THE COMPASS WILL EXPAND TO PROVIDE ALL PEOPLE PLACES OF HOPE AND HEALING
COMMUNITY SITES
If you've begun to imagine The Compass — its framework with Cardinal Trails, Compass Points, and Compass Center — consider its expansion to achieve the following:
1) Designating outdoor places of hope and healing in urban, suburban, and rural settings that inspire awareness and appreciation of the diversity of the humans we call community and the desert habitats that we call home
2) Ensuring that some Compass Points are accessible to those with short- and/or long-term disabilities, illnesses, or injuries and to those whose socioeconomic vulnerability may not allow the time or transportation to easily visit a mountain or foothill Compass Point
3) Creating Compass Points in multiple locations to allow for the rest or restoration of trails to ensure the long-term sustainability of desert habitat and its inhabitants
4) Visiting Compass Points in places that recognize Southern Nevada for its aims and achievements in community building, e.g., education, arts, health, environmental sustainability, habitat protection, and the like
5) Developing Compass Points that promote different desert habitats, species, and wellbeing focuses, e.g., a Compass Point reflecting gratitude, reconciliation, etc.
They were part of a grand conversation, a relationship of reciprocity and respect, connecting them with all other beings and elements of life. - Victoria Loorz
Healthy Humans
Studies have found that urban residents who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.
Expanding The Compass framework to include urban, suburban and rural locations can promote getting outdoors as a soul nourishing, stress relieving opportunity.
Healthy Habitats
Habitat protection, preservation, and restoration is essential in protecting biodiversity. It ensures that the protected species have places to live that can support them. Importantly, saving one habitat or species can have a cascading effect.
By designating trails and centering points for human activity, The Compass can encourage compassionate decisions to remain on open trails to allow hurting habitats needed restoration time.
Healthy Economy
Commitments to trails and outdoor amenities make communities more attractive places to live. Investing in trails is beneficial for big cities seeking workforce to rural town ripe for revitalization.
Trails boost economic activity ranging from trail development to creating business opportunities and traffic for outdoor stores, restaurants, and potentially hotels, bed and breakfasts, and the like.
MAKING MEANING OF OUR DESERT STORIES.
MY WAY. MY WHY.
In imagining The Compass, I revisited my story as a lifelong "desert rat." I recalled tagging along with my dad, a land surveyor, as he mapped the deserts that continually called to him. We traipsed across scorching hot earth in Searchlight, NV and across a plot of dirt on Paradise Road that would become home to the Hilton Hotel. When I was five years old, our family toured the new hotel — and were treated to Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches — at a grand opening celebration. I also recall my mom loading a cooler, my four siblings, and me into our Country Squire station wagon and heading to Mt. Charleston, a haven that reminded her — an Oregonian — of home. It was a place for her to unwind as we ran amuck learning that trees, like ice cream, could be Neapolitan. (Jeffries pines smell like strawberries and Ponderosas exude the essence of vanilla).
I also took time to reflect on the less romantic stories of my desert home. My oldest brother, for instance, spent a number of years lost to us on the streets of Las Vegas after suffering a string of hardships that included a traumatic brain injury resulting from a head on car collision. The Compass can compassionately recognize people like my brother by locating Compass Points in places that the vulnerable can seek rest, respite, and renewal. Such places might become a place to recognize the dignity of — and stand in solidarity with — "the least among us." These spots might also serve as places to reunite with loved ones.