“Sen. Salazar is anxious to introduce this bill, however he awaits the county commissioner input. We need that,” Salazar spokesman Cody Wertz said. Allard’s spokesman Steve Wymer echoed the sentiment. This input follows lengthy public scoping and a 169-page report on it released by Mesa State College in November.
The county commissions have come close to backing the NCA, but are halted by concerns of a couple of Delta and Mesa commissioners over potential water rights, according to commissioners and the senators’ staff.
  
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Unlike some other parts of western Colorado, and much of the West, natural resources do not appear to be a major issue within the NCA and surrounding lands. Other than one gas lease, no natural resource claims or active leases have been filed to date, said Barb Sharrow, regional BLM land manager in Montrose.
What is more difficult to gain tri-county support for is the desire by conservationists and some ranchers to see more land protected adjacent to and outside the NCA boundaries. Adding to NCA boundaries does not appear to be a political option.
“It’s hard enough to get consensus from three commissioners in our county on the boundaries we’ve been scoping now for years,” said Delta County Commissioner Jan McCracken.
“Of course Congress can do anything it wants,” McCracken added. “As a commissioner, I feel I can only speak responsibly regarding land that has gone through a public scoping process.”
Salazar and Allard staff members made clear that they do not want any more controversy than that which is implicit in restricting the impacts of human activity on any public land in a relatively conservative state.
Conversely, Sens. Salazar and Allard could choose to add land to their bill if providing such protection to an expanded area seems to have relatively little opposition.
Roubideau Addition
The top short term conservation priority is the “Roubideau Addition” — the Roubideau-Potter-Monitor Canyon area, along with Monitor Mesa a few miles west-southwest of Olathe — a mix of 160 acres of private in-holdings and 22,604 acres within the BLM and Uncompahgre National Forest. Like the established proposed NCA, it is not sought after for minerals, oil or gas.
The BLM portion, known as Camelback Wilderness Study Area, was first designated in the 1980s, but was denied wilderness status by the BLM in 1991. At that time the agency’s regional manager was current Montrose Commissioner Allan Belt, who is the county liaison to the senators on NCA and land protection recommendations.
Since 1993, Upper Roubideau Forest Service land has been in an administrative “wilderness” state, including grazing, but roadless except for rancher maintenance “until Congress determines differently.” Conservationists want to see Salazar and Allard permanently establish wilderness or wilderness conditions on this forest land as part of their proposed legislation.
Roubideau advocates are less specific as to what they seek for the BLM Roubideau area. “A roadless area in the canyons, except for the minimal maintenance needed for grazing, and perhaps some kind of limited compromise for motorized vehicles on Mesa land, “suggested Delta resident Chad Kennard of Colorado Environmental Coalition (CEC), who is also a lifelong 4-wheeler.
Isolation
Jim Riddell, a member of Friends of Greater Dominguez in Montrose, said the three canyons constituting Roubideau are “remarkably isolated, while still being relatively close and therefore accessible to major population centers. It tends to cast a kind of spell on people. The canyons are 600-1,000 feet deep, range from 3/4 to 1 1/2 miles wide and from 10-25 miles long.”
The lands cover drastically different terrain with alpine meadows and old-growth forests at 9,000 feet and sage mesas at around 5,000 feet. In between are perennial streams in the canyons and occasionally on the mesas.
Riddell writes poetically of escaping the oven of the surrounding desert listening to “the crackling of mini-rockfalls as bighorn sheep scamper up a hillside; driftwood a hundred feet from a creek that just days earlier carried more water than the Uncompahgre River in spring flood; a rock with two indentations the diameter of baseballs where some ancient one ground her grain centuries or millennia ago.”
On a January morning in Potter Creek that began at 15 below zero, the isolation felt intense. There was crystalline silence, with only the sound of the creek, birds, and hiker’s boots. A small group walked along an ice covered creek through steep gorges surrounded by sage mesas and accessed through a small peaceful ranch. With a choice of three confluences to hike, Roubideau is the largest and deepest canyon, extending onto Forest Service land perhaps 4 miles from where the road ends. Potter was the easiest to access.
These canyons have been well documented for rock art, as has Dominguez Canyon, for petroglyphs that range from possibly 6,000 years old to more recent Ute period drawings. Spanish explorer Juan Rivera de Santa Fe scrawled his name in Roubideau in 1765 (see Patterson Sidebar).
Perhaps just as wondrous, Rancher Wanda Boyd has cattle grazing on Monitor Mesa above, and she also had family members who spent Christmas of 1886 carving the date into Roubideau Canyon’s walls.
Boyd is of two minds regarding legislation to protect the canyons and Monitor Mesa.
“We love that area and we’ve always tried to manage the creek riparian areas. It’s been our home and my husband and I have been there all our lives,” she said. “There’s a great deal of history and I would love to have the canyons, themselves, protected.”
Yet, she added, “The (Monitor) mesa top should be managed efficiently in a way to protect the land and our livelihood. This last fall we had lots of feed but no water and we need to have access to water for the future and roads for our cattle. People could still go out and enjoy the canyons.”
Boyd added a truism of Congressional action, “When bills go to legislation, things are changed and added, you think something specific is in a bill and it comes out different.”
Boyd summed up the biggest challenge of adding Roubideau to legislation: Ranchers want the BLM and Forest Service to ensure that they can make their living, presuming they are good stewards of the land under the law.
Staffers for Salazar and Allard feel this is not an insurmountable problem, whether within the NCA or if language is added to provide protection to Roubideau. Grazing is grandfathered into Wilderness and NCA legislation. Wymer points to the fact that three quite different post-1990 Colorado bills have had language addressing water rights.
Allard’s staff offered precedents of water language that protects traditional water rights in legislation protecting the Rio Grande Natural Area, Colorado Canyons NCA, and the Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness Act. They are all different, and one example is, “nothing in this Act shall affect any conditional or absolute water rights in the State of Colorado existing on the date of the enactment of this Act.”
Making such language ensure that water use for ranchers is limited to that needed for grazing only — and whether there should be an interim period of time to figure out how to address individual water needs — remains to be worked out.
Off-Road Vehicles
There appears to be little rancher opposition to halting excessive off-road vehicle traffic.
Keith Distel, a supporter of the Roubideau Addition, ranches on nearby California Mesa. His family has ranched in the area for generations, although his grazing allocations would not be impacted by legislation.
“Ranchers and farmers want to take care of the land because it feeds them and takes care of them,” Distel said. “Ranchers with in-holdings on public land discourage people coming in with motorized vehicles because they interfere with cattle, leave gates open and tear things up. To many of these people riding motorcycles and ORVs, every rock is the same to them and driving’s the challenge; they don’t have the stake in this land that we do. Wildlife needs to go somewhere and they should be left in peace in these canyons. This is back country.
“The county commissioners should make the effort to add Roubideau.”
Kurt Kunkel is employed by CEC to walk public land boundaries, and look at potential wilderness. “The type of protection we seek for Roubideau will halt off-road vehicles who will still have access, by default, to 80 percent of the public land in southwest Colorado. Off-roaders could look down at the beauty of the canyons from the mesas,” he said.
Another Montrose County Roubideau defender, rancher Jim Graziano added, “Ten years ago, I migrated from a small farm in the Rosemont area to ranch here because of the pressures of Front Range growth. Now that same pressure is here. I don’t know of any ranchers opposing the NCA or the Roubideau Addition, that is, presuming they can keep their livelihood.”
The BLM, the Forest Service and the County Commisioners
NCAs regulate BLM land only. The Roubideau addition includes both BLM and forest lands. A future area of concern to conservationists is Kelso Mesa in Mesa County on Forest Service land to the west of the NCA proposed boundaries.
The efforts to protect the Roubideau-Camelback issues are at least 25 years old. In 1983, the Forest Service was preparing its Forest Plan, which eventually led to the creation of the current “administrative wilderness” in 1993.
At around the same time, the BLM was doing a regional wilderness assessment as part of a national process and conservationists were advocating for the Camelback portion.
Belt concluded the wilderness study process for the Roubideau-Camelback by rejecting the area for wilderness in 1991 on the grounds that it met minimal wilderness criteria but “it wasn’t really wilderness. I felt that we’d had years of public input and it was the right decision for a land manager. The water and grazing issues arose many times”
However, he is now an elected official, and in a position to influence legislation on public land which, Belt enthusiasticallyagreed, is permanent.
“I will give you my educated guess that the Montrose board will go along with NCA designation as long as nothing comes out of left field. There is no total protection for land other than the Wilderness system and all NCAs are different reflecting the personalities of different lands and people.”
Belt added, “BLM administrative protections are made by land managers who generally stay about 6 years and then move up the career ladder (Belt stayed 18 years). A new person brings new belief systems, so real protection has to be legislative.
“I had the experience of negotiating the Gunnison Gorge NCA and negotiating myriad water and off-road issues. Personally, I have no opposition to protecting the Roubideau area but my personal fear is that adding it to legislation could make it a moving target for naysayers, such as ORV users, who will try and kill it. I think we could weaken the NCA designation by creating buffer areas that are unlikely to get the budget to be effectively managed.”
In other words, like McCracken, he feels that the existing NCA boundaries constitute a politically safer recommendation, however he might feel personally.
“I don’t have tools to reconsider wilderness designation for Camelback /Roubideau, but obviously Congress can and will do things other than the agency,” Sharrow said, regarding Roubideau.
“I do have tools to manage the area, for example we are right in the middle of a ‘travel plan’ addressing what roads will have what type of vehicle travel. We received incredible substantive alternative plans during public comment and we are in a three- to four-year process of establishing how to manage these lands.”
Riddell worries that two of these vehicle plans could actually increase traffic in Roubideau-Camelback and cites that concern as another reason for Congress to act now despite Sharrow’s claims that all alternatives should have minimal impact on the canyons.
“The Uncompahgre-Grand Mesa Forest Service position”, said spokeswoman Lee Ann Loupe, “is that we were involved in revising our Forest Plan for five years and are heavily involved with collaborating with the public interest groups. Forest Plans face reevaluation to see if they are working every 15-20 years. Then last March, the 9th Circuit Court threw it out as part of an overall challenge to (Bush Administration) guidelines to how the Forest Service is conducting its planning.
“Part of Roubideau Canyon was recommended as a special management area but not wilderness; wilderness comes from Congress only. The Kelso Mesa areas were recommended as backcountry primitive non-motorized use. We did recommend 125,000 acres of wilderness to be designated.”
Advocates for Roubideau Addition feel that Salazar and Allard should include the temporary wilderness upper Roubideau Forest land as well as BLM sections within the pending legislation because the land use pressure is immediate and the opposition minimal. They believe that, since those directly impacted by public land protection don’t object, it will be a good political as well as environmental decision.
Perhaps most importantly, Roubideau fans feel that, presuming the county commissioners of all three counties do support the existing NCA boundary, that they have no concrete reason to oppose adding Roubideau as an addition.
Belt and McCracken feel that addressing Roubideau could simply stall the process and that the fears over water brought up by at least two dissenting commissioners in Delta and Mesa County will be exacerbated by adding more land.
“I thought we were ready to sign a letter many times backing the NCA,” said McCracken, “and now, I won’t guess when the process will be over.”
Montrose Commissioner Bill Patterson defers to Belt as spokeperson but adds, “Personally, I haven’t really heard any constituent object to a Roubideau Addition, presuming you can work out the ranching issue. I think it would be great.”
And Belt added, “You wonder sometimes if more than water concerns keep holding up this NCA support process. I think that Colorado’s getting more educated on the value of protecting our public land, but it’s still the Old West out here and some people think of that as a private land ‘takings’ by the Federal government.”
For more information
Montrose County Commissioner Allan Belt
249-7755
Delta County Commissioner Jan McCracken 874-2100 ext 2111
Senator Ken Salazar: Western Slopes Regional Director Trudy Kareus 241-6631. Senator Wayne Allard: State Director Andy Merritt, 303-220-7414
Colorado Environmental Coalition: William Patterson (not Commissioner) (970) 249 1978; Chad Kennard (970) 243 0002
Friends of Greater Dominguez: Jim Riddell 240-8390
ORV Club (no comments to this article): Western Slope 4-Wheelers
(970) 240-9818.
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