SILVERTON – Southwest Colorado residents are pushing — again — to protect 61,000 acres in the San Juan Mountains as wilderness, and are waiting on Congress after making the case that wilderness is essential for economic growth.
They’ve been campaigning since 1999 to keep high-elevation land near towering Mount Sneffels, the merciless crags of the Lizard Head and fragile forests as wild as possible forever.
Other Coloradans, in Summit and Eagle counties, are pushing — again — to protect 40,000 acres as wilderness along the Continental Divide. And a coalition of hikers, river riders, hunters and others in Gunnison County is developing a proposal to preserve tens of thousands of acres there.
Nearby in Utah, residents have urged lawmakers to create a 9.2 million-acre red-rock canyonlands wilderness. These Rocky Mountain region requests add to the pending Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness bill that would designate 1.5 million acres as wilderness in Alaska.
Population growth and the development boom in the West are propelling the efforts to establish wilderness protection while it’s still possible. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials found, in a 2013 survey, that 70 percent of Coloradans consider wilderness or undeveloped open lands offering solitude very important or extremely important. And 72 percent ranked protection of more land as wilderness as “high-priority” or “essential” — an even higher proportion of residents than the high percentages favoring more forest campgrounds, community trails, urban greenways and parks.
But Congress consistently has failed to deliver on most wilderness proposals.
“We need to set aside land and protect it as much as we can,” said San Juan County Commissioner Scott Fetchenhier, who went to Washington recently as part of a delegation of elected officials.
The locals extolled “economic values” of preserving nature — fellow San Juan County Commissioner Ernie Kuhlman has said that, with the demise of mining, wilderness that enables recreation is Colorado’s new gold.
“Tons of people use it,” Fetchenhier said.
The latest San Juan Mountains Wilderness proposal would protect land adjacent to existing wilderness and also add tracts of last-remaining undisturbed tundra and icy lakes in San Miguel, San Juan and Ouray counties.
Fetchenhier and San Miguel County Commissioner Hilary Cooper met with U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner. They’d made their initial pitch in letters sent last year. Their congressman, Republican Rep. Scott Tipton, wasn’t able to attend a scheduled meeting in Washington.
Cooper pointed to a petition signed by 120 business owners who, along with Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, strongly support new wilderness. “I’m hopeful it’ll happen soon,” Cooper said. “We need wilderness protection like this for the economic benefits, for recreation, and for the ecological benefits of wildlife habitat protection.”
Bennet backs the San Juan Mountains Wilderness Act and is working to re-introduce a bill in Congress with bipartisan support. Gardner told Fetchenhier and Cooper he was interested. Gardner couldn’t be reached this week to confirm this, and staffers declined to comment on his position. Tipton also could not be reached for comment.
The 1964 Wilderness Act made it the policy of Congress to secure parcels 5,000 acres and larger “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” land that retains “primeval character” with no permanent roads or commercial activity where managers ensure “natural conditions … affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.” The act envisioned human use of the wilderness seeking “solitude, or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”
Congress has since 1964 protected 109 million acres in 765 parcels as wilderness nationwide.
While Colorado holds the most fragile high-elevation terrain with 58 mountains exceeding 14,000 feet in elevation, the state ranks sixth among states for total wilderness with about 3.7 million acres, or about 3 percent.
During the past decade, as Colorado’s population grew at nearly twice the national rate and commercial and residential development took off, Congress set aside relatively little new wilderness.
In 2009, Congress designated 249,339 acres in Rocky Mountain National Park as wilderness and created the 66,280-acre Dominguez Canyon Wilderness near Grand Junction. In 2015, Congress created the 37,236-acre Hermosa Creek Wilderness near Durango.
“We’re not keeping pace. The fact that some of these wilderness bills have been out there for 10 years is obvious evidence of that,” said Scott Miller, regional director of the Wilderness Society advocacy group. “We want Congress to move these bills.”
“Congress is having a hard time doing anything for the American people,” Miller said. “But Coloradans, and the American people in general, really are standing up asking that land be protected.”
