Over the weekend, SUWA’s Service Program organized a Wilderness Stewardship Training in Salt Lake City. Forty trainees attended the Saturday session, twenty-four of whom then took part in a training hike on Sunday to practice their monitoring skills on a portion of Stansbury Island (Great Salt Lake) that’s proposed for wilderness protection under America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act. Volunteers committed a total of 429 hours of their time over two days.

Born of a partnership with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Washington County, SUWA’s recently-expanded Stewardship Training recruits individuals to monitor for impacts to wilderness-quality public lands during their time hiking and exploring Utah’s great outdoors. Stewards report back to SUWA with photo-tagged geospatial data and written reports assessing on-the-ground conditions. The training equips Stewards with the tools, technology, and training to perform these monitoring tasks while fostering a growing, hands-on stewardship community in Utah. Cumulatively, the Stewards’ work informs SUWA’s approach to proposing and executing service work on public lands across the state.

Our SLC-based initiative was co-sponsored by the BLM state office, who provided staff to present on the need for volunteers and public partnerships on Utah’s public lands. Future trainings will engage agency field offices across the state in the effort to collect and provide data to better manage Utah’s many and diverse wilderness lands.