Colorado National Monument is a very convenient stop just off I-70 just E of the Utah/Colorado state line. The Monument is administered by the National Park Service so it has the feel of a National Park. There’s an entrance fee, well maintained hard surface roads, visitor center, and campground. www.nps.gov/…
The winding road skirts the edge of most of the cliffs of the monument and has no guard rails. There are many views of the Wingate Sandstone cliffs that are the Monument’s main attractions as well as views of Grand Junction Colorado and the broad Colorado River Valley.
There’s been talk (for a few thousands of years) of making the Monument a Park and I think it a good idea. All the infrastructure for a Park is in place and it has a Park feel to it. Good place to drive along, stop, look at the cliffs, take some snapshots.
Of more significance from a public lands perspective is the McInnis Canyon National Conservation Area which abuts the Monument to the west. The Conservation Area itself is further divided into the Black Ridge Canyon Wilderness, which is basically all public lands south of the Colorado River, and a much smaller area north of the river criss crossed with a spider web of mountain bike trails, campsites, Interstate 70, etc.
For comparison, the Wilderness is 75 of the 123 thousand acre Recreation Area, the Monument next door is a mere 20 thousand acres. Good deal in my book, no one goes to the Wilderness, Rec Area is packed cheek by jowl with mountain bikers, Monument has car tourists like us. I know that if I ever want a bit of solitude I can just head off into the Wilderness, there are almost no roads or trails which is how I like things.
We camped on the far side of the Monument on BLM land past the tiny town of Glade Park, on land that was rising to the Uncompahgre Plateau to the south.
Glade Park isn’t a Park. “parks” in Colorado parlance are grassy low lying areas between mountains. The entire town and it’s surrounds are private land of course.
When first homesteaded people proved up on wet acreage, dry uplands are worthless without water. Ecologically the more moist areas of the lower grassy park is more important than the drier uplands. Much of the larger fauna of the uplands, deer, elk, and the predators that feed on them, depend on the richer foods and warmer temps of the park to survive the winters. The ubiquitous pinyon pines feed all kinds of rodents, birds (turkey too) and bear. A short walk around our campsite showed signs of everything except bear and cat.
On our way in and out of our campsite, driving along the road I also noticed something else that seemed out of place.
Large suburban type homes far past commuting range of the city of Grand Junction. They had no visible cars, lots of manicured landscaped irrigated lawn close to the house, and not much sign of being lived in.
These are mostly second homes or retirement homes. Almost no traffic in or out of them. The lots are five to thirty acres in size and show none of the detritus one usually sees with rural living, no piles of firewood or old trucks, no projects. These were immaculate, sterile, mcmansions plopped down on the desert as if helicoptered in.
Glade Park also had some cows. Private land, bottom land, irrigated. All of the BLM I looked at showed no sign of cows over the past four or five years or however long a cow pie lasts in the desert. There might have been some active allotments being grazed but I saw none.
Around our campsite the area looked cut. One morning after the snow I started a fire in the stove then went for a walk. I’ve learned that if you start a fire in the woodstove kids will sleep on another hour of deep sleep early in the morning. My time for a little sniffing around.
One thing I noticed was that despite all the torn up vegetation there were no stumps, and actually none of the branches lying around had been cut. I walked across the ground and noticed that things seemed shredded more than chipped. Something had come in and torn up the pinyon and juniper trees. Acres of torn up with patches of intact pinyon juniper between.
Lots of sign from deer, rabbit, and even some elk. Down in a draw that was actually a seasonal watercourse I saw the recent tracks of a coyote.
When I got home I called the BLM office in Junction and the guy who answered the phone happened to be a forester.
I mentioned the area I’d been in and the shredded trees and also the old tracks of what looked to be a skidder or front end loader, you know one of those big articulate in the center things, the forester knew immediately what the name of that machine was but I can’t for the life of me remember what he called it, it shreds trees
Shredding is a good thing to happen to pinyon/juniper stands, it lets other plants grow up in their stead, like sagebrush, habitat for sage grouse those birds everyone is het up about. I know that juniper or cedar as they are sometimes called (same genus so you go ahead and call them as you’d like) suck up the water and dissuade other species from growing in their shadow. Pinyon has tasty nuts and feeds lots of animals but then bushes and grasses feed many more, and they were leaving about half the land untouched.
The forester was guarded in what he’d say about the species that might benefit from such treatment, which is a shame. They are so used to being quoted on some blog or magazine to make a point, and often the point being made is how horrid the BLM or someone is, or they are misrepresented into being something they aren’t.
Of course most of the BLM money isn’t going towards habitat or wildlands management, it’s going to house feral horses in some gawd awful holding pens in some other state for the rest of their natural lives.
When sage grouse looked like they might possibly be listed as an endangered species every energy company and their brother got into donating money to improve sagebrush habitat. I’m not sure how much money, probably hundreds of millions. They studied, they poked and prodded, Utah even went on a coyote killing bounty paying holy war. The idea of pushing so much money into sage grouse salvation was that if the species was listed, all that money would stop. And it worked. Conservation orgs were happy to have so much money spent on the species, which often had spin off benefits to other species, and they knew that they would never ever in their wildest dreams be able to replicate that effort with their own funding. Everyone except the litigious orgs (y’all know the sumbitches I’m talkin bout) was very much against listing.
So we got a lot of habitat improvements compliments of many people you wouldn’t think of as being into that kind of thing. Which is still ok by me. And I suspect that the land I camped on was maybe shredded with some of those big org donations.
When I got back to my tent and added some wood to the stove and made coffee and as much noise as I could to make those lazy kids get up I got to thinking about habitat, and critters and grouse and those houses out on the flats on the way to town and how they were all dark the night before when I went out to look at the stars and how there should have been lights.
Houses take up habitat. Driveways take up habitat. Landscaping eats habitat with a voracious appetite. Dog fences eat habitat because they deny habitat to all wildlife within them even if the dogs are only there briefly in the spring. I too would like a house out past Junction, sure would beat the wall tent, wouldn’t mind a couple aussie shepherds too, I like dogs. Can’t blame people for wanting to live an enjoyable life.
I saw a sign on the way up the road to the BLM, “Desert Solitude, 35 acre ranches”. Less than a thousand of those second homes would be larger than the entire Colorado National Monument, on much more significant land for wildlife. What typically happens is a rancher decides to throw in the towel and just starts selling chunks of land, or maybe he sells the entire thing to someone else who develops it and the rancher moves to Montana. All those cattle that people love to hate are gone, in their stead are large suburban mcmansions that often don’t even get lived in, and a lot less habitat.
Thanks for the rescue. It’s a snowy spring Saturday here out on the plains E of the mountains in CO this morning. Not so different from that recent morning in the tent on the other side of the state.