DEATH VALLEY, Calif. -- This could be the year a congressional bill is introduced to give the Amargosa River the designation of a wild and scenic river, Brian Brown, a founding member of the Amargosa Conservancy, told attendees at the Devil's Hole Workshop here last week.

Conservancy members are advocating the designation for a 23-mile stretch of the river between Shoshone, Calif., and Dumont Dunes that would place it under strict control by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Brown said the conservancy already received a letter of support from the Inyo County Board of Supervisors and enlisted the support of a member of the San Bernardino County board at a meeting in Baker, Calif., recently.

Members of the California congressional delegation are being approached to possibly introduce the bill.

"This year, because of an election year and the political climate, they are looking over their shoulder a little bit, so it's a good year to be approaching them about a legislative bill," Brown said.

The plan is to introduce the wild and scenic rivers bill along with a proposal to designate the Hoover Wilderness Area high in the Sierra Nevadas near Sonora Pass and Bridgeport, Calif.

"It will basically mandate the BLM to protect the surface flow of the river," Brown said. "It will hopefully open up some funding channels for the BLM to begin establishing recreational trails and doing appropriate management on that section of the river."

In his annual presentation at the workshop at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, Brown said the Amargosa Conservancy has been busy leading tours from October through April and are removing invasive plant species like tamarisk and now the Sahara mustard which cropped up after a rainy winter.

The conservancy has selected four sites to monitor groundwater flows in the lower Amargosa River, Brown said.

"In the southern reaches of the Amargosa area in the Shoshone and the Tecopa region there is an enormous amount of water flowing out of the ground, just free-flowing streams, but there is very little data how much," Brown said.

Susan Sorrells, who founded the Amargosa Conservancy, said recently the idea would be to create a package for the wild-and-scenic designation.

From Shoshone to the Amargosa Canyon, the river is largely free-flowing and scenic. Amargosa Canyon would be designated wild and scenic as well as an area of critical environmental concern. Then, as the course of the river begins to bear west toward Death Valley, the Dumont Dunes would remain a recreation area, "and most of that is running water. It would give us more weight when we are discussing water. If it starts to dry up, then other things are going to dry up."

Most of the focus on water flows has been farther north in Amargosa Valley, using funding from oversight of the Yucca Mountain repository project, he told the collection of scientists, many of whom are involved in that program.

Brown said the conservancy was also instrumental in the forming of a bi-state, four-county regional forum, which will hold its first meeting in Sandy Valley June 25. The forum consists of two members each from San Bernardino and Inyo counties in California, along with Clark and Nye counties in Nevada.

The plan is for the forum members to meet three times each year.

In a letter urging the creation of the bi-state forum last August, conservancy Executive Director Tami Tripp-Massie said important issues in the area are not being regularly addressed. Brown said his congressman, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, lives miles away in the northern San Fernando Valley.

"We would like the focus to be on water," Brown said, conceding meetings will include other topics as well. "These counties have an interest in this area, but because it is an outlying area for all four of these counties, it's often just not on their radar screen."

Brown said two petitions to list endangered species native to the Amargosa River area were filed in the last year -- the Amargosa toad in the Beatty area, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard in the Dumont Dunes.

The Amargosa Conservancy hasn't taken an official position on the listing of the fringe-toed lizard, he said.

"The petition asks for a portion of the dunes to be closed off to preserve habitat for this. That could have profound impact because the Dumont sand dunes, if you're not familiar with it, is a very heavily used recreational area," Brown said.

The dunes can swell to what he called "an instant city" on some three-day weekends, with 30,000 off-road vehicle enthusiasts crammed into an area of between 8,000 and 9,000 acres.

"If you close off a portion of that, where are they going to go? Is it like a balloon? If you squish it over here, will the ORV population squish out somewhere else?" Brown asked.

Overall, Brown said he feared there would be a reactionary backlash to the conservancy as "these darn environmentalists," but the organization has been accepted well in the community.

"Most people who live in Pahrump are new arrivals. They don't know much about the desert, they don't know much about the history," Brown said.

While the area was heavily used for mining in the past, it's a fragile ecosystem, he said.

Part of the education campaign undertaken by the conservancy included hosting two busloads of students from the San Fernando Valley on field trips to see the Amargosa River. Brown said they camped out on the lawn in Shoshone and visited Amargosa Canyon just outside Tecopa.

He said they were sent home and urged to write letters to McKeon, supporting the wild and scenic rivers designation.