Our Wash Green-Up Month was a HUGE success!

The Las Vegas Wash has about 3,000 new trees and plants along its banks, thanks entirely to the efforts of more than 250 volunteers from throughout the Las Vegas Valley.

The second annual Las Vegas Wash Green-Up volunteer planting was the finale of a month-long series of activities orchestrated by the multi-agency Las Vegas Wash Coordination Committee (LVWCC) to protect and manage the Las Vegas Wash. On the first Saturday outing, LVWCC members led volunteers in a successful effort to remove invasive plants from the Clark County Wetlands Park Nature Preserve, a developed wetlands area immediately southeast of Las Vegas. On the next Saturday, crews with heavy equipment dragged a dozen automobiles from their graves adjacent to the wash.

Las Vegas Wash Green-Up month is the latest effort in an ongoing program to stabilize and manage the Las Vegas Wash, which funnels virtually all of the 1,600-square-mile Las Vegas Valley's excess water into Lake Mead, the nation's largest manmade reservoir and the primary water supply for millions of people in Nevada, Arizona and Southern California.

Comprised of local, state and federal agencies, environmental organizations, business leaders and private citizens, the LVWCC was created in 1998 to develop and implement a long-term management plan for the 12-mile channel. In addition to reducing sediment deposits into Lake Mead and providing wildlife habitat, the wash's wetland vegetation helps polish water from the urban watershed as it flows into the lake.

According to Kim Zikmund, manager of the Las Vegas Wash Project Team, the massive tree planting was only one step in the LVWCC's plan to restore a waterway whose wetland vegetation has been eroded from 2,000 to less than 200 acres during the past two decades.

"To affect habitat restoration, you have to begin by bringing erosion under control," Zikmund said. "We are accomplishing that by constructing erosion control structures and by planting trees and shrubs, which serve as a kind of 'bio-armor' for the wash's banks. Once we succeed in stabilizing the channel, we can look at developing additional wetlands."