Red Rock gets vintage-poster treatment as part of BLM campaign

The beauty of Red Rock Canyon may be timeless, but a new poster commemorating the conservation area is straight out of the 1930s.

The Bureau of Land Management unveiled the limited edition, vintage-style poster in a ceremony at the Red Rock vistor center Friday morning.

The new poster depicts two mountain bikers cruising through the desert in front of the ribboned wall of cliffs that drew an estimate 2.4 million visitors to the valley’s western edge last year alone.

The design is similar in style to the classic National Park posters produced during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration and its Federal Arts Project.

The poster is part of wider campaign, launched on Earth Day 2014, to promote BLM’s National Landscape Conservation System, which takes in more than 30 million acres of specially designated monuments, trails, rivers, wilderness ares and other notable places.

“Red Rock Canyon is a great representation of an awe-inspiring landscape that belongs to all Americans,” Abbie Jossie, acting assistant director of the National Landscape Conservation System, said in a written statement about the unveiling.

Congress designated almost 200,000 acres in Red Rock Canyon as Nevada’s first National Conservation Area in 1990.

The new posters are free. “Anybody can have them until we run out,” said Rudy Evenson, spokesman for the BLM in Nevada.

Unfortunately, that may have already happened. A limited run of about 450 of the posters were made available at the Red Rock visitor center for Friday’s event.

Evenson said the BLM hopes to hand out many more of the posters when a full printing is done sometime down the road.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.