The Nation's Backyard Is Now Bigger and Wilder

On March 30, President Obama signed into law a bill that designates 2 million acres of land as wilderness.

Wilderness designation is the highest level of environmental protection the U.S. federal government offers and it is permanent. This bill, which combined over 150 separate bills, took 35 years to become law, and it is the largest amount of land to be designated wilderness since 1994.

The national backyard is now bigger and wilder, but this new wilderness designation has special meaning for Colorado. An eighth of that new acreage is Rocky Mountain National Park (park announcement), which is now 95% wilderness, thanks to the "Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009".

Mark Twain predicted this designation's 35-year delay when he said, "Whiskey is for drinkin', water is for fightin'." The political alignment of Congress and the White House aside, arguments between federal negotiators and Colorado residents about water rights, irrigation ditch maintenance and liability, and wildfire control were part of what prevented these new protections for three decades. Funny that these locals, the very people who should care most about the land, prevented its protection for so long. "All politics is local."

Maintenance and liability for Grand Ditch were among the sore points. Japanese and Mexican workers begin digging the ditch by hand in the 1880s to carry water from west of the Continental Divide east through a mountain pass, to Long Draw Reservoir, into the Cache Le Poudre river, and down to the farms of Fort Collins and north east Colorado. The ditch wasn't completed until 1936. Some friends and I backpacked to the "Ditch Camp" site in northwest RMNP in 2005. The ditch is beneath us:


Where is all this new wilderness?

• California: 700,000 acres in the Sierra and San Gabriel mountains
• Idaho: 517,000 acres in the Canyonlands
• Michigan: 11,700 acres of Lake Superior shoreline
• Colorado: 250,000 acres covering 95% of Rocky Mountain National Park and expanding the Indian Peaks Wilderness
• Wyoming: 1.2 million acres of the "Wyoming Range" moose habitat (I suspect some of this acreage must be part of Colorado's acreage or else the acreage total exceeds 2 million.)
• Other states gaining wilderness: VA, WV, OR, NM, and UT

What does it mean?

All this new wilderness land is officially out of bounds for any activity that might permanently affect the habitat or landscape. This basically means no mining, drilling, logging, or motorized vehicles. Most of Colorado's new wilderness has been managed as wilderness since President Nixon first suggested that RMNP receive protection in the 1970s.

Other resources:

• Local supporters of the bill include Sen. Mark Udall, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Sen. Michael Bennett, Rep. Betsy Markey, former Sen. Wayne Allard, and former Rep. David Skaggs.
• Summary of the Act, as passed and signed into law, including which members of Congress voted for and against the act
• Summary of the full text of the Act
• Wilderness.net: facts and figures about U.S. wilderness