Eddy Christensen, center, and volunteer Charlotte Comito talk Tuesday to a homeless man near Boulder Highway and Russell Road. A homeless census for Clark County continues today, benefiting from guides such as Christensen, who once were homeless themselves. Photos by Gary Thompson. During a census of the homeless Tuesday, Eddy Christensen checks out a homeless encampment near Boulder Highway. Christensen knows where to look for homeless encampments because he lived in such places until he got off the streets about a year ago.

To the untrained eye, the large swath of desert land near Boulder Highway and Russell Road is just that: a dusty, unused plot with a view of U.S. Highway 95, empty but for the occasional stray cat and abandoned sofa.

But to Eddy Christensen, a formerly homeless man who used to camp nearby, the area is alive with people, a big, hidden community living on the fringes.

"There's a little place down here," Christensen says, pointing in Tuesday's pre-dawn darkness toward a barely visible thicket 50 yards away.

Sure enough, a homeless encampment complete with a tent, couches and other belongings is hidden among the trees and brush. No one at the encampment is stirring yet, and Christensen is careful to be quiet.

He makes a single tally mark in a space marked "encampment" on a sheet of paper attached to his borrowed clipboard.

"Who knew?" said Charlotte Comito, a volunteer teamed with Christensen for the morning's tally, the first of two consecutive days devoted to the first large-scale count of Clark County's homeless population since early 2005.

It's Christensen's particular expertise, knowing "where homeless folks are," that count organizers had in mind when they recruited about 100 homeless or formerly homeless people to help, says Shannon West, regional homeless coordinator for the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Commission's Committee on Homelessness.

"They have the expertise on that," she said. "It's also giving them a chance to participate in the world they live in."

For Christensen, it's also an opportunity to earn some much-needed spending money. The "homeless guides" receive $20 for training and are paid $10 an hour for doing in-person counting.

"I've only got $4," the 33-year-old Christensen said as he led Comito toward another encampment, complete with a small shack constructed from plywood.

Tuesday morning's volunteer teams concentrated on outlying Clark County: Henderson, North Las Vegas, Searchlight, Overton. Today's early morning count focuses on urban Las Vegas. The volunteers, about 200 total, will descend on city streets starting at 2 a.m., peeking behind strip malls and trash bins, investigating empty lots, washes and underpasses. Each volunteer team is assigned a particular area to canvas.

Las Vegas police helped during Tuesday's count by providing two police helicopters to survey outlying areas.

Because of population growth and a shrinking pool of low-rent housing options, organizers expect to find a moderately larger number of homeless people than during their last count, which found about 13,000 homeless.

A report issued two weeks ago by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonpartisan advocacy group, ranked Nevada highest among U.S. states for its percentage of people who are homeless. Service providers estimate about 14,500 homeless people live in Southern Nevada. Official count results should be out in March.

The county's Committee on Homelessness uses the numbers when applying for federal grants and other aid to help the homeless. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development uses the census numbers to help determine the amount of aid it provides.

The winter tally is a point-in-time estimate of homelessness and includes shelter, hospital and jail numbers, people counted on the street and people identified through a telephone survey as living with others because they can't afford their own residences. Homeless "guides" will later return to the field to survey homeless people about demographics and shelter use.

The count is part of a $325,000 contract with Applied Survey Research, a California-based nonprofit social research firm that has completed similar counts in Los Angeles and Atlanta. The contract also includes a second, summertime count and a panhandling study to gauge how much money people give to panhandlers and how many are actually homeless. A date has not been set for the study.

Christensen, who was homeless for years but got off the street about a year ago with help from the Straight from the Streets homeless outreach program, identified five encampments during his Tuesday morning search.

He and Comito also came across an abandoned camp next to Central Christian Church that was about to be bulldozed by a waiting construction crew. Several tractors were lined up, and one of the workers said they were waiting for Henderson police to arrive to make sure nobody was still living in the brush.

"It looks like they moved out," Christensen said. "About 15 people lived here."

"It's a little bizarre they chose this morning (during the homeless count) to bulldoze," Comito said.

Later, West said she has been "working that encampment" since November.

"There was a lot of vandalism," she said. "It was a tough place. The church needed to clean up."

West said intervention teams were dispatched to the camp to tell those living there they needed to move out.

The teams encouraged campers to enter transitional programs or go to local shelters. They offered to help the homeless move into housing, she said.

"We haven't seen anyone in that encampment for weeks."

After sunrise, an old man was stirring at another camp near a Boulder Highway trailer park. The man, who remembered Christensen from his homeless days, said six people, including one woman, are staying at the camp. Some were sleeping in a camper shell. Others constructed a makeshift fort out of crates and blankets.

"Look at this man," the old man said while appraising Christensen's clean clothes and clipboard. "He's a straight man."