A March heat wave shattered several records for high temperatures across Colorado. the source of at least 70% of the state’s stream flows and water in reservoirs, is the worst on record. Cities along the Front Range have enacted water restrictions.

At a time when snow in the mountains usually has barely begun to melt, several ski resorts have closed. And ranchers are looking for hay in case the rangeland and pastures can’t provide enough food for their cattle this summer.

Problems for Colorado’s cattle industry will ripple through the state’s economy. The state’s cattle herd was the nation’s 10th largest in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Beef is the state’s top agricultural export, totaling $1.26 billion in value in 2025, the Colorado Department of Agriculture said.

Beef, fresh and frozen, is Colorado’s No. 1 export overall.

“The producers that are in the business now are here for a reason. It’s because they continue to be optimistic. They just keep saying, ‘You know, it has to rain one day,’ ” said Erin Karney Spaur, executive vice president of the

But ranchers are also keeping their eyes on the sky and the forecasts. Karney Spaur said most ranchers have drought plans, which include stockpiling hay and moving cattle around to give the grass time to grow. Worst case scenario, ranchers might end up selling part of their herd.

In past dry spells, people have trucked their cattle to other parts of Colorado or other states in search of greener pastures. The problem this time is the broad sweep of the drought will make those places harder to find.

“What I haven’t seen in my lifetime is the widespread drought all throughout Colorado and the West, for that matter,” Karney Spaur said.

In most areas, cattle producers with federal grazing permits on U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land have received letters saying to expect reductions in use of the sites unless conditions change, Karney Spaur said.

“Most BLM-managed public lands in Colorado are in severe to exceptional drought,” Colorado BLM spokesman Steven Hall said in an email.

The BLM staff regularly communicates with permittees and with industry associations, Hall said. “Typically the BLM and permittee agree on changes to grazing use during drought.”

Conditions in the Rio Grande National Forest in southwest Colorado range from moderate to exceptional drought, according to the . Ranchers have been advised that if dry conditions continue, the grazing season might have to be shortened or the number of cattle on a site reduced for part of the summer in some areas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in an email.

Decisions will be made case by case and the Forest Service will work with ranchers to explore options, the USDA said.

Much of the federally managed land used for grazing is in western Colorado. On the Eastern Plains, several ranchers have grazing permits on state-owned lands.

Curtis Russell, Colorado Cattlemen’s Association president, ranches in Sugar City in southeast Colorado and is a member of a grazing association that leases state lands. While the area had a good grass-growing season last summer, Russell doesn’t expect producers to move their animals onto the state lands this season until it rains.

The State Land Board closely monitors drought conditions and manages grazing on a case-by-case basis in coordination with lessees, spokeswoman Emily Barbo said in email. The staff is in close communication with ranchers across the state, she said.

“Things are really trying to green up, but it’s just hard,” Russell said. “We had 90-degree days in March. It was pretty hard to keep moisture in the ground with the wind blowing and 90 degrees.”

Ranchers on the Western Slope were battling through a dry summer in 2025 when wildfires erupted and raced through the parched vegetation. The fires scorched some ranchers’ pastures and federal grazing allotments.

Off the charts

Retta Bruegger, a regional range management specialist with Colorado State University Extension, calls snowpack “money in the bank” for ranchers who depend on grasses and plants to feed their cattle. But with Colorado’s snowpack at its lowest-ever levels, the bank is close to tapped-out.

“To be perfectly frank, this year is off the charts in terms of what it looks like and how it’s setting up so far,” Bruegger said. “I think people will be making a lot of hard decisions.”

On a recent trip just over the Colorado border into Utah, Bruegger said the forage looked better than she expected. The outlook could change if the weather does.

“In the world of all possibilities, it could start snowing tomorrow and snow until June 1. I don’t necessarily think that’s going to happen, but that would change some things if it does,” Bruegger said.

Janie VanWinkle and her family ranch in Mesa County. They graze their cattle on land they own and on leases with the federal government, the city of Grand Junction and Colorado Mesa University. The bulk of their grazing in the summer is on Forest Service land and they’re not sure whether use of the allotment will be restricted because of the drought.

“We’ll be having a meeting with our Forest Service range specialist in the next month or so. We’re kind of waiting to see what the weather is going to do,” VanWinkle said.

She finds the uncertainty unnerving after the  forced the family off their usual allotment to another area. VanWinkle and her husband, Howard, spent 122 days on horseback, moving their animals from water to food and at times through flames. The firefighters worked closely with the family to keep them and the cattle safe.

“The good news is we didn’t lose a single cow in the fire,” said VanWinkle, whose son works with her and husband.

As the family heads into what could be another dry summer, wildfires are a concern. “We’ve never talked about this, but I know this is the fear that’s been in my son’s heart. It’s the fear that’s in mine and my husband’s: What if there’s another one?” VanWinkle asks.

The statewide snowpack was at 21% of median Wednesday, the reported. This year’s level is the worst since measurements were recorded starting in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In addition, the snow water equivalent, the amount of liquid water stored in the snow, was 3.3 inches, just 22% of the 30-year median, as of April 1, said Russ Schumacher, state climatologist and director of CSU’s Colorado Climate Center. The previous low was 9.1 inches in 1987.

“That’s the metric we pay attention to for water because that’s the water that’s going to flow into the rivers” and increase soil moisture, Schumacher said.

A year when the water content is 70% to 80% of average in early April would be considered a bad year, he added. “This year, we’re looking at 20% of the average, which is so far beyond that.”

Colorado has been hot as well as dry.

“That heat wave in March was just astonishing in terms of how unusually warm everything was across the state,” Schumacher said.

It was Colorado’s warmest March on record, according to the . Averaged across the state, the month was 13.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average and 4.3 degrees above any previous March.

Relief might come this summer in the form of El Niño, the weather phenomenon that warms the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

“Globally, it tends to raise temperatures. Here in Colorado, that tends not to be the case. We tend to be wetter and somewhat cooler, later in the summer and fall,” Schumacher said.

The said April 9 that the chance of an El Niño was 61% and a one-in-four chance that it might be strong.

David Gottenborg, whose family owns Eagle Rock Ranch in South Park, is hoping for a change. Park County typically doesn’t get a lot of moisture in winter, but this winter was even drier than usual. And warmer.

“We sit on Tarryall Creek and we’re running about 15, 14 cubic feet per second versus normally about 30 or so. So we’re about half,” Gottenborg said.

The Gottenborgs, who raise cattle and hay, irrigated a little in the last couple of weeks.

“Irrigation season typically starts April 1. In most years, it’s almost kind of a moot point because our head gates are frozen,” Gottenborg said.

Not this year. And there’s no ice now in Tarryall, a tributary of the South Platte River.

Besides cattle, hay is one of the Gottenborgs’ main income sources. They partnered with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to donate 48 tons of hay in December to Western Slope ranchers whose land was burned by the Lee wildfire last summer.

But their hay crop was down last year and they’ve halted sales for now.

“The old-timers here in the valley, they would always keep at least half of what they would need the following year in their stack yards. We’re trying to do that,” Gottenborg said.

The ranch gets calls almost every day from people looking to buy hay. Gottenborg said a woman told him that she had contacted more than 30 people. “We had to tell her ‘no’ as well.”

Karney Spaur of Colorado Cattlemen said she’s heard of hay selling for $300 to $350 a ton. This time of year, she said $150 to $175 a ton is more the norm.

One bright spot for ranchers is that in large part because of low cattle numbers nationwide.

“If you have to sell cows, it’s a good time to sell cows because they’re worth a lot of money,” said Russell, the rancher from Sugar City. “On the other hand, if El Nino comes in like they’re talking about this summer and we get a lot of rain and people have already sold cows and need to buy cows back, it’ll cost a lot of money.”

The slaughter of the buffalo was a tragedy for all Western Indian tribes — including every tribe in Montana — because the animals were everything to Native people. Bison provided food, shelter, clothing and tools. They were central to spiritual practices. Their destruction was also a central part of the federal campaign to subdue and dispossess tribal nations.

But before the last smoke from the buffalo guns had cleared, Native visionaries had acted. A Salish man known as Attice trailed a few surviving bison across the Continental Divide to Montana’s Flathead Valley. That small herd would become critical seedstock for rebuilding bison herds in both the United States and Canada.

Through Attice’s efforts, state and federal agencies across the West were later able to establish small herds on refuges and wildlife management areas. Over the last 50 years, Western tribes have also led determined efforts to restore buffalo on reservation lands.

Tribes have also benefited from partnerships with conservation organizations that share a vision of big, healthy bison herds grazing across large landscapes. Chief among these partners is American Prairie, which for the past 25 years has worked to restore intact grasslands on public and private lands adjacent to Montana’s Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. As part of its work, American Prairie has also provided both technical expertise and buffalo to many tribal nations rebuilding their herds.

Yet even with these initiatives, there are only a few thousand truly wild buffalo today, and they occupy just a tiny fraction of their former range across the American and Canadian prairies. Why?

The persecution of bison continues — nowhere more so than in Montana. Governor Greg Gianforte’s administration has opposed any expansion of wild buffalo populations and has relentlessly pressured the federal Bureau of Land Management to reverse earlier, positive bison decisions.

Bowing to this pressure, the BLM has denied a request by American Prairie to convert existing federal grazing permits from cattle to bison in eastern Montana. What����ap worse, the BLM has terminated other bison grazing permits the organization had lawfully held for years.

Given the stakes, the Coalition of Large Tribes — advocating for more than 50 tribal nations, including the Blackfeet Nation and the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana — has filed a formal protest of the BLM’s unprecedented and unlawful decision. Federal law is clear: statutes affecting tribes must be interpreted in their favor, and ambiguities must be resolved to protect tribal rights.

The consequences of the BLM’s illegal action are immediate and profound. Terminating these permits disrupts herd genetics, intertribal gifting traditions, treaty territories, and longstanding cooperative relationships. It also establishes a dangerous precedent for other federal agencies engaged in tribal co-stewardship and wildlife restoration, not only for Montana tribes but for tribes everywhere. If bison being managed for conservation can be categorically excluded from federal lands, decades of collaborative progress are jeopardized.

Perhaps most alarming, this decision amounts to rulemaking by fiat. In order to reach the result demanded by the Gianforte administration, the BLM acted without meaningful consultation with either tribes or the public.

Federal law is clear. Actions and decisions affecting tribes require consultation, yet no meaningful effort has been made by either the BLM or the Gianforte administration to fulfill this binding obligation. If this failure to consult is allowed to stand, tribes across the West will be harmed by the precedent.

Montana and the federal government face a defining choice: They can cling to outdated policies that ignore history, science, and treaty obligations, or they can honor tribal leadership, uphold the law and help restore a species that once defined this land.

The future of Montana’s prairies depends on that choice.

Tyson Running Wolf is a member of the Blackfeet Nation who chairs the Montana Native American Caucus in the Montana Legislature. Tom France represents Missoula in the Montana Legislature and works with the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council on buffalo conservation issues. Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, is an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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Maloy has long criticized this southern Utah national monument that was halved by President Trump during his first term, then restored under President Biden. One million awestruck visitors come here every year and spend money in the two Utah counties surrounding the monument, whose towns total less than 14,000 residents. Yet Maloy discounts data showing the economic value of preserved public lands. She neglects the world-class scientific value of these 1.9 million acres, detailed in Biden’s proclamation.

Rep. Maloy’s attack is wily. She and the rest of the congressional delegation know there’s too much public support to ask President Trump to again chop down the monument����ap size. Nearly 3 out of 4 Utah voters are on record as wanting to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante protected as a national monument.

So Utah politicians are betting the public won’t pay as much attention to management retrenchment as they would to downsizing. They’re using a controversial tactic to force the Bureau of Land Management to abandon the current Resource Management Plan–a blueprint for how the BLM puts the presidential proclamation into effect on the ground.

But monument supporters are paying attention because management plans matter.

After President Biden restored the boundaries of Grand Staircase in 2021, the BLM worked with the public for two years to create the 2025 Resource Management Plan, listening to every conceivable collaborative partner. Such plans guide decision-making for years, and this true compromise keeps ranchers’ grazing permits in place while also factoring in a warming planet, persistent drought, the need for biodiversity, and a sustainable future.

Now, Rep. Maloy has obtained an opinion from the Government Accountability Office to treat the 2025 plan merely as a “rule” that Congress can overturn. This unprecedented allowance can’t be challenged in court and permits the Utah delegation to use the Congressional Review Act to kill the conservation-based plan and bar the agency from issuing any “substantially the same” plan in the future. The Trump-era plan that would take its place leaves much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.

Maloy says that emphasizing conservation “undercuts rural economic development.” From 2001 to 2022, however, real per capita income grew by 41 percent in the monument����ap counties.

She says that local residents and “trail users” oppose the Biden plan. This is cherry-picking. Motorized trail users always want greater access, even though the Biden-era plan left more than 800 miles of dirt roads and trails open for motorized vehicles.

When Maloy talks about “deep cultural traditions” being disrupted by the current management plan, she isn’t listening to Indigenous people who have made this place their home since time immemorial. The six Native Nations of the Grand-Staircase Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition oppose her move, noting that without the “clear roadmap for protection and conservation” provided by the current management plan, “our ancestral lands and … cultural sites within the monument would be at greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation.”

To support their attacks, Utah’s politicians use their timeworn template to argue exclusively for “the needs and voices of the people who live and work on this land.” These politicians, however, listen only to county commissioners and legacy ranchers, not to a much broader constituency.

This is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, not Grand Staircase County Park. The environmental, scientific, interpretive, and Indigenous values and potential of these public lands have national and international importance.

This new attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante from Congress–along with a parallel attack on Minnesota’s Boundary Waters—would set a national precedent with no public input that could upend public lands protection for years. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a “Wild West” for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy’s radical approach.

The exhausting years-long battle to protect the resources and restorative magic of Grand Staircase-Escalante can wear out supporters. But this place gives us no choice but to speak up once again. Staying silent puts federal agencies in an impossible position and places all of our public lands at risk. Let your members of Congress know that preservation of the monument requires leaving the current resource management plan in place.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He’s been hiking in Grand Staircase and writing about Colorado Plateau conservation for 50 years.

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Throughout his political career, Pearce has worked to privatize and undermine our public lands. As a New Mexico congressman, he co-sponsored several bills to dispose of national public lands. This alone ought to disqualify him from running the agency charged with stewarding 245 million acres for current and future generations.

In a , Pearce argued that the federal government owns “vast” land holdings, “most of (which) we do not even need,” and called for a massive sell-off to pay down the national debt. Pearce’s vision for our public lands is not conservation or even balanced management — it����ap liquidation.

President Trump has been down this road before: During his first term, he nominated anti-public-lands zealot William Perry Pendley to run the BLM. Pendley never even received a hearing, and the White House dropped the nomination after his record was revealed. Pendley went on to write the public lands chapter of the now-notorious Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Pendley spent his career as a lawyer arguing that the federal government should not own public lands. Steve Pearce has gone even further. From inside Congress, Pearce spent 14 years undermining public lands, seeking to gut wildlife protections and sell off huge amounts of public land.

Pearce’s nomination comes as our public lands are being attacked from all sides. Over the last 10 months, President Trump has elevated officials such as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, both of whom view our public lands as nothing more than assets to monetize through drilling, mining and logging.

These officials are currently working to execute Trump’s vision of selling out public assets for private profit. Pearce would accelerate this effort, liquidating lands to the highest bidder–including corporations and luxury developers.

Even by recent standards, Pearce’s public lands record is radical. It is also unpopular. This spring, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tried to include a public land sale provision in the sprawling budget bill, framing it as a housing solution. The measure would have mandated the sale of 2-3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands.

But Lee’s amendment triggered immediate backlash from hunters, outdoor recreation groups and Western lawmakers. Within days, he abandoned the effort. If the Senate rejected Lee’s market-rate sell-off as radical, it should be easy now to reject a nominee whose goal is to get rid of even more public land.

That brings us to the Senate Stewardship Caucus, co-chaired by a Republican, Tim Sheehy of Montana, and a Democrat, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. It launched last month to “advance bipartisan efforts to conserve the nation’s lands and waters” with science-based policy. The caucus has been applauded by hunting, outdoor recreation, and conservation organizations as a promising start for defending public access and wildlife.

Pearce’s nomination is the caucus’s first real test. If its members cannot draw a bright line at a nominee who has worked tirelessly to sell off public lands and weaken laws that protect them, then its vision of “stewardship” is nothing but empty branding.

The stakes are immense. BLM’s multiple-use mandate requires balancing energy, grazing, recreation and conservation under long-term land use plans grounded in science and public input. That mission collapses if the agency’s leader believes we must “reverse this trend of public ownership” of the very lands he is charged with managing.

Westerners understand what happens when responsible stewardship is abandoned. Rural communities lose the long-term economic engine that healthy public lands provide. Hunters, anglers and campers lose access they have relied on for generations.

Steve Pearce’s nomination is a referendum on whether Congress believes our shared lands still belong to all Americans. The Stewardship Caucus and every senator who claims to care about the West����ap outdoor heritage should reject Pearce’s nomination. America’s public lands are a unique legacy we pass down to future generations, not a portfolio to liquidate.

Aaron Weiss is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities and co-host of The Landscape podcast.

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The board, in a 4-1 vote, approved the $49.6-million sale of the La Jara State Trust Land property in Conejos County, with most of it going to the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and the rest to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

owns 2.8 million acres of land in Colorado and manages it to earn money for the state’s public school system. It began considering selling the La Jara property in 2017 because it was not generating enough revenue. Selling the property would allow the board to invest the proceeds in other, more lucrative land.

After nearly a decade of work, the deal to sell the 45,952 acres to the three agencies seemed rock solid, proponents of the sale have said.

But some members of the State Land Board commission in recent months became concerned about selling the vast majority of the land to federal agencies under the Trump administration, which has repeatedly weakened conservation rules and hollowed out agency staff. Members of the Republican-majority Congress this year have also attempted to sell federal public lands in the West but were defeated amid bipartisan backlash.

The board’s commissioners worried that selling the land to federal agencies could open it to the whims of the administration, while maintaining state ownership would protect it.

“We were all-in until the world went nuts,” said Commissioner Christine Scanlan, who expressed concerns about federal management.

She ultimately voted in support of the sale, saying beforehand: “We are taking a risk in selling it to the federal government in the sense that these threats to public lands are out there and they’re real and they’re not going to go away.”

The parcel is tucked in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains — west of U.S. 285 between Alamosa and Antonito — and is primarily surrounded by BLM and Forest Service land. The parcel includes 30 miles of streams and provides important wildlife habitat.

The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management will purchase 43,526 acres with $43.5 million appropriated through the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The remaining 2,427 acres, around La Jara Reservoir, will be sold to Colorado Parks and Wildlife for $6.1 million.

The early afternoon vote to continue with the sale followed hours of public comment — all in support of the deal. Residents of the valley, the local heads of the Forest Service and the BLM, and conservation organizations testified.

All three drove to Denver to urge the board to support the project, saying it had widespread backing in the San Luis Valley. The deal would protect access to the land that people rely on for hunting, fishing, grazing, firewood and recreation, said Commissioner Mitchell Jarvies. The valley community knows best what to do with the land it relies on, he said.

“This is probably the biggest collaboration for a project that I’ve been a part of in my 15 years as a county commissioner,” he said.

Ken Salazar, a former U.S. senator and Interior secretary who lives in the valley, compared the benefits of selling the land to the creation of , which protected important ecosystems and spurred tourism for the valley.

“This is the project of the 21st century for the San Luis Valley,” he said at the meeting Thursday.

Representatives from conservation groups said they shared commissioners’ concerns about the Trump administration’s public lands policy. However, they said, support from regional agency leaders as well as local land management plans will help safeguard the property from interference.

“We must always keep in mind that landscape conservation and long-term public lands management is at a different timescale than political administrations,” said Jordan Williams, the Colorado regional representative for the .

Lands purchased through the Land and Water Conservation Fund have greater protections from future sale by the federal government, Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper wrote Wednesday in a joint letter to the board’s commissioners, urging them to approve the deal.

“Colorado’s Congressional delegation has led the fight to safeguard public lands by preventing their mass sell-off, championing permanent protections for our most valued areas, and opposing efforts to terminate employees of land management agencies,” the letter states. “Our bedrock public lands management laws and Colorado’s record should give the board confidence that the La Jara transfer will continue to serve the public interest.”

Several commissioners who voted in support of the sale said they were swayed by the community support for the deal. While the risk of changes due to federal politics is real, the residents of the San Luis Valley will be the ones to deal with the consequences, said Deborah Froeb, the president of the board.

“I’ve come to think of this decision now as one (where) our fear of outcomes should not be imposed on those who will face them,” she said.

But the deal to sell the 45,952-acre La Jara State Trust Land property in Conejos County to federal and state land managers is now experiencing unexpected pushback from . Its commissioners are expected to vote on the proposal, which has been in the works since 2017, . Though the deal has garnered a wide spectrum of support, land board commissioners in recent months have requested information about alternatives to the sale.

The questioning caught proponents by surprise.

“We had pretty much put it in our rearview mirror, because it looked like a done deal,” said Mitchell Jarvies.

The board initiated the process of selling the land because it was not making enough money for the agency. Selling the southern Colorado property to land management agencies — with pieces going to the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and Colorado Parks and Wildlife — would allow the board to pursue better investments while also cementing long-term public access to the land, which locals use for cattle grazing, hiking, fishing and hunting.

At the board’s June meeting, the agency’s staff recommended the deal and a majority of commissioners voted in support of moving forward with it.

Since then, however, board commissioners have requested more information and asked staff members to compile alternative plans for the land. Staff put together two alternative plans and is no longer making a recommendation to the board.

“While it is common for staff to provide recommendations when seeking Board decisions, this is a unique situation,” Colorado State Land Board spokesperson Emily Barbo wrote in an email. “It����ap not often that the State Land Board considers disposal of a property like La Jara, given its large size and its location. The Board (members) will make their decision per their responsibility and authority to act in the best interests of our beneficiaries.”

The addition of alternate plans surprised those who have been working for years on the deal. If the board cans the deal, San Luis Valley residents worry that the State Land Board could use the land in a way that restricts access. Or worse, sell the land to a private buyer.

People in the valley rely on the land for subsistence hunting and fishing as well as firewood, Jarvies said. It also draws hunters and their dollars to the rural area, which includes .

“The unknown is what scares people,” he said.

A deal years in the making

The owns 2.8 million acres of land in Colorado and manages it to earn money for the state’s public school system. It leases the land to businesses for agriculture, mining, oil and gas development, and renewable energy projects. It also allows varying levels of public recreation access.

The board aims for its land holdings to make revenue equal to at least 1.5% of the land’s value. According to board documents, the La Jara property’s revenue in recent years amounted to 0.6% of its value. The parcel’s remote location also made it difficult to manage, the documents state.

So the board began exploring options for the parcel — its largest single landholding in southwest Colorado. The plan the agency developed since then includes selling 43,526 acres to the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management for $43.5 million. Another 2,427 acres around La Jara Reservoir would be sold to Colorado Parks and Wildlife for $6.1 million. The sales would be at market value for the land.

Since 2017, a wide range of Colorado agencies, nonprofit groups and local residents have signed on in support of the sale. Supporters include , the Conejos County commissioners, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, San Luis Valley Outdoors and the Colorado Wildlife Federation.

The land is tucked in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains — west of U.S. 285 between Alamosa and Antonito — and is primarily surrounded by BLM and Forest Service land. The parcel includes 30 miles of streams and provides important wildlife habitat.

Over the last week, former U.S. Rep. John Salazar’s phone lit up as word spread through the valley that the board was considering other options besides the sale.

“Everyone that I know of here in the valley supported that transaction,” said Salazar, also a former state agriculture commissioner who farms and ranches in the valley.

On Monday, The Denver Post published an opinion piece urging the board to approve the deal that Salazar wrote with his brother, Ken, a former U.S. senator and Interior secretary.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet helped secure funding from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to pay for the purchase by the Forest Service and BLM. That money would likely be forfeited if the deal does not go through.

“Walking away from the project now, and leaving over $40 million in precious conservation funding on the table, is a mistake,” Bennet said in a statement to The Post.

In June, Gov. Jared Polis wrote a letter to the BLM’s Colorado director in support of the deal. He wrote that the state had already invested money in the project and urged that the government “remain committed to seeing this project through,” according to a copy of the letter provided to The Post.

“The state strongly supports this acquisition as a meaningful advancement in our goals of habitat connectivity, heritage preservation and equitable public access to the outdoors,” he wrote in the June 18 letter.

On Monday, a spokeswoman for Polis would not answer whether the governor still supported the deal.

“The State Land Board is an independent board and the Governor respects their ability to weigh this opportunity to protect access to public lands in Colorado, maximize asset allocation, and work with federal partners where it benefits Colorado,” spokeswoman Shelby Wieman wrote in a statement.

The who will vote on the deal are volunteers appointed by the governor and approved by the legislature. Polis appointed all five current commissioners, all of whom began their terms after the agency began exploring selling the La Jara parcel. Two commissioners began their terms in July and Polis hired a new director for the agency in June.

None of the commissioners live in the San Luis Valley and instead are from combinations of Denver, Boulder, Summit, Eagle, Grand and Pitkin counties, .

Vote planned this week

At the board’s direction, State Land Board staff compiled two alternatives to the proposed sale. One would keep the land and attempt to increase the revenue generated from it. The other would sell only the smaller parcel to CPW, while maintaining ownership of the land slated for sale to the federal government.

During the June meeting, board members did not express any criticisms about the proposed deal. But ahead of Thursday’s meeting, agency staff members listed pros and cons of each option in the information packet.

The document lists uncertainty about the direction and stability of the Forest Service and the BLM under the Trump administration as a disadvantage to the deal. Staff cited recent attempts to sell federal public lands and efforts by the administration to reduce regulations that protect conservation.

The exploration of alternatives has left proponents of the deal uneasy.

Jarvies said nobody from the state agency has contacted him or other local leaders about concerns they might have with the original deal. He and the two other Conejos County commissioners will make the 4.5-hour drive to Denver for , which begins at 8 a.m.

Jarvies worries that, once again, the desires of the rural and poor communities in the valley will be sidelined.

“These rural areas are so often the redheaded stepchild,” he said.

The planned cuts were outlined in a filing made public Monday in an ongoing federal court case stemming from a lawsuit by two labor unions seeking to halt the layoffs.

In total, the department plans to eliminate more than 2,000 jobs across the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the department’s administrative offices.

In Colorado, the proposed cuts include:

• 87 of the 177 positions (49%) in the Bureau of Land Management’s in Denver
• 33 of the 595 positions (6%) in the
• 40 of the 224  positions (18%) at the National Park Service
• 39 of the 69 positions (57%) at the U.S. Geological Survey’s

The layoffs are blocked by a judge’s order, but the case is scheduled for a hearing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Oct. 28.

The department’s chief human capital officer, in a court filing, said the layoffs were not connected to the current government shutdown.

The planned layoffs drew criticism from Colorado’s Democratic delegation in Washington as well as conservation groups.

“The Trump administration’s unlawful and politically motivated attacks on workers at our land management agencies — the NPS, BLM, USGS, and elsewhere — will inflict direct harm on both these civil servants and all Coloradans who treasure our lands and water,” Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat representing Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, said in a statement. “It is shameful.”

Such quiet is a rare gift. I haven’t been in Goodall’s Tanzanian rain forest, but recently shared Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park with a 25-year-old cousin visiting from urban America. Once in the canyons he kept pausing to say, “it����ap so peaceful, so still.” He was astonished and renewed by that quiet.

This canyon country stillness is under attack. The assaults come in waves powered by motorized vehicles, engines revving.

First, the Trump administration g the 2023 Bureau of Land Management travel plan for Labyrinth Canyon. This 300,000-acre Utah wildland along the Green River just north of Canyonlands National Park is a gem — a fretwork of slickrock canyons along the river. Labyrinth preserves quiet for rafters, hikers, and bighorn sheep. No death-defying rapids here on this lazy, looping stretch easily paddled by families in canoes.

In a model compromise, the current maintains access to more than 800 miles of off-highway-vehicle (OHV) routes, closing only 317 miles to vehicles. In the surrounding Moab region, more than 4,000 miles of routes remain open. OHVs have plenty of room to roam.

But moderation is never enough for Utah politicians determined to motorize every inch of our public lands. They are pushing to reopen 141 miles of closed OHV routes at Labyrinth and hoping for even more. You before October 24.

In another backtrack on conservation in Utah, the administration has solicited of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks. The big views from Capitol Reef, Zion, and Bryce Canyon don’t stop at the park boundaries. Visitors, many from other countries, would be horrified by such industrialization of these world-class destinations. Rural Utah depends on these tourists to survive economically.

These are lands that even the conservative second Bush administration deemed unsuitable for mines. As Cory MacNulty, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said of the proposed leasing, “It����ap absurd.”

Now the OHV battalions are threatening to overwhelm Capitol Reef National Park.

Utah Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis introduced a bill on October 5 to open virtually every road in Capitol Reef to off-roaders. They claim that disabled Americans need this fundamental change to park policy, though even the park’s back roads are currently accessible by moderately high-clearance cars and trucks. There’s absolutely no need to permit noisy and destructive OHVs.

The senators’ second bill would potentially open other national parks to OHV use. Lee tried to pass nearly identical bills in 2021 and encountered a buzzsaw of resistance from national park advocates.

As retired Capitol Reef superintendent Sue Fritzke said, “OHVs would denigrate the very resources those sites have been set aside to protect, with increased dust and noise and impacts on wildlife, endangered species, and visitors.”

At each mile farther into remote corners of the park, off-highway vehicles become more problematic. Even though a majority of riders obey the rules, some will go off-road. They just will. Their vehicles are designed for this exact purpose. In Capitol Reef’s considerable backcountry–as in all underfunded national parks and monuments— staffing does not allow for constant patrolling to apprehend and ticket wrongdoers.

Capitol Reef is a place to slow down, not speed up. To revel in quiet, not reach for earplugs. To share the healing land with tenderness and restraint.

Lee disrespects national park values with these twin bills, and Curtis, who likes to tout his nature sensitivity on hikes with constituents, should know better. Their misguided proposals should be left to wither in committee and die. Those of us who love the restorative peace of national parks will just keep fighting such regressive bills.

In her last interview, Jane Goodall asked us to never give up: “Without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing. If people don’t have hope, we’re doomed. Let����ap fight to the very end.”

We will.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Utah.

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About 54,300 federal employees work in Colorado, according to the . That doesn’t include nearly 38,000 active-duty military service members who are based in the state, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center, and must continue serving without pay.

It wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday how the tens of thousands of civilian workers were spread across the different federal agencies with presences in Colorado, including at the Federal Center in Lakewood, government labs and other sites. Not all workers are furloughed, with significant exemptions in some agencies. Excepted employees, or those whose work includes protecting life and property, are expected to continue working, though they won’t be paid until the shutdown ends.

But some impacts were evident. The vast majority of staff and researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder , according to U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse’s office, with some — from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the National Weather Service — working without pay.

Though the exact number of furloughed workers wasn’t available, most of the research at NOAA labs had stopped.

Other agencies, such as the U.S. Postal Service, have separate funding mechanisms that keep their work — and public services — continuing apace.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, continues to provide veteran medical care and other critical services, according to . That includes suicide prevention programs, homelessness programs, the veterans crisis line, and caregiver support, according to its website.

The state’s labor department said that many furloughed federal workers , though they would have to pay back any money received once the shutdown ends and the government pays them retroactively.

Immigration agencies, EPA continue work

Colorado’s two immigration courts were still processing cases Wednesday, despite the shutdown. Judges overseeing proceedings in the Aurora detention center were still balancing full dockets, and a receptionist for the Denver court, which oversees immigration cases where people aren’t in custody, said work was continuing there, too.

Non-detained immigration cases may eventually be delayed, according to an FAQ page posted by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s office. The “vast majority” of employees at federal agencies in charge of border protection, immigration services and enforcement should be unaffected by the shutdown, the page added, citing Department of Homeland Security estimates.

Some agencies were set to continue work until their previously appropriated budgets ran out.

Miles Batson, executive vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents nearly 8,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees, said he and others were working and getting paid via carryover funds for now.

EPA employees received anonymous emails that told them to report to work as usual on Wednesday and said they would be furloughed when that money ran out, said Batson, who spoke with The Denver Post on personal time. The problem, said Batson, who works in a Denver laboratory, is that they did not know when that would be.

“I couldn’t tell you whether it might end tomorrow or it might end next week,” he said. “It’s not ruining people’s lives, but it’s making people’s lives very stressful. All of that’s being purposely left in the dark these days so people are confused and stressed.”

State steps in to continue food program

Other services to the public, however, may be curtailed or halted during the shutdown.

On Tuesday, the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee approved spending $7.5 million to pay for food benefits, or WIC, for a month in the event of a federal shutdown. The federal government typically pays for the program. Gov. Jared Polis warned that the program was set to halt payments immediately without the state money.

“WIC is one of a myriad challenges the state faces the longer this goes on,” Polis said in a statement, which included a reference to Democrats’ strategy of seeking to pair health care-related funding with a shutdown resolution. “The state cannot fill the void left by the federal government, and if they do not reopen the government and save health care for Coloradans, the consequences will be dire.”

Federal lands are open to public

Rocky Mountain National Park, a gem of the state and perhaps the most visible federal function in Colorado, remained open.

to the National Park Service indicated the nation’s beloved parks should remain as accessible as possible, despite concerns from conservationists that unsupervised access could result in damage to fragile ecosystems and park infrastructure, as happened at many sites during a 2018-2019 shutdown that lasted 35 days.

Rocky Mountain National Park remains open despite government shutdown

The millions of acres of public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management will also remain open.

Thousands of employees from the three land management agencies will be furloughed, except those who work as law enforcement or emergency responders and in other roles necessary for the safety of human life or the protection of property, including firefighting. The NPS expected to furlough about two-thirds of employees nationally.

Forest Service employees working to implement the Trump administration's expansion of logging, as well as BLM workers tasked with expanding oil and gas production under the administration's guidance, can also be exempted from furloughs, according to the agencies' shutdown contingency plans. 

Varying impact at Boulder labs

In Boulder, which is home to about 17 federally funded labs, there was varying impact. The labs employ nearly 3,600 people throughout Boulder County, according to by the Boulder Chamber’s Economic Council.

The U.S. Department of Commerce  of services affected by the shutdown, noting that most research activities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as NOAA, would stop. Weather forecasting, weather warnings and climate predictions will continue, according to the department, in addition to other services related to national security and public safety.

Officials at NOAA and NIST did not immediately respond to questions on Wednesday. Dan Powers, the executive director of CO-LABS, a nonprofit group that champions the value of taxpayer-funded research, estimated that hundreds of employees at the Department of Commerce campus in Boulder had been furloughed.

Powers said uncertainty was high as employees he'd spoken to were worried that their temporary furlough would turn into being permanently fired, as the Trump administration had threatened more broadly ahead of the shutdown.

“They’ve just received instructions while they’re furloughed to keep an eye on their email for any notice that they have been RIF-ed, or fired,” Powers said, referring to the phrase "reduction in force."

The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder was operating as usual, with staff continuing to receive paychecks, according to spokesman David Hosansky.

“Even though most of our funding comes from the federal government, we’re not federal employees,” Hosansky wrote in an email to the Daily Camera. ”… While new grants won’t be awarded for the duration of the shutdown, and it����ap possible we could receive stop-work orders for some projects funded outside of our (National Science Foundation) base funds, we don’t anticipate substantial interruptions to our operations or research.”

How Colorado’s senators voted

The latest shutdown stems from a fight in which most Democrats have refused to sign onto Republicans' short-term continuing resolution as they take a stand over health care funding. Democrats are demanding that Congress reverse cuts made to Medicaid under President Donald Trump’s signature tax and funding bill passed over the summer, as well as extend soon-to-expire tax credits for people who buy health insurance on Affordable Care Act marketplaces. 

Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s marketplace, estimates 112,000 Coloradans would if the federal subsidy isn’t renewed. 

Federal Republicans have called Democrats’ proposals a nonstarter because of their more than $1 trillion price tag, leading to the impasse on federal spending as Republicans have sought to pass a short-term measure to fund the government through Nov. 21. Democrats, who are the minority in both chambers of Congress and out of power in the White House, largely united against it and blocked passage in the Senate, where there's a 60-vote threshold.

Colorado's delegation has voted on the funding measures along party lines, including nays lodged again Wednesday by Bennet and Sen. John Hickenlooper, both Democrats.

In a call with the media Wednesday afternoon, Bennet said the cuts to Medicaid and the loss of the subsidies "is going to create a huge amount of misery in Colorado, and all across the country, and I think this is a fight worth having." He didn't have a specific prediction on how long the shutdown would last.

But he said ongoing conversations gave him hope for a bipartisan solution.

"If we let this budget go by without fixing this problem, it would never be fixed for the American people," Bennet said.

Republicans have criticized Democrats for trying to negotiate rather than passing a clean funding measure. U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans said in a statement Wednesday that Democrats "abandoned the American people, played political games and forced a shutdown."

Trump has meanwhile promised to wield the shutdown like a cudgel. 

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them,” Trump said of Democrats. “Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

Staff writers Noelle Phillips, Seth Klamann and Aldo Svaldi contributed to this story, as did the Associated Press.

The U.S. Department of the Interior plans to , which directs the Bureau of Land Management to consider the conservation of public lands to be equally important as commercial uses like oil and gas extraction, mining, grazing and timber harvesting. When they announced the rollback, administration officials said the rule placed outsized priority on conservation and threatened to curtail grazing, energy development and other traditional land uses.

“The most effective caretakers of our federal lands are those whose livelihoods rely on its well-being,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the proposal was unveiled. “Overturning this rule protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.”

Colorado conservation advocates said the rollback of the rule is shortsighted. The 2024 rule gives the BLM the tools to make sure the it manages — or nearly 13,000 square miles — remain healthy and productive for future generations, they said.

The rule provided balance so that the agency could “really embrace the most significant growing part of Western economies — the recreation economy,” said Michael Carroll, BLM campaign director for . “By not having balanced management on those landscapes, the pressure climate change is going to put on those landscapes is going to ultimately restrict the use of those lands, no matter what that use is.”

The proposed rollback is the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to open more public land to development and relax regulations around commercial uses on them.

Months after a proposal to sell some of the West’s public lands failed due to an incredible onslaught of public opposition, federal lawmakers and the Trump administration are trying other methods to weaken protections for public lands, say conservation and recreation advocates.

“In the West, public lands power our outdoor economies, provide critical water and grazing resources for agriculture, and give our residents unmatched opportunities to recreate and enjoy the peace and solitude that comes along with time spent in nature,” said Anna Peterson, the executive director of , an organization that works with over 100 communities across the western U.S. on environmental and economic sustainability.

“But threats from the Trump administration and radical anti-public lands politicians are putting our shared outdoor heritage in danger of being exploited for short-term gain.”

Public lands policy change

The BLM implemented what’s known as the Public Lands Rule — formally called — in . Local offices had just received guidance on how to use the new rule when President Donald Trump took office in January.

Implementation has ground to a halt.

“We never got the opportunity to see the Public Lands Rule fully implemented,” Carroll said.

Along with conservation, the rule designated several other uses of BLM land as equally important as commercial uses — access to nature, plus protection of cultural resources and wildlife habitat, along with using the land to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The rule gave the agency several new tools to implement that goal:

• It allowed communities or other entities to lease BLM land for restoration.
• It created a program in which companies using BLM land can lease land for mitigation efforts to offset negative environmental impacts from energy development, mining, grazing or timber harvesting.
• It streamlined the process for designating areas of critical environmental concern and expanded the definition for what qualified for the more stringent protections available for those areas.

In Colorado, state leaders and conservation groups had hoped to use the new rules governing areas of critical environmental concern to better protect wildlife corridors, big game populations and wilderness areas in the southwest corner of the state, said Juli Slivka, the policy director for the Carbondale-based . The BLM’s , based in Montrose, is .

“Under the (public lands) rule, there is a lot more space for them to do that,” Slivka said, lamenting the proposed rollback.

Communities along the Colorado River could’ve used the new conservation leases to restore riparian environments, Carroll said.

“Giving communities and local governments the ability to take out conservation and restoration leases would’ve been instrumental in a lot of the restoration moving forward,” he said.

The Public Lands Rule enjoyed broad support among Colorado’s Democratic congressional delegation. More than 150,000 people commented in 2023 on the rule after it was proposed, and found that 92% of comments supported it.

“In moving to rescind this rule, the Trump administration is undermining efforts to protect our lands for the next generation,” U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, whose district includes the state’s central and northern mountains, said in a statement. “Already this year, we’ve seen their radical agenda call for the auctioning off of millions of acres of our public lands, including here in Colorado, and continued attacks on the public servants in our land management agencies.

“We’ll continue to push back against these efforts — which are deeply unpopular with the public — and are building a bipartisan coalition to make clear that public lands must stay in public hands.”

U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican whose western and southern Colorado district contains the majority of the BLM land in Colorado, did not respond to a request for comment on the rollback.

Rep. Jeff Crank, the Republican representing the Colorado Springs-based 5th Congressional District, applauded the BLM’s move and said the Biden administration “stepped away from its statutory core mission — to manage lands for multiple use.”

“I applaud BLM’s decision to rescind the rule, it will make sure that our public lands are accessible and fruitful for the benefit of all Americans,” Crank said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing working with the administration and House Republicans on further ways we can promote productive management of Western lands.”

Public comment on the administration’s proposed rule rescission is .

Other efforts underway

The proposed change to the Public Lands Rule is one of several major ongoing overhauls of federal public lands policy.

Taken together, the changes threaten to overrule public input on how federal lands should be managed and amount to “one of the biggest assaults on balanced management in a generation,” Carroll said.

“It all amounts to putting the thumb on the scale for industry, over and over again,” he said.

Republican lawmakers in several Western states — Alaska, Montana and North Dakota — are looking to use to overturn management plans for BLM land in their states that they believe are too restrictive on mining and energy development. The first-of-its-kind use of the Congressional Review Act to challenge BLM management plans could set a precedent that lawmakers have the final say on those plans, which are drafted over years and require broad community and industry input.

There are no known efforts to undo management plans in Colorado through the Congressional Review Act, Carroll said. But if the other states’ lawmakers are successful, he said, they could create a roadmap for doing so in the future.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, is pursuing the . The rule bans the construction of roads, and the commercial uses those roads enable, in 45 million acres of Forest Service land.

Colorado’s 4.2 million acres of roadless areas will not be impacted if the rule is rescinded, however, because the Forest Service has a .