Growing wilder

Examining the James Peak Wilderness Area 50 years after the creation of the Wilderness Act

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Saving a piece of land from human activity actually requires a whole lot of human activity and cooperation. Years of it, really. In addition to those years of effort on the part of people, it takes a couple ingredients that also seem to be in short supply these days, not the least of which is a Congress capable of coming to bipartisan agreement. The Wilderness Act marks its 50th anniversary this year, and rings it in with successive legislative sessions that have designated the least amount of wilderness areas in the history of the act. During the last session in Congress, legislators approved the designation of 17,000 acres of wilderness across the country — about the size of the James Peak Wilderness Area.

Wilderness is the highest protection a piece of land can receive — it’s reserved for land largely unmarked by the presence of humans, and protects that land from ever seeing that mark, and can only be created by an act of Congress.

When the Wilderness Act itself was signed into law on Sept. 3, 1964, to protect places “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” as the act says, there were 54 wilderness areas that covered 9 million acres total over 13 states. Now, there are 758 wilderness areas, 109 million acres protected.

“In that passage of time, 50 years, a great deal has been accomplished, so a lot of people would say that’s incredible, that’s enough, but actually that’s only 2.78 percent of the contiguous United States,” says Alan Apt, wilderness chair for the Rocky Mountain State Chapter of the Sierra Club. “In every state, across the nation, there are lots of areas that need to be protected that are really unique.”

The benefits for humans, including clean air and clean water, are basically irreplaceable.

Each year, as millions of acres of land are drilled and mined, or even developed with roads, those areas are so impacted they can’t be designated as wilderness.

“There’s a practical side to wilderness and I think there’s a spiritual side,” says Bill Ikler, wilderness chair for the Indian Peaks Group with Sierra Club. “The practical side is that a lot of the areas that get set aside as wilderness are also protecting the watershed. By keeping motorized vehicles out of there, you keep the watershed as pristine as possible, and also wildlife habitat that might be more disturbed with motorized use. … As far as the spiritual side, I just think it’s great to have areas you can go where you don’t get cell phone reception and you don’t hear motors. So much of our life is impacted by the sound of motors and it’s great to have places where you can get away from that. And you can take the phrasing right out of the Wilderness Act, places that give you an opportunity for solitude or you don’t see the impact of man.”

Hiking through the James Peaks Wilderness Area in July, Ikler pauses to identify the wildflowers, to talk them over with his wife, author Kay Turnbaugh. He knows the side trails that lead off toward overlooked waterfalls and which sections offer good turns on skis in winter. Making the steep climb toward a high alpine lake, Turnbaugh jokes, “Did we really herringbone up all this?” 

The area has been their playground for years, and that fond familiarity was part of what drew him into the Sierra Club efforts in the campaign to see the area designated as wilderness, which began in 1994. That campaign rode out changes in the county commissioners — which included land from four counties, Boulder, Gilpin, Grand and Clear Creek — and in the local support critical to passing bills for proposed wilderness areas.

In its regular review of forests to craft a management plan that can cover matters like where roads, picnic areas and logging activity will go, the Roosevelt National Forest management plan had noted that the area was wilderness-quality land, according to Steve Smith who has worked with The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club. The James Peak area had few roads or structures and was ecologically unique. But inside the area was a large private inholding, some 4,000 acres owned by Henry Toll, of the family that founded the town of Tolland. When Toll gave up the land, it went to the Forest Service with a message that the family wanted to see the land designated as wilderness, which added momentum.

It wasn’t easy to build from there. Boulder would be the easiest group of constituents to get on board, but had the smallest share of the acreage dedicated. In Grand and Gilpin counties, which would see more of their land designated with wilderness protection — and subsequently barred from motorized uses and mountain biking — the reception was less welcome. Passing the act that created the James Peak Wilderness Area required some compromises and a lot of phone calls and emails.

Grand County had already seen chunks of its land go to other wilderness areas in the ’80s and ’90s, and the general sense was that area residents wanted to see the forests managed with the flexibility for use by snowmobilers and mountain bikers and harvest through logging.

“I don’t know that it was a big fundamental argument against wilderness,” says Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke. “Most people in Grand County are in favor of multiple-use forests.

The rumor mill also ran rampant with word that the wilderness area was going to shut down the road over Rollins Pass, but that was never the intention. The road did eventually close after a collapse in the Needles Eye Tunnel. Grand County Commissioner James Newberry says that road staying open was promised as a condition of Grand County getting on board with the proposed wilderness area. That the road has since been closed, which allows access to historic railroad infrastructure, including a set of trestles, has been a point of contention for Grand and Gilpin counties since then.

Gilpin County had also initially rejected the proposed James Peak Wilderness Area, then a key ally appeared: then Gilpin County Commissioner and self-described “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” Web Sill. He provided the kind of bipartisan support that seems tougher to secure now.

In the course of the eight-year discussions about creating the wilderness area, some of the compromises cut in to the acreage set aside.

“My opinion was, it’s better to get most of something than all of nothing, and I kind of approached things with that, and at some point you have to realize, at least in the James Peak wilderness situation, we weren’t going to get everything we had hoped for,” Ikler says. “But at that point, I think it’s safe to say that we were thrilled that the legislation did go through.”

That was in 2002, and the designation of these acres added on to create a corridor of protection that extended from the northern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, through the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area to end almost at Interstate 70.

The last session in Congress created the least amount of wilderness of any congress in half a century — in two years, nationwide, a few thousand more acres than is in the James Peak Wilderness Area were set aside.

“Congress in the last four years especially, but really the last six, hasn’t passed much of anything on any topic,” Smith says. “They take on some big topics when they’re really pressed in an emergency or when there’s a strong public support for them, but on more localized or state specific bills, they just haven’t passed bills on any topic — on social security, immigration, education funding, let alone public lands.”

Alternative designations like national monuments and conservation easements, which can have protections tailored to a specific area based on local interest, simply aren’t as clear and as strong as Wilderness Act designations.

Colorado Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet have had public hearings on some of the proposed wilderness areas in the state with the communities near those areas. Bills have even been introduced, including the Rocky Mountain Recreation and Wilderness Preservation Act announced by Rep. Jared Polis on Aug. 24, which would designate 40,000 acres of new wilderness and expansions to existing wilderness in the Eagles Nest and Holy Cross wildernesses.

Increasingly, those bills pass with concessions written in to them that entices a wider variety of people to get on board, Smith says. In some states, that’s become as extreme as approving a pipeline or authorizing a dam alongside a wilderness bill.

“Any time you can get wilderness for as much of the land that qualifies, that’s still the best practical protection,” Smith says.

One proposed wilderness area in Browns Canyon, on the Arkansas River near Salida and Buena Vista, has been studied as a potential wilderness area for 20 years. In that time, the size of wilderness area proposed has been reduced by at least a third because of objections from local stakeholders, leaving a critical 22,000 acres, Apt says.

“Just this past year we had a scare where a bunch of mining claims were filed,” he says. “There are tens of thousands of rafters right now that go through Browns Canyon and the rafting companies are very supportive [of the wilderness designation] because … they realize if you start putting a lot of industrial development in those canyons, that could destroy their economy, which is people coming to recreate in pristine areas.”

The Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, among other conservation organizations, have had people in the field surveying millions of acres of land before they’re leased for oil and gas drilling. Public land managers may take a proposed wilderness area into consideration with their day-to-day plans for land management, Smith says, meaning there’s still some benefit to essentially having the clock running on a proposed wilderness area.

“We’re fortunate to live in a state where there are still millions of acres that do have wilderness characteristics, and there have been thousands of citizens who’ve asked for that kind of protection all over the state, so we still have a huge amount of potential here, and a lot of the citizens who care and work on these proposals,” Apt says. “But we don’t have a united Congressional delegation.”

Some of the proposals furthest along are the Browns Canyon wilderness area and Hermosa Creek watershed in the San Juan National Forest near Durango, a 160,000-acre watershed that’s one of the largest roadless areas left in the state. Bennet has previously proposed protections for that area. If people want more wilderness, Apt says, they should pay attention at the ballot box.

“The term recreation, I think if you split it in two, it’s re-creation and I think it’s soul food,” Apt says. “Recreation, to me, in the wilderness is like getting a more fundamental understanding of who you are and what you are and where you fit into the scheme of things.”

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