KVIG Informative

President Franklin D. Roosevelt set aside more than two million acres of Southern Nevada desert to save the region’s last desert bighorn sheep in 1936. Four years later, the War Department carved out more than a third of that land for bombing practice — land the Air Force is still using today, under a federal withdrawal that now runs until 2046.

Roosevelt created the Desert Game Range by Executive Order 7373 on May 20, 1936, setting aside 2.25 million acres of Southern Nevada desert to protect habitat for desert bighorn sheep and other wildlife, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The range is known today as the Desert National Wildlife Refuge and still protects the largest intact desert bighorn sheep habitat in the Mojave Desert, the agency states.

The War Department reserved about 846,000 acres of that range in October 1940 for use as an aerial bombing and gunnery range, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. That reservation became the core of what is now the Nevada Test and Training Range.

The city of Las Vegas bought a small private airfield northwest of downtown for $10 on Jan. 2, 1941, and the U.S. Army leased the property three days later, on Jan. 5, 1941, according to Nellis Air Force Base’s published history. The Army Air Forces dedicated the site that October as Las Vegas Army Air Field, home to a flexible gunnery school the service had surveyed the location for in 1940 because of its year-round flying weather and its proximity to the newly reserved range land, the base history states.

The gunnery school trained roughly 55,000 B-17 gunners and about 3,500 B-25 Mitchell gunners between 1942 and 1945, according to the base history. The field went into standby status in December 1946, reopened for advanced pilot training in January 1949, and was renamed Nellis Air Force Base on May 1, 1950, in honor of 1st Lt. William Nellis, a Nevada pilot killed during the Battle of the Bulge, the base history states. A 1949 memorandum of understanding set the terms for the Air Force’s continued use of the refuge’s overlapping range land, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Congress passed the Military Lands Withdrawal Act of 1999 to reauthorize the range land the Air Force had used since the war. Lawmakers revisited that withdrawal in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, Public Law 116-283, signed Jan. 1, 2021, according to the published law’s text. The Bureau of Land Management published the range’s formal legal land description in the Federal Register on Oct. 18, 2021, putting the total withdrawal at approximately 2,949,603 acres spanning Clark, Lincoln and Nye counties, with the renewed withdrawal running until Nov. 6, 2046, according to that notice.

The Desert National Wildlife Refuge itself has shrunk from Roosevelt’s original 2.25 million acres to about 1.6 million acres today, with the difference largely accounted for by the military withdrawal and other land transfers over the decades, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. More than 1.3 million acres of what remains has been managed as de facto wilderness since 1974, the agency states.

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The bighorn sheep Roosevelt tried to protect in 1936 and the gunnery students who started training four years later ended up sharing the same fenced-off desert, under the same two federal agencies, for nine decades running. The 2046 expiration date now on file with the Bureau of Land Management means the next renewal fight over that shared ground is still two decades off — and the herd will still be there when it comes.