It takes a four-hour horseback ride to get to Jeff Mead’s favorite hunting grounds below Mamm Peak near Rifle, so the outfitter was understandably dismayed when a gas-exploration company built a road last year right through the remote part of the White River National Forest.
“I’ve lost a lot of clients,” Mead said. “Nobody wants to hunt where they’re building roads and putting in gas rigs.”
When EnCana built the road – one that the company subsequently decided not to use, at least for the time being – Mead unwittingly found himself in the middle of a 30-year-old national debate over what kind of protections should be afforded to U.S. Forest Service roadless areas.
“This affects everybody in this state, not just the hunters,” he said. “This is about whether we protect these lands or not.”
In Colorado, which claims about 4.4 million acres of roadless areas in national forests, a statewide task force has wrapped up eight months of public hearings and will begin crafting a recommendation to Gov. Bill Owens and the federal government about how to manage land prized for both its natural state and its resource and recreation potential.
Allied on one side – arguing to protect as much roadless terrain as possible – are environmental groups, hunters and anglers, backcountry hikers and campers, numerous governments and even a group of Aspen real estate agents.
Aligned on the other – seeking no special protection for roadless areas or at least giving the Forest Service the ability to make local decisions based on demand – are users of all-terrain vehicles, utilities, timber interests and the oil-and-gas industry.
The state’s ski industry supports cleaning up roadless maps to exclude about 8,000 acres within ski area boundaries.
“This was a real hard challenge,” said task force chairman Russell George, the executive director of the state Department of Natural Resources. “Will we find the final answer? Of course not. But no one else has, either. … I do think we’ll move the ball a little bit. We’ll just do our best.”
The latest feud flared in 2001, when President Clinton enacted a rule that would preclude any road building or development on 58 million acres of identified roadless areas.
Even as the broad Clinton rule was immediately challenged in court, the rule was overturned by the Bush administration in favor of a new procedure calling for individual states to file petitions to the federal government that would suggest which roadless areas should be preserved.
Each state has taken a different approach.
The governors of three East Coast states, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, already have submitted petitions asking for the restoration of the protections afforded in the 2001 rule. Governors of other states have until Nov. 13 to make roadless-preservation requests. Otherwise, it will be left to the Forest Service to determine the best plans.
The Colorado task force held packed hearings in communities near each of the state’s national forests.
“I was not surprised” by the turnout, said state Rep. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, who carried the legislation creating the task force and then won appointment to the panel. “The public cares about this issue a great deal. And we heard loudly from a lot of folks.”
The group will make a draft recommendation by July 19 and will take comments on that plan until Aug. 15. A final plan should be to Owens by Sept. 15.
George said synthesizing the input from thousands of comments into a cohesive recommendation is a gargantuan task that has been controversial since the 1970s.
“The job was too big when we designed it,” he said of the current effort. “But there was a good-faith, honest effort by the legislature and the governor, when this was put in motion, to take seriously the opportunity the Forest Service gave us when they said, ‘We’d like to see more local input.”‘
And so at each meeting, in places like Delta and Durango and Pueblo, people would line up to offer their views on roadless protections, which can apply to land that may or may not be under consideration for wilderness designation, the strictest level of primitive preservation.
“One of the things that was clear to us was there are broad differences of understanding” about roadless designation, George said. “Great numbers of people were just glancing across the top of this thing.”
Still, the general concept of roadless areas is easy enough to appreciate, and environmental groups crowed that 90 percent of public comments through the years have supported the 2001 rule that establishes maximum protections and limits the creation of new routes for motorized vehicles.
“How many times do we have to tell them?” said Sloan Shoemaker, director of the Wilderness Workshop in Aspen. “We told them in the (comment period for) the draft ’01 rule. We told them in the final ’01 rule. We told them in the draft and final Bush rule. So how many times do we have to tell them? There’s overwhelming support for keeping roadless areas roadless.”
But others, such as Brian Hawthorne, the public-lands director for the Blue Ribbon Coalition, a national organization that advocates for motorized recreation, contend that the one-size-fits-all approach under the Clinton-era rule doesn’t work.
“We don’t want to see any top-down management anywhere in a forest, even on a statewide basis,” he said.
Some have complained, though, that while the task force is crafting its recommendation, the Forest Service continues to allow development of oil and gas leases, even in some of the very same roadless areas being considered for protection.
Hunting outfitter Mead believes that EnCana built the road in the Mamm Creek area merely to stake a claim in the middle of the roadless area, a notion that company spokesman Doug Hock disputes.
“Initially, we did have plans to build there,” Hock said. “We did a re-evaluation of the economics of that particular well, and the economics were not as good in that area as in other areas. And as a result, we will not be impacting that area at this time. We may go back in there at some point in time.”
EnCana, Hock said, already has a large inventory of well sites in places that have road access and probably would see little impact in its drilling plans, regardless of the statewide recommendation on managing the roadless areas.
All the more reason that roadless supporters such as Mead are intent on putting public lands off limits to further development.
“I’m not pushing for the Mamm Peak area. They’ve already put a road in there,” Mead said. “I’m pushing real hard for the rest of them. Why change them?”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
