“This decision closes down a major threat to Death Valley National Park and protects the desert tortoise, bighorn sheep and many other rare plants and wildlife that call the park home,” said Lisa Belenky, senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, who also worked on the case. “It means that counties can’t obstruct efforts to protect national parks and other natural areas by claiming as a highway every wash a jeep may have once driven down.” The mountains are located at the northern end of Death Valley near the California–Nevada border, about 80 miles southeast of Bishop, Calif. The Last Chance Mountains are a remote and scenic range that is home to cougars, deer, coyotes and badgers. “This is a great day for Death Valley National Park and the wildlife that call it home,” said Ted Zukoski, an attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm representing the conservation groups in the lawsuit. “The court’s ruling preserves the solitude and grandeur of this desert wilderness in the largest national park in the lower 48.” The ruling is a victory for conservation groups and the National Park Service who argued that the county’s evidence didn’t show the half-mile route was a public highway - the route showed no signs of construction, and only one person could remember having traveled the route in a vehicle before 1977. 2477.” Congress protected the Last Chance Mountains as wilderness and added the area to Death Valley National Park in 1994. Ishii ruled that Inyo County failed to prove that a little-travelled desert wash in the Last Chance Mountains at the north end of the park was a public county highway under a repealed, Civil War–era right-of-way law known as “R.S. Lisa Belenky, Center for Biological Diversity, (415)385-5694Ĭourt Ruling Protects Death Valley Wilderness From Road ClaimįRESNO, Calif.- A federal judge today threw out a suit by Inyo County, Calif., to open a highway through a remote roadless area of Death Valley National Park.