Thriving Boulder City bighorn replenish other herds

Bighorn sheep once roamed nearly every mountain range in Nevada. Their decline began in the mid-1800s, as settlers and prospectors swept into the state, mostly in the north. By 1960, unregulated hunting, habitat loss and disease spread by domestic livestock had reduced Nevada’s bighorn population to about 1,200 animals in a handful of ranges, none of them north of Ely or west of Hawthorne. Wildlife officials launched the Bighorn Sheep Release Program in 1967 to return the official state animal to its former glory.