WHO WE ARE
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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.
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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.
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Carin Agiman is a designer based in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California. She has a deep love for the desert and environmental conservation, and visits Avi Kwa Ame National Monument as often as she can.
FRIENDS OF AVI KWA AME NATIONAL MONUMENT BOARD OF DIRECTORS
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ilene is an avid hiker and resident of Searchlight. She moved to the area from Northern California where she was a volunteer hike leader for the California State Parks and currently leads many of our hikes within Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
FRIENDS OF AVI KWA AME NATIONAL MONUMENT ADVISORS COUNCIL
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ashley Hemmers is an enrolled member of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and the Tribal Administrator for her Nation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jeffrey Wedding has 30 years of experience in archaeological and historical research in the western United States (including Nevada, California, Utah, and Arizona). His current focus is on archaeological sites associated with World War II military training exercises and Cold War era research facilities in the desert regions of southwestern California, southern Nevada, and western Arizona. Other areas of interest include the historical archaeology of mining, transportation (particularly aviation and railroading), and ranching in the West during the 19th and early 20th Century. Although principally an historical archaeologist, Jeff also has considerable experience recording, excavating, and interpreting prehistoric archaeological sites in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert regions.
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David Stenn is the author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, edited by Jacqueline Onassis and still in print. As a passionate advocate of film preservation, he has saved and restored all of Clara Bow’s surviving films among many others. His television writing-producing credits span from Hill Street Blues to Boardwalk Empire, while his documentary film Girl 27 (now streaming free on YouTube) chronicles his discovery of Hollywood’s best-suppressed scandal.
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Dr. Julian Kilker is associate professor of emerging media at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and is a founding board member of the Friends of Basin and Range National Monument. His work focuses on the intersection of visual media, social issues, and innovation. In conjunction with his scholarly work, he has exhibited photography documenting Mojave Desert locations in Switzerland, Nevada, California, and Washington, DC.
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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.
