Off-road race didn’t run through Nevada monument after all

A creek runs in Coal Valley on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, in what is now the Basin and Range National Monument. (Jeff Scheid/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @jlscheid)

Rock formations is seen Wednesday, May 20, 2015, along the Wrong Way Canyon road in the White River Narrows area now in the Basin and Range National Monument, about 130 miles north of Las Vegas. (Jeff Scheid/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @jlscheid)

The Vegas-to-Reno Best in the Desert Race was rerouted after an HH-60G Pave Hawk from Nellis Air Force Base went down during a training mission. (U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Brian Ferguson)

RENO — Concerns about a controversial off-road race running through a new national monument in Nevada turned out to be much ado about nothing.

The Vegas-to-Reno Best in the Desert Race didn’t end up crossing into the new Basin and Range National Monument on Aug. 19 as was planned and approved by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over the objections of conservationists.

The 37-mile segment on existing dirt roads through the monument northeast of Las Vegas was rerouted because a military helicopter crashed and sparked a wildfire nearby the night before.

The participants raced the first 50 miles from near Alamo to Pit Stop 1 at the border of the national monument. There, they packed up vehicles into trailers and transported them 70 miles around the monument to Pit Stop 2 on the road where it came out of the monument and unloaded the vehicles. Then then resumed racing with timed-interval starts.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a suburban Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog group representing past and present federal workers, had argued unsuccessfully for months that the two-day, 640-mile race dubbed the longest of its kind in the nation would cause ecological damage to the fragile desert lands in the monument President Barack Obama designated in summer 2015 stretching across more than 1,000 square miles.

“Kind of a weird ending,” Jeff Ruch, the group’s executive director, said Thursday. “Nobody is explicitly saying anything, but the race through the monument never happened.”

BLM spokesman Chris Hanefeld confirmed Thursday agency officials informed race organizers hours before the start they had decided to reroute the course so the Air Force could secure the crash site. He said the detour was selected from alternatives studied as part of an environmental assessment conducted before approving the original route a week before the start.

The Air Force said in a statement the day after the helicopter crash that four crew members were treated for non-life threatening injuries after the HH-60G Pave Hawk from Nellis Air Force Base went down during a night training mission on the Nevada Test and Training Range near the monument.