A meditation on the ruining of Blue Diamond Hill
Nevada Public Radio | By Shannon Salter
On June 18, 2024, the Clark County Commission voted to accept a legal settlement under which the county will pay developer Jim Rhodes $80 million and allow him to develop 3,500 luxury homes on Blue Diamond Hill, overlooking the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. This avoids the county potentially paying Rhodes $2 billion, which would have meant financial ruin.
I sat on the left side of the county chamber room with other supporters of keeping Red Rock Canyon rural. I wore a red shirt I had just procured outside, in exchange for a donation, that said “Save Red Rock.” At the end of public comments, Commissioner Jim Gibson spoke about how the county didn’t want this development, that they had discouraged it for two decades, but, he said, now there was no other choice.
There’s always another choice. Blue Diamond Hill, where Rhodes owns and operates a lucrative gypsum mine, was zoned for rural development, meaning Rhodes could freely build one house every two acres. But he wanted it rezoned for denser suburban development. He wanted this because wealth begets greed in equal proportion, and Rhodes is very wealthy. Moreover, he wanted this because developers can’t stand to see land sit open like that. There’s something in the soul of capitalism that renders it incompatible with the open, and therefore with the wild and with wildness. This is capitalism’s greatest threat to the world and to the human being.
When the vote was over and the motion approved, all of the Save Red Rock supporters left, but I stayed. I just sat there, alone on the left side. The meeting wasn’t finished; commissioners had a few other items to move through. My staying made the room tense up. I probably looked somewhat strange because of my leather sandals, my airy summer pants, and the N95 mask covering my face. I suppose they thought I looked like a crazy person, someone educated and nonconformist and therefore probably mad. Maybe I was mad. In my peripheral vision, I saw one of several police officers in the room move to the end of my row. All of the commissioners glanced in my direction. What was I going to do?
Commission Chairman Tick Segerblom made a joke, that now they’d hear a presentation from Rhodes’ lawyers, and everyone had a little laugh. Because there was nothing left for the lawyers, for anyone, to say. The case was “settled.” The Save Red Rock people had performed the role of concerned citizens, while the commissioners performed the role of county officials, and Rhodes’ lawyers performed the role of representing both the bad guy’s presence and absence. Maybe this is what made the room uncomfortable when I stayed after the vote. At this point, I ceased to perform my designated role. That threw the whole thing out of whack.
When I finally left the hearing, I took Charleston Boulevard through Red Rock Canyon, and I went for a hike at First Creek Canyon Trail, something I hadn’t done in years. A family asked where there was more water. I told them this was a good place to see water, but it’s late in the season — the snow has melted and the waterways are becoming dry.
When I got to the little creek, the water was still and shallow. I bent down, and there were a gazillion black tadpoles — strange amphibious creatures! I thought of the fat frog I saw at night in our Pahrump yard, and the several I saw at Villa Anita in Tecopa, California, at the edge of Death Valley.
What are we to make of the impending development here? What should our reaction be? A filthy rich developer has the county hostage; but surely the county shouldn’t be forced to approve a high-density development on rural-zoned land just because there’s a precedent. That’s the whole point of a review process, and a vote.
After my hike at First Creek, I stopped at the gas station at the intersection with Blue Diamond Road.
I looked at Red Rock from the gas station parking lot, the big part, looming over Blue Diamond Hill. The canyon filled with light; it was one of those moments of heaven’s clarity. And in that moment I thought, these houses won’t get built. And in the next moment, I thought, all the houses everywhere get built, and in the end they all go away. Ashes to ashes.
Then I got back in my car and continued up Blue Diamond Road, along the southern edge of the canyon, up to the summit at Mountain Springs. I descended the mountain pass and kept driving to Tecopa Road, where I turned off to spend the night at Rabbit Camp. I was back in my old campground, where I once lived for nine months to bear witness to the destruction caused by the Yellow Pine Energy Project. Can you believe, one of the strands of solar fairy lights is still on after two-and-a-half years.
I made a fire. I crumpled a newspaper, one with a story about Rhodes, and I positioned the kindling as a little house around it. I read from a script the steps for a Druid circle ceremony, and I performed this alone while reading each part.
Child,
you dwell
in the house of the snake
you dwell in the house
of coyote
only the road long travelled
They say looking into a fire can heal you. But I didn’t need healing, not that night.
Just a few years ago, when I saw that Bonnie Springs Ranch was for sale, I knew I needed to take my nephew before it was all over. He was eight. We stayed in the motel, ate at the restaurant. I think he had a steak and me a cheeseburger, sitting beside that warm fire, the glow of the flames, the darkness of that restaurant, the wooden beams. We rode the little train, we watched the gunfight and the hanging, even. Can you imagine? A hanging. We rode the horses through Red Rock Canyon, and there is nothing like that anywhere on Earth. And now Bonnie Springs is gone. Sold to Joel Laub- — a board member at the Nature Conservancy — who is turning it into an elite 20-parcel residential development.
At the commission meeting, someone giving a public comment had the good sense to remind the commission that 40 years ago, the land that is now the Spring Mountain Ranch State Park, adjacent to the Red Rock Conservation Area, was up for sale, and a developer wanted to buy it, and everyone thought it was a done deal. But it was saved. Because there’s always another choice. The commission didn’t let it happen, and now it’s a state park, and Red Rock stayed rural all this time. Why can’t that be our precedent?
