Saturday, March 7, 2015, was the open house for the new Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge visitor center, located in Nye County, Nevada, near the California/Nevada State Line. There are no paved roads in the Refuge, so a high clearance vehicle is recommended when visiting this area.
The new Visitor Center contains a variety of exhibits, an entertainment center with a movie about the Refuge, and a small gift shop. Crystal Springs is located behind the visitor center and is reached by a series of interconnected boardwalks that form a 0.9 mile loop trail.
Water from the spring is considered to be "fossil water" because it entered the ground thousands of years ago and is just now being forced to the earth's surface. Once water leaves the spring, it flows along a small stream until it reaches Chrystal Reservoir, several miles away. The Refuge has constructed boardwalks that follow the stream for a short distance before returning to the visitor center. There are viewing areas along the boardwalks where small pupfish can be observed darting in-and-out of the moss that forms in the spring and along the stream banks. There are also many trees that line the stream banks and a number of the trees contain large clusters of mistletoe, which will eventually kill the tree.
Longstreet Spring and Cabin and Rogers Spring are located a few miles north of the visitor center, but well worth the extra drive. Near the parking lot there is a large chalky white rock that some people say looks like a poodle's head. You decide!
Following the boardwalk a short distance from the parking lot brings you to Jack Longstreet's cabin. Jack was a prospector, gunman, and horse breeder that lived near the spring from 1894 to 1899. Jack had a number of notches carved in his pistol grips and he would often tell people that there was only one notch that he regretted.
Rogers Spring is just a short distance up the road from Longstreet Spring, but there are no improvements at Rogers Spring.
(Longstreet Spring)
(Rogers Spring)
Native Americans lived in this area for hundreds of years and grew corn, beans, and squash by irrigating their fields from the many springs. By following the boardwalks at Point of Rocks, it is possible to view holes in the rocks that the Native Americans used for grinding their crops. We also noted a number of Nevada Side-Blotched Lizards while we were following the boardwalks.
People typically associate Death Valley National Park with California, but Devils Hole, a detached unit of the Park, is located on the north side of Ash Meadows in Nevada. To protect the dwindling number of pupfish, the site was added to Death Valley National Monument in 1952 because it was the nearest Federal facility.
In 1984, the Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge was established to protect the 26 species of endemic plants and animals that are found around the springs, including three other endangered fish (two of them pupfish) and seven threatened plants. The Refuge now encompasses over 23,000 acres of spring-fed wetlands and alkaline desert uplands.
Devils Hole contains the only naturally occurring population of the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). The pupfish are isolated in a water-filled cavern (Devils Hole) that has a constant temperature of 92 degrees Fahrenheit and the cavern is known to be over 500 feet deep; however, the pupfish stay within the top 100 feet of the water-filled cavern. The pupfish count varies from season-to-season; but on the day we visited the site, the pupfish count was 103.
The Park Service has now constructed a viewing bridge over the Hole so that visitors can look down on the site.
From Devils Hole it is possible to leave the Refuge and continue north and east along the west side of the Spring Mountains until you arrive at State Route 160, which connects to US Highway 95, and then back to Las Vegas.
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