Forty-five years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson sat down in the Rose Garden and signed the Wilderness Act. It established 9.1 million acres of designated wilderness in the U.S.
"A wilderness" the act states, "in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
In the nearly half-century since LBJ defined wilderness, the amount of protected official wilderness has expanded more than tenfold. There are now 109 million such American acres protected (though about half of that is in Alaska).
Colorado boasts about 3.4 million acres of that land - a little over 5 percent of the state's total mass. In the White River National Forest, which surrounds Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley, there are currently about 750,000 acres of wilderness out of 2.2 million total forest acreage.
Within designated wilderness, the act prohibits commercial enterprise, buildings, roads, motor vehicles and motorized boats, aircraft and calls for ìno other form of mechanical transport." The last prohibition means outdoor pastimes like hiking, camping, skiing, horseback-riding, fishing and hunting are OK. Modern outdoor activities like snowmobiling, four-wheeling, and mountain biking are prohibited.
A coalition of environmental groups are currently working on a proposal that would expand designated wilderness in the White River and Gunnison national forests by more than 400,000 acres. They are hoping to bring it to Washington by the end of this year and eventually get the land protected through an act of Congress, under the Wilderness Act.
Factions of the forest
The so-called Hidden Gems Wilderness Campaign has been met with some blustery resistance from unlikely foes: outdoor enthusiasts themselves who use the type of equipment that would be banned if the lands become designated wilderness. Bikers, snowmobilers and others are organizing against, and some negotiating with, the Hidden Gems contingent.
"We like using the Wilderness Act because it is the best tool and the only one that guarantees that these lands will be protected in perpetuity," said Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Carbondale's Wilderness Workshop, which has taken the lead on the Hidden Gems campaign here in the Roaring Fork Valley. He was pointing to the fact that since the Wilderness Act passed, no land designated wilderness by Congress has later been undesignated.
Some have defined the wilderness expansion as a "land grab" or a means of shutting down existing trails and negating the possibility of future expansion of trail systems. Organizers at the Wilderness Workshop say the proposal will only take away unpopular or unusable trails while protecting at-risk land from future logging, oil drilling and digging.
Hidden Gems has dropped 35,000 acres of land and 75 miles of bike trails from its proposal, in an attempt to bring mountain bikers into the fold and get them to support the campaign. The Roaring Fork Mountain Bike Association (RFMBA) has been in negotiations with Hidden Gems since 2007 over their proposal. They have not yet come to an agreement.
"We think that mountain bikers are definitely an important part of this process," said RFMBA spokesman Mike Pritchard, who is working with other biking advocacy groups in Eagle and Summit counties. "But we are not pleased that we are at the center of this debate. We are people who enjoy going out and enjoying the outdoors."
They have also met with rock climbers and carved out areas popular for climbs. Rock climbing is not barred under the Wilderness Act, but power drills are, which would make it difficult for climbers to replace bolts on climbing routes.
"In my mind if we do nothing with Wilderness Workshop and this passes, then we lose access," said B.J. Sbarra, a local climber and co-author of ìRifle Mountain Park & Western Colorado Rock Climbs Guidebook. "If we work with them and it doesn't pass, then we just lose some wasted hours."
The Wilderness Workshop has not yet met with representatives from the White River Forest Alliance (WRFA), a group formed in the late 1990s to negotiate with the U.S. Forest Service on their Forest Travel Management Plan. It includes snowmobilers, off-roaders, motorcyclists, hunters, climbers, skiers and ranchers. They were dormant until recently, when they reformed to contest the Hidden Gems program.
"Sloan asked us to come talk to them and I said, ‘Sloan, I want to come talk to you but I'm still meeting with people and figuring out what the interest points are,'" said Jack Albright, a WRFA member, snowmobiler, skier, mountain biker and occasional ATV user and dirt biker. "We're getting our voices together."
The U.S. Forest Service has abstained from the debate, and a spokesman did not return a message for comment. But they previously have supported decommissioning trails and dedicating wilderness within 82,000 acres of the White River and Gunnison national forests. Those lands are included in the Hidden Gems proposal.
Shoemaker, of the Wilderness Workshop, said the Forest Service is overburdened and converting forest land to wilderness would allow them to focus on and improve existing trails.
"The Forest Service has indicated that both nationally and locally they can't maintain what they have and they need to get rid of some land," Shoemaker said.
The Hidden Gems Web site lists 30-plus endorsing organizations, including the Roaring Fork Audubon Society, the Roaring Fork Conservancy, Roaring Fork Horse Council and the Roaring Fork Group of the Sierra Club.
"We recognize the needs that off road vehicles have but the problem with them is they tear up all the habitat," said Roaring Fork Sierra Club conservation chair Bob Millette. "We both need to have places we can go."
The Aspen Skiing Co. is listed on the Hidden Gems endorsement list. But company spokesman Jeff Hanle stated Friday that the company has not endorsed Hidden Gems. He clarified that the Aspen Skiing Co. Environmental Foundation has contributed funds to both the Hidden Gems campaign and the RFMBA.
"The SkiCo has no official position on this," Hanle said.
Trails, present and future
The difficulty in finding common ground between Hidden Gems and the various subsets of recreation interests lies mostly in the sheer mass of land they are hoping to redesignate and the perceived threat to current trails and future trail development.
In negotiations with the RFMBA, Hidden Gems has identified some popular trails - including the Arbaney-Kittle and Thompson Creek trails, along with the Sloan Peak area - that they've taken out of their plans. Mountain bikers want some of the proposed Basalt Mountain Wilderness Area taken off the table, in the hopes they can develop a trail through the Christine Lake Wildlife Area sometime in the future. The Wilderness Workshop reports this is impossible, because the Colorado Division of Wildlife will not allow it.
(The proposed wilderness areas in and around the Roaring Fork Valley are listed with some information about their location, habitat and current recreational opportunities at the end of this article.)
The Hidden Gems campaign this week took out newspaper advertisements listing dozens of mountain biking trails that would not be affected by the wilderness proposal and just six remote ones that they still want.
For snowmobilers and off-roaders, who ride in zone areas and not necessarily in straight lines, that is little comfort.
"When I went and I saw the maps, I saw the areas that I like recreating in," said Albright of the WRFA.
A meeting of the Carbondale Parks and recreation Board earlier this month brought out about 200 citizens upset about Hidden Gems. Many of them were from the wide-ranging user groups that Albright and the WRFA are trying to organize. There is palpable outrage among some of the motorized recreation community, who believe their playgrounds are being taken from them.
"All these smelly hippies want to do is return us to a time when we walked everywhere and sat in our houses at night by candle light!" dirt biker Brandon Toomey said via e-mail. "This is an outrage. ... Have you ever actually been out on the trails and seen how many of your fellow locals are enjoying it out there?"
While the dirt bikers and snowmobilers have yet to enter negotiations with Wilderness Workshop, Pritchard and his mountain biking alliance have agreed that 30,000 of the 400,000 proposed acres are suitable for wilderness designation. The rest they think can be preserved under alternate designation like conservation areas." Pritchard points to the Dominguez-Escalante Conservation Area, south of Grand Junction, as an example where it was zoned to allow mountain bikes and new trails but not motorized machines and roads.
Shoemaker, of the Wilderness Workshop, counters that settling for anything less than a congressionally approved wilderness area puts pristine land on a slippery slope.
"Conservation areas are an ad hoc process and they are subject to the political persuasions of the time and the special interests," he said. He pointed to Thompson Creek, which they are attempting to save, as an example where oil companies are already making moves to develop it and could get it without the stringent rules of a wilderness area.
Also, in 1964 there was no such thing as a mountain bicycle, or the recently developed mountainboard (or mountain skateboard). On this point, Shoemaker calls the Wilderness Act ìprescientî for anticipating future development of mechanized mountain machines.
Wilderness Workshop Development Director Dave Reed said protecting more wilderness now will keep out the mountain machines of the future. "The bigger and fancier our toys get the more important it is to protect what backcountry we have," he said last week.
All sides of the debate argue that they are looking out for the best interests of future generations.
Sloan Shoemaker, of Wilderness Workshop and Hidden Gems: "Which is more important, preserving hundreds of thousand of acres of our backcountry for future generations as a source of clean air and water and as an ark of biodiversity - or leaving those lands unprotected so that future generations can ride bikes on them?"
Mike Pritchard, mountain bike spokesman: "It's not all about existing trails, it's also about letting future generations decide what to do with the land."
Jack Albright, advocate for snowmobilers and other uses: "To be honest, I am thinking about the impact on me and my family and future generations."
Bob Millette, Sierra Club conservation chair: "We want our children and grandchildren to go to these places and say, ‘This is what Colorado used to be.'"
The battle over defining government-designated wilderness is as old as the Wilderness Act itself - actually, it's older. Before the president signed it into law in 1964, the Wilderness Act went through eight years of congressional debate and 66 rewrites.
So, what are the hidden gems?
The Hidden Gems campaign has identified 12 areas in and around the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys that they want to designate as wilderness:
Hunter-Fryingpan Wilderness Area expansion. The Hidden Gems Campaign is aiming for a 2,370-acre addition to the existing wilderness to this popular area just east of Aspen. If redesignated this would close the old motorcycle road at the top of Smuggler Mountain, which the Forest Service has already scheduled for decommission. This proposed area had contained several popular rock climbing areas in the North Independent area, but those have been carved out. Hidden Gems cites timber-harvesting and mineral extraction as potential threats here.
Eagle Mountain. This small addition to the Maroon Bells/Snowmass Wilderness encompasses about half of a square mile of ragged mountain territory in Old Snowmass. It is on Bureau of Land Management land and currently hosts no trails.
Basalt Mountain. Hidden Gems has called for almost 13,000 acres of the mountain and the adjacent Cattle Creek drainage to be designated as wilderness. They are not asking to designate areas that include mountain biking trails, for the most part. Their original proposal included the Arbaney-Kittle Trail, but it has since been dropped. Still at issue are a handful of spurs dropping off of the Basalt Mountain Trail. Mountain bikers hope a future trail can be cut here through the Christine Lake Wildlife Area. Dirt biking and four-wheeling is prohibited here already, though unauthorized use is fairly prevalent.
Red Table. Hidden Gems is seeking to designate nearly 100 square miles around Red Table Mountain, adjacent to Ruedi Reservoir. It is a calving area for deer and elk, and is popular with hunters and some backcountry skiers. Portions of it are popular with off-road motorcyclers. It also is currently used for high-altitude helicopter training by the Colorado Army National Guard - the Hidden Gems Campaign is currently doing an environmental assessment of whether that training could continue under a wilderness designation.
Hay Park. This proposed 5,000-plus-acre wilderness area sits on the northeast flank of Mount Sopris. The Hay Park Trail, a popular ride for mountain bikers, lies within the protected area but Hidden Gems has excluded the trail so that bikers will not be restricted.
Assignation Ridge. This proposed 25,000-plus-acre wilderness area in the Crystal River Valley, currently comprised of both Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management property, is an off-roading destination and includes some unauthorized mountain biking trails. It also has several rock climbing areas, which have been negotiated out of the proposal.
Clear Fork. Hidden Gems is asking for 54,406 acres of this Crystal River Valley area in Gunnison County to be dedicated as wilderness here, within the larger 110,000-acre Clear Fork Divide Wilderness Area (which also includes Thompson and Hays creeks, and East Willow). Most of the area has already been leased to oil companies, raising the specter of drilling if it does not become wilderness.
Thompson Creek. This area of more than 32,000 acres just outside of Carbondale would fall within the proposed greater Clear Fork Divide Wilderness Area. It contains what is believed to be the largest aspen forest in the world. The popular Thompson Creek Trail has been carved out of the Hidden Gems proposal and biking there is not affected by the proposed designation. RFMBA and Hidden Gems are still negotiating an offshoot from it called Middle Thompson Trail. There are active oil leases in Thompson Creek, and Hidden Gems has identified drilling there as a grave threat.
East Willow. Also falling within the larger proposed Clear Fork Divide Wilderness, the East Willow comprises about 8,500 acres of new wilderness 20 miles southwest of Carbondale. The remote area is popular with hunters and unauthorized off-roading. Some of it has already been leased for oil drilling and a proposal for a natural gas pipeline through it is pending.
Hayes Creek. This proposed area, 16 miles south of Carbondale, includes more than 9,900 acres of new wilderness land. It includes Huntsman Ridge, an oft-used off-roading site. Hidden Gems calls the area ìan erosive messî in need of rehabilitation.
McClure Pass. This relatively small, 2.6-square-mile area of steep and avalanche-prone terrain lies south of the actual McClure Pass in the Crystal River Valley. It has no developed trails.
Treasure Mountain. Comprising 3,866 acres of rugged terrain adjacent to the Raggeds Wilderness Area three miles southeast of Marble, this area would link the Raggeds to the Maroon Bells/Snowmass Wilderness Area. There are no maintained trails here, but backcountry and helicopter skiing has occurred in the area. Heli trips would be banned if this becomes wilderness.
