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Western Slope Wild land beckons people thirsting for adventure -- and those who want humans to leave it alone By Lisa Levitt Ryckman RANGELY -- The last great land battle in western Colorado turns on a crazy quilt of high desert, acres of gray-green sage and yellow rock inaccessible in the winter and uninhabitable in the summer.
Worthless. Or wilderness? Last summer, Susan Tixier found herself standing on a gnat-infested ridge 30 miles northwest of here, debating that point with a group in search of the true wild. They were looking at the same land, but she was the only one who saw a raw, strange beauty worth protecting. "People look at this and don't see canyon country, they don't see rock and ice," said Tixier, who heads the Colorado Environmental Coalition, which includes 56 conservation groups. "They see it's dusty and it's dirty and it's full of rattlesnakes. "And most people say that it would look a lot better with a tree on it." This is the land of the Bureau of Land Management -- the land nobody wanted, 8 million Colorado acres considered too homely to be a national park, monument or forest. "It's the land people don't realize Colorado has, but it's the most raw, most wild wilderness, because it's unfriendly," Tixier said. "It's somebody's ugly stepsister who's really not ugly. Just put a dress on her and clean her up, and she's more beautiful than any of the others." Mine it, graze it, extract oil and gas. Or let the land sit, unused, for decades. It's happened both ways.
Enter hunters, hikers, mountain bikers and four-wheelers. Today, so many people compete to use BLM lands that the issue of saving pieces as wilderness -- closed to all but the most primitive uses -- brings out the sagebrush rebel hidden inside some very reasonable Coloradans. "Everybody loves wilderness," said Catherine Robertson, the BLM's field manager in Grand Junction. "The question is, how much -- and where?" Not too much, and not in our backyard, some Western Slope counties might respond -- because these public lands are their backyard. About 75 percent of western Colorado is owned by the people of the United States and managed by the federal government. Most of it is 14 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land, including about 2.6 million acres designated as wilderness. The BLM, by contrast, has only 52,000 acres of wilderness, almost all of it in the Powderhorn area northeast of Lake City. That might change in the next century. U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette has introduced a BLM wilderness bill in Congress, one that mirrors the environmental coalition's 1.4 million-acre state recommendation in its "citizen's proposal." "They want to take down the sign that says, 'Land of Many Uses,' and put up a sign that says, 'No Trespassing,"' said U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, who represents the Western Slope. His opposition means a long, hard road for DeGette's bill, which would add nearly 1 million more acres than the BLM has recommended as wilderness. "I bet she's never set foot out here," said Cathy Hall, a commissioner in Mesa County. Ten areas covering 172,000 acres in and around Mesa County are being studied for possible designation as wilderness. Another 53,000 acres have just been added, much to the dismay of residents who want to subtract pieces from the wilderness equation. "We all want wilderness, we love the concept," Hall said. "But it has to be reality." The reality of much of northwestern Colorado is oil and natural gas. The town of Rangely receives more than $500,000 each year -- about 30 percent of its budget -- from oil and gas taxes and leases on federal land. Anything that hurts Chevron hurts the county. "I sometimes believe some of our radical environmentalists -- I use that term advisedly -- aren't so much after wilderness areas as they are after shutting down some industry," said Don Davis, a Rio Blanco County commissioner. When Congress passed the Wilderness Act 35 years ago, only the parks and forest services were required to look for wilderness: pristine, roadless areas with outstanding opportunities for solitude, "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." But in 1976, Congress told the BLM to inspect its own 25 million acres in 11 western states and make wilderness recommendations by 1991. Most Colorado lands were scrutinized in 1980, and the condition of the land has improved since then. Some roads have disappeared, and fewer scars have been left by human use. "If anything, it's better," said John Mehlhoff, BLM manager in Meeker. "It's not being trashed. I don't know if there's a perception that public land is a free-for-all. But we try to make sure it isn't." There already are 46 wilderness study areas in Colorado, expanses of land the BLM protects until Congress acts. So when the agency recently decided to look for wilderness qualities in six more areas, the idea went over like a cowpie on a bike trail. "Enough is enough," said Jim DeWitt, a Rangely gun shop owner who belongs to the White River Land Users, a group dedicated to recreation. "Let's not keep picking up a little bit of acreage here and there, locking people out instead of allowing use." Three of the six BLM areas qualified for further wilderness study; one of those, South Shale Ridge, includes 32,000 acres open to gas and oil leasing and 27 producing wells. Those can continue to operate while a decision about wilderness status is being made, but no new leases will be allowed. Pinyon Ridge, where Tixier found herself at odds with other members of a BLM field review team, merited another look: nearly 20,000 mostly roadless acres filled with dense stands of piñon and juniper, steep rock outcrops and rolling meadows, one of the last undeveloped areas along the lower White River. But it's no Rocky Mountain National Park. And the other members of Tixier's group -- the mayor of Rangely, a county commissioner and an oil industry representative -- had been there, seen that. "It is very typical country in regard to what you find when you get there," Mehlhoff said. "It's country they are used to because they live here. Nothing there struck them as being unique. I don't think they felt like they were in wilderness when they were there." In the end, Colorado BLM director Ann Morgan decided that scars left by people and cows disqualified Pinyon Ridge as wilderness, a decision that pleased Moffat and Rio Blanco counties as much as it peeved Tixier. But better than many other environmentalists, Tixier understands why wilderness feels like a threat to people on the Western Slope. She was a miner's daughter, born with a Geiger counter in her hand, who spent her childhood scrambling over Grand Junction's red rocks in search of uranium mines. She grew up thinking that mining and loving the land were the same thing, that she and her father shared a vision of the land and how to honor it. She was wrong. "His argument was, just leave us alone. Get the federal government out, they don't know what they're doing, but the mining industry does, the grazing industry does," Tixier said. "He would say that the people who use it are not going to destroy their own backyard. I know he really believed that." But no one -- not the federal government, nor the environmentalists, nor the people who lived near the public lands -- could have anticipated the greatest modern threat to that fragile desert landscape. Fun. Four-wheelers, mountain bikes, even horses. In 1997, 6.5 million visitor days were logged on BLM lands in Colorado, including 1 million for trail activities on bikes and horses and off-road vehicles. "It makes me crazy every time I see commercials on TV, those trucks ripping the daylights out of those beautiful vistas. We all know where those vistas are," the BLM's Robertson said. "It's the wrong message. But a lot of people are buying into that message." Bangs Canyon is a case in point. Just a quick drive south of Grand Junction, it is a mecca for bikers, hikers and off-roaders. Even on a Sunday with questionable weather, there are 20 vehicles in the parking lot. Bangs was one of the six areas re-examined for wilderness qualities, and 21,000 of its 140,000 acres will be looked at again this summer.
"In the old days, hardly anybody was out there. It's not like that any more," said Robertson, who cites the "Yahoo! factor" as contributing to major damage on public lands. "We're not the Park Service," BLM director Morgan said. "We don't have asphalt trails with rails around the overlook. Recreation has the potential to have a big negative impact on sensitive lands if we don't get people educated." One of the biggest conflicts: New West meets Old West, when off-roaders cross paths with longtime users of public lands, mainly ranchers and their cattle. Gates are left open, fences knocked down, animals harassed or even shot. "People need to understand that public land in the West plays a role in a rural lifestyle they like a lot," Robertson said. "They don't like to see private property subdivided, but then they get grumpy when they come across a cow." Use the land, but use it responsibly, or it won't last long: that's the message groups like the White River Land Users try to impress on their members. "There are off-roaders that are totally out of control and are concerned with nothing but their own fun, and they're destructive," DeWwitt said. "But I know a lot of people that are extremely cautious about the way they use the land. They don't go out and tear up a piece of land just because it's there to tear up. "It takes just a few knotheads out on public lands to make a bad name for everybody." But to environmentalists like Tixier, four-wheelers and the roads they come in on make preserving rare and wild desert a now-or-never proposition. "Recreation is one of the biggest threats to wilderness," she said. "And we're trying desperately to save these last remnants. As far as we're concerned, this is a last-ditch effort." March 28, 1999 Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society |
