Glenwood Springs – Quiet is hard to quantify.
But that’s exactly what the 100 attendees at the fourth annual Quiet Commotion Summit aimed to do, gathering in Glenwood Springs over the weekend to raise a fuss about hush – or the lack thereof.
Depending upon your perspective, Colorado is either the most remote place in the Lower 48 or among the least. According to a new U.S. Geological Survey analysis, Hinsdale County in southwest Colorado has more wild and roadless land per capita than anywhere else in the contiguous United States. Hinsdale – the state’s least populous county, made notorious by Alferd Packer’s cannibalism conviction after his party was stranded in the surrounding San Juan Mountains during the winter of 1874 – is one of the rare few places a person can stray more than 10 miles from a road.
The flip side of that stat, according to Roz McClellan of the Rocky Mountain Recreation Initiative, is a mere 3.6 percent of the entire state lies more than 2 miles from a road. Meaning you might have to lose yourself down in Hinsdale in order to find some genuine peace and quiet.
McClellan’s was one of many soft voices creating a club-like crescendo in Glenwood as the event – hosted by the Southern Rockies Conservation Alliance and co-sponsored by Audubon Colorado – united traditionally “quiet” recreation enthusiasts such as hikers, skiers, mountain bikers, bird watchers, hunters and anglers to discuss the recreation future of local public lands with representatives of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Although the message remained for the most part positive, an all-but-unspoken enemy was found in motorized recreation, primarily the increased use of off-highway all-terrain vehicles known as “quads,” or ATVs, expanding in a spaghetti network of routes and roads through the forest.
“Colorado is a hotbed for quiet, active recreation,” said Aaron Clark, recreation campaign director for the Southern Rockies Conservation Alliance. “We’re trying to take a positive approach by focusing on the need to preserve quiet recreation opportunities and wildlife habitat. However, if ATV users and the advocacy groups that represent them have their way, there will be even fewer places to go to find quiet and solitude.”
Fate of wilderness?
The timing of the annual conference was particularly significant as federal officials are currently deciding the fate of Colorado’s 4.4 million roadless acres – land designated a candidate for wilderness protection but not yet shielded from oil and gas exploration, mining or ski-area expansion. Although the more development-oriented uses of “extraction” industries such as drilling, mining and timber are considered differently from recreational uses by land agencies, quiet-use advocates view the impacts of any roads on wild land the same.
“I like to think of quiet users as an ‘extraction’ industry. Mountain bikers are extracting the sensation of gravity as they ride down a trail; bird watchers are extracting the sight of a bird in nature; hunters are extracting the animals they hunt,” said Tom Sobal, a Quiet Use Coalition volunteer coordinator from Salida. “Everyone is extracting their little thing, but we have a lot in common. We all want the forest to be in a pristine state when we get to it.”
Citing statistics compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Colorado Department of Transportation, McClellan noted that outdoor enthusiasts seeking solitude are being forced to the state’s highest elevations, since more than 70 percent of the 2,379,698 acres falling outside the 2-mile roadless buffer are located in the subalpine and alpine ecosystems beginning above 9,000 feet.
Economic clout
The phenomenon, conference attendees say, makes little sense, given the newfound economic clout of the nonmotorized outdoor recreation community. According to a recently released report from the Outdoor Industry Association, that community contributes $730 billion a year to the U.S. economy, more than $10 billion in Colorado alone.
Other Colorado-specific stats include 107,000 recreation- based jobs across the state, nearly $500 million a year in state tax revenue and $7.6 billion a year in retail sales and services – accounting for 4 percent of gross state product.
“We organized this conference to be proactive in helping the agency understand our visions and to build better relationships with them, to offer them a chance to rise to the occasion and start thinking about the value of quiet use,” Clark said. “The media and general public often portray the conservation community as negative and pessimistic, but I think that a conference so well attended proves that we are actually the ones who are optimistic and still hold hope that America’s public lands can be managed to protect the resources and the natural sights, sounds and smells that we all crave.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
