. She enjoys the many benefits of residing within the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument and participating in preserving the lands of Southern Nevada and the Mojave region.
-
Originally from Boston, Ellen Ross relocated to Las Vegas in 1975 to pursue a career as a professional dancer in the "Lido de Paris" at the Stardust Hotel. She has been a licensed realtor in Nevada for over 45 years and a contributing writer for a local online magazine. Ellen is also a Master Gardener, a Nevada Naturalist, and a certified Colorado River kayak guide who has hiked, kayaked, snow-shoed, and rock-scrambled over nearly every inch of Southern Nevada, as well as parts of Arizona and Utah.
Ellen has a deep passion for the Mojave Desert and enjoys sharing that enthusiasm with newcomers and long-time residents alike, especially when they see things they would never have believed could be found in the "desert".
-
Kevin spent his working life as an engineer and lived in a variety of places stretching from Maine to Hawaii. Upon his retirement in 2018, Kevin and his wife Carolyn moved to Las Vegas. While Kevin had long enjoyed a variety of outdoor activities, the desert environment was a new one for him and one that continues to fascinate him.
Kevin enjoys learning about the cultural heritage, geology, hydrology, and biology of this area. Kevin is also a board member for the Friends of Sloan Canyon and the Las Vegas Okinawan Club.
-
Cat Johnson has been volunteering with organizations across the country since 2010. She is a painter, designer, and performing artist captivated by personal adventures, diversity and the common thread that binds us. For the last decade, she has pursued projects and volunteer work that explore elements of culture, spirituality, and sociology to celebrate our diverse and beautiful universe.
FRIENDS OF AVI KWA AME NATIONAL MONUMENT ADVISORS COUNCIL
-
Bertha Gutierrez (she/her) is the Conservation Lands Foundation's Nevada-based Program Director. Bertha has worked in non-profits for over 15 years and specifically in outdoor stewardship and advocacy for the last seven, supporting community-led conservation organizations and campaigns through her work at CLF, including the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument campaign. Originally from El Salvador, Bertha knows hoe important connecting to land and nature is for an individual and the community, and works for everyone to have safe access to experience nature in their own ways. Bertha is an artist and tía to her 16 niblings.
-
Dr. Todd Esque's work focuses on understanding how organisms, habitats, and ecosystem processes respond to environmental change, how organisms interact to effect change, and how human-induced changes compare to the natural range of variation in arid systems.
Representative studies include: projects to determine how desert tortoises, Mojave ground squirrels, golden eagles, long-lived plants, and biodiversity will respond to climate change and energy development in a rapidly changing landscape; vegetation change from fires across a 30-year chronosequence in Sonoran desert tortoise habitat; identifying habitat and health relationships for the desert tortoise, and developing a vegetation restoration program for the Mojave Desert.
Dr. Esque's projects are collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature and he is active in academic research as well as applied problems for public entities in the Department of Interior (Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), Department of Defense, State and local governments, and private entities.
-
Alex Harper is a bird biologist, ecologist, and interpretive naturalist based in Las Vegas. He moved to the region in 2015 to assist in monitoring bird populations on renewable energy sites to help land managers and developers to make informed decisions possible. Alex has participated in field studies of birds and their habitats in eight western states, specializing in deserts, wetlands, and forests.
-
Neal Desai is the Senior Program Director for the National Parks Conservation Association’s Pacific region.
He has worked on and led numerous campaigns to protect, expand, and create national parks. Those campaigns include the protection of Drakes Estero within Point Reyes National Seashore as the first marine wilderness on the West Coast.
-
Dr. Andy Kirk is a professor of environmental, western and public history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Director of the Reid Public History Institute. His research, teaching and fieldwork focus on the intersections of cultural and environmental history with a special interest in the hybrid landscapes of the American Southwest. In public history, he specializes in collaborative transdisciplinary research partnerships linking historic preservation and environmental history.
-
Dr. Michael Webber is a biology professor at the College of Southern Nevada, specializing in Herpetology, Scorpiology and Field Biology. Dr. Webber loves talking about desert and enjoys public speaking and making scientific research accessible and understandable to a general “non-science” audience.
-
Dr. Deirdre Clemente is a historian and curator of 20th-century material culture with a specialization in American fashion. In her role as the Associate Director of the Reid Public History Institute at UNLV, Clemente has supervised dozens of graduate students in the interpretation and preservation of the Ranch.
-
Aaron Mayes is a photographer who documents Southern Nevada, its built and natural environments, and the people who call it home. He is currently the curator for visual materials at UNLV Libraries.
A fifth-generation Nevadan, Mayes’ work has been seen in many national and international publications and in local media outlets.
-
An outdoorsman since before birth, Jim retired with a Ph.D. in Ecology and a passion for conservation issues. His main activities these days involve sharing knowledge of the desert environment, encouraging responsible outdoor recreation, and clearing Nevada of abandoned mining claim markers that trap and kill birds and other creatures.
-
Checko Salgado is a photographer, teacher and conservationist. He has exhibited his work and collaborated on projects at the intersection of art and land conservation, including co-curating the Spirit of the Land exhibition, part of the awareness campaign to designate Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
Becoming a National Monument
-
![]()
NPCA Holds Forums
May and June, 2013
The National Parks Conservation Association holds two forums at Walking Box Ranch to discuss how the landscape between Mojave National Preserve and Lake Mead National Recreation Area may be better known, treasured and preserved.
-
![]()
The First Monument Map is Created
April 2019
Following years of uncertainty and various proposals to use the land for large-scale energy projects (opposed by the community, local tribes and conservationists), Alan O’Neill worked with the Conservation Lands Foundation, the Friends of Nevada Wilderness and the Fort Mojave tribe to develop the first monument map.
-
![]()
Fort Mojave Tribal Council Adopts Resolution
September 2019
The Tribal Council for the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, caretaker of Avi Kwa Ame on behalf of the Yuman tribes, adopts a resolution supporting and endorsing the creation of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
-
![]()
Representative Titus Introduces Bill
February 17, 2022
Representative Dina Titus of Nevada’s First Congressional District introduced H.R. 6751, the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument Establishment Act of 2022.
-
![]()
Congresswoman Lee Visits Avi Kwa Ame
April 24, 2021
Prior to joining the call for Avi Kwa Ame’s designation, Congresswoman Susie Lee meets with Fort Mojave tribal leaders in Grapevine Canyon.
-
![]()
Spirit of the Land Art Exhibition
March 25, 2022
Spirit of the Land opens at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at UNLV.
-
![]()
Community Postcard Campaign
Spring & Fall 2022
Postcards are mailed to local and national representatives featuring images of Avi Kwa Ame submitted by members of the community.
-
![]()
Secretary Haaland Visits
September 7, 2022
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland visits public lands in southern Nevada to meet with Tribal and local community leaders.
-
![]()
President Biden Makes Proclamation
March 21, 2023
President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. issues the proclamation establishing the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
-
![Celebration at Avi Resort]()
Celebrations Take Place
April 2023
Multiple celebrations take place as the community rejoices in the designation of the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
