Hundreds of tons of garbage has been hauled out of Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument in Nevada this year/NPCA

So much junk and trash has been hauled out of Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument that Superintendent Jon Burpee came up with a unique way of tracking it.

Noting that a male adult mammoth that walked this landscape near Las Vegas during the Late Pleistocene age about 12,000 years ago weighed roughly 20,000 pounds, the superintendent said last week that, "We’ve removed 37.5 'mammoth weight' of trash from the park this year.”

The trash has come in many forms: dumped appliances, furniture, construction debris, broken up concrete. In all, through mid-November, roughly 358 tons, or 716,000 pounds, of garbage and junk had been hauled out of Tule Springs, said Superintendent Burpee.

“It kind of shows that there’s a lot of passion behind treating the place well now," he said during a phone call. 

Though it's been almost two years since Congress created the national monument by attaching to a defense appropriations bill an amendment transferring the landscape from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to the National Park Service, that was the easy part in adding Tule Springs to the National Park System. The hard work - ramping up staffing, creating visitor facilities, and, frankly, getting the unit ready for visitors to explore - is ongoing. 

Most recently, the National Park Service announced a plan to build a roughly 7-mile-long fence to keep off-road vehicle enthusiasts and target shooters out of the northern end of the not-quite-23,000-acre monument both to protect the fossil-rich landscape and to allow volunteers to safely remove more junk - furniture, TVs, appliances - that has been dumped there for target practice.

Visitors have to be determined to visit the unit. There is no parking area, no visitor center, and no facilities.

"Right now, to access the park, people can park on nearby public roads in the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, and they can enter the monument on foot," the park's website states.

Horseback riding is allowed in the park - "Please ride with caution. Fossils can crumble under the weight of a horse's hoof." - as is hiking, though Tule Springs is only open to visitors during daylight hours, so there's no camping allowed.