Project Frontier

About

Spanning 300,000 acres across northern Nevada, the historic Virginia Range is home to approximately 3,000 wild horses. These beautiful horses are native to Nevada and have become an integral part of our state’s identity. However, this population continues to grow without a large-scale, long-term plan to ensure the mustangs’ safety and well-being.

While support has been provided by volunteer organizations such as the American Wild Horse Campaign (AWHC) and state institutions such as the Nevada Department of Agriculture (NDA), for which we are profoundly grateful, these initiatives are often reactive in that they occur after* incidents are reported on the range. Unfortunately, in between support efforts, the wild horses remain at risk of injury, death, and relocation as they continue to roam free across the Virginia Range.

Project Frontier aims to bridge this support gap. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by Blockchains to manage and protect, year-round, the thousands of wild horses that roam throughout Blockchains’ land in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, known as Innovation Park. In supporting these mustangs, we are also promoting public safety and preserving the rangeland ecosystem.

Project Frontier

What We Do

Project Frontier has begun several key initiatives to proactively protect the area’s mustangs:

  • A fertility control program to manage population size. We have established a formal partnership with AWHC to administer a humane immunocontraceptive vaccine called PZP to mares throughout Innovation Park. Controlling the population helps prevent mustang removals and preserve the rangeland’s natural resources.
  • Development of multiple water sources throughout the range, especially within the highly trafficked areas of Innovation Park, to prevent horse dehydration and death. USA Parkway pond, where several hundred mustangs have obtained water for the past decade, is being removed for construction in the area. Reliable watering stations need to be built nearby so that the wild horses can continue to access water to survive. Project Frontier is actively securing water tanks to establish new water sources away from construction.
  • Diversionary feeding (with support from the NDA). Because USA Parkway pond is being removed, several hundred mustangs will need to be “retrained” to safely obtain water elsewhere.
  • Public safety efforts (with support from the Nevada Department of Transportation, Nevada Highway Patrol, and the Storey County Sheriff’s Office). We are coordinating the installation of horse-crossing and dynamic speed feedback signs, as well as rumble strips and variable message boards, to properly warn motorists of the range’s mustangs. Additionally, we are working to improve speed limit enforcement throughout the industrial center.
  • Educational programming to raise public awareness of the range’s mustang population, recruit volunteers, and further engage the northern Nevada community about the wild horse issue.

Special Thanks to Our Donors

See Our Volunteers in Action