That's Cotton in the Blog Stew -- Don't Eat It

Marco checks out a muddy arroyo in Huerfano County.

I let March go by without posting. That's bad. I was deep into the most annoying book-edit of my life. Kind of like "Who's on first?" but with different drafts and different sets of corrections from different proof-readers.

That said, I did get out in the weirdly warm and dry weather to investigate some public hunting lands-mostly Colorado state trust lands that are also grazed, but opened during hunting seasons. 

I may live in the foothills and love mountains, but the High Plains, mesas, and canyons call me too, Chad Love, who lives in Woodward, Oklahoma (touched by one of the big prairie fires this spring) says it well. He talks about autumn here, but early spring as upland seasons end is just the other side:

If you really want to hear the world creak and groan and slip from one epoch into the next, walk out into the prairie in early September. Find a hill to sit on, turn your face up to the sky, let that ancient celestial light strike your eyes, and listen to the ancient gods whispering in your soul’s ear; old thoughts, old yearnings, old fears, old hopes, all welling back up from within on the tendrils of that first softly keening fall breeze that marks the trembling of the seasons and the dimming of the summer light. 

And it's dry, so dry. What can farmers do? Some people suggest that the future is less corn and more cotton, even here in Colorado. 

For decades, the Wertz family focused on corn and alfalfa in the Arkansas Valley. But in recent years, the economics became harder to ignore. Water supplies dwindled, and production costs climbed. They needed a crop that used less water but still offered a solid return.

Even though cotton had never been grown successfully in Colorado, Wertz believed it could be the right fit for their operation.

“Finding a crop that cash flowed better and something that conserved water, we decided cotton was the way to go,” he said. “Cotton does all of those things. It just fit a niche that we were looking for.”
Cotton brings in similar revenue per acre as corn, but requires far less fertilizer and water. That makes it a natural choice for hot, dry areas and more sustainable in drought conditions. 

 Maybe parts of Eastern Colorado will start resembling West Texas—wisps of cotton blowing in the wind. 

The Lonely Horse

The lone horse grazes at the Blue Heron Ponds near Florence, Colo.

Sometimes when headed north I stop at some old gravel pits (now full of water) on BLM land by the Arkansas River, now managed by Fremont County as a kind of basic, "undeveloped" park, which is just how I like it, thanks very much. No picnic tables. No soccer fields. Just a few people walking around or fishing for catfish or perch. 

Marco likes to swim in the ponds or the river there, and when we walk back and forth, we usually see "the horse," whose caretaker calls him River. It turns how that he has a backstory, as described last September in the Denver Post: 

For two years, [Carol[ Stires, 64, has been caring for the abandoned wild horse that’s living on a sliver of public land on the Arkansas River, between Florence and Penrose. At the beginning, she couldn’t get near him. Now, after nearly two years of spending time with River, the mustang comes when called by the name she gave him. He follows her around the park and contentedly grazes a few feet from her. 

But the park isn’t a suitable place for the horse. At a little more than 100 acres, there is no fence between the land and the busy highway that forms its western border. Unleashed dogs [not Marco!] chase River, horseback riders spook him and gunshots send him running when hunting season starts in the fall.   

The federal agency that manages the park agrees — River shouldn’t be in the park. 

Stires has made it her mission to help capture the abandoned horse — to make sure he gets to a sanctuary where he’d have room to roam. If she can’t catch him, she worries the Bureau of Land Management will dart him with a tranquilizer, which could be dangerous.

Where did he come from?

The Bureau of Land Management rounded up the horse from the wild in 2020 in Wyoming and adopted him out, BLM paperwork shows. The person who adopted River, then 20, used him as a rodeo bucking horse before he escaped to the park, Stires said. The owners have not captured him. 

Another BLM mustang dumped. Everyone says "adopt them," but not too many people want them. Elsewhere in Fremont County, the Colorado Dept. of Corrections is shutting down its 30-year-old program in which inmates halter-break wild mustangs and otherwise habituate them to people to make them more adoptable because the BLM won't pay for it.

Like many other reporters, I wrote about the wild-horse program once. From the prison's viewpoint, it was a good thing -- a prestige inmate job. No one ever leapt onto a mustang and galloped toward the horizon -- from what I heard, such an infraction would have shut down the program; consequently, inmates themselves would have punished the man who wrecked it, if he was caught and brought back inside the walls. 

For 30 years, thousands of wild horses captured in federal roundups have ended up in corrals at a state prison complex in Cañon City, where they were cared for and trained by inmates through a program that prepared horses for adoption and provided work experience for people returning to life after incarceration. 

But the program is ending. Citing escalating costs, the federal Bureau of Land Management has not renewed its contract with the Colorado Department of Corrections for the mustang program. The 2,073 horses at the prison complex will go to holding facilities in Wyoming or Utah, minus about 100 animals that were captured in Colorado. 

From what I read, there are about as many mustangs standing around in pens as out on the range. The land managers are caught inside an Iron Triangle:

1. Just leaving mustangs on the public lands angers ranchers who lease grazing rights and wildlife biologists and hunters who see them competing with wild game.

2. Killing them on the range angers the horse cultists, who see horses as intrinsically morally better than cattle, elk, mule deer, etc. 

3. Sending the excess horses to slaughterhouses invokes #2 as well. Adoption rules had to be written to keep people from adopting the mustangs and then selling them for slaughter.  

This is not just a Trump Administration problem; it has been growing for decades. There are more "pleasure horses" in America than there people who want to own and care for them. Dump in thousands more half-broke, cheaper mustangs that come with certain rules, and the problem worsens. Yes, there are some "wild horse sanctuaries," but not enough for all the horses stagnating in BLM holding pens.

So Rain the elderly mustang ends up dumped "("escaped") in a public park, where, to my mind, his life has not been too bad, but management does not want him there. 

From Sagebrush Rebellion to Tech Bro Megacities: Someone Always Wants the Public Lands

What a change a week makes. Last week my email blew up with responses to the possible sale of public lands  in the West, thanks to language inserted in the "Big Beautiful Bill" by Senator Mike Lee (R-Deseret). 

Now the bill has passed and been signed by the president but without that language, thanks to a huge outcry by organizations and ordinary Westerners (and others).  

(I don't like huge "omnibus" bills on principle, because who knows what horrors lurk on page 635, but apparently Pres. Trump wanted One Big Bill as a part of the "shock and awe" tactic he has adopted in his second term.)

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers was one of the most involved groups, but as the graphic suggests, it was a multi-headed effort.

“This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners who stood up and said loud and clear: Our lands are not for sale,” said Patrick Berry, BHA President and CEO. “BHA members flooded the phone lines, sent emails, rallied their communities, and kept the pressure on until this provision was pulled. We didn’t just show up—we led the charge.”

Some crisis is always invoked to justify taking public lands away. "States can manage them better" was the war cry of the 1980s "Sagebrush Rebellion" during the so-called Energy Crisis. What that really meant was that it would be easier for oil companies etc. to influence state legislators while it would be harder for conservation groups to fight battles in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, etc all at once. 

Now the war cry is "housing." But at this map that shows the lands identified for sale in Senator Lee's proposal. Housing for cities? For ski-town workers? Or for mountain mini-mansions? Lost forever to hunters, campers, etc.

Condos are often the first step on the home-ownership ladder, but Colorado, for instance, killed condo building by piling too much legal liability risk on builders. So they just stopped building. This year the legislature tried to undo its stupidity with "Governor Pudge" proclaiming that the new  "Construction Defects Law, Ending Years of Gridlock to Build Housing People Can Afford."

Resort towns zone for big houses on big lots while the workers sleep in their cars.

Selling public lands will never be "the fix," but you can bet someone will propose it again.  How about brand-new high-tech cities in the desert? 

The always-radioactive idea of selling off federal land comes and goes from Mesa County [western Colorado] and the environs, where 3 out of every 4 square feet of the high desert is owned by a government. Biting off a piece of forlorn pasture next to a highway exit for an apartment building may be controversial, though it has been done. 

But when the proposals started flying this month for everything from selling the popular Lunch Loops bike trails, to plunking 150,000 new residents down onto a no-rules “Freedom City” of the sage, the tech-bro think tanks floating the edgy concepts are finding that the practical folks of the Western Slope have a few questions.

 There will be more, you can bet on it.

 

Every Colorado Wildfire from 2009 — Until Last Week

The 2011 Sand Gulch Fire on the San Isabel NF just before it blew up to 2500 acres.

 If you wonder where wildfires ignite in Colorado, follow this link and scroll down to a compex interactive map.

It was created by journalists at the Colorado Sun online publication (and a good for statewide -- although inevitably Denver-centric) news. Authors John Ingold and Danika Worthington write:

As fires explode around the Front Range, we wanted to map out where they were in relation to each other. But taking it further, we stepped away from the minute-by-minute updates to take a historical view of fires and where they burn. 

We looked through the National Interagency Fire Center’s records on fires since 2009 and plotted them on a map — all 10,849 of them. What resulted was a galaxy of blazes, but one with a clear message: Reported fires tend to happen most often where people live.

One caution: This data comes from the National Interagency Fire Center's database. That means it favors fires that burn on or adjacent to public lands.

There are in fact many wildfires in eastern Colorado that don't show up here. And while I live where there is a mix of public and private land, I can see that some fires in my area are missing, which I think is due to falling through the cracks in federal reporting and cataloging.

How a Popular Hunting App and a Conservation Group Forced a Public-Access Issue

Sample OnX map.

An article on "corner-cutting," public access, and whether landowners own airpace over property corners makes it to the New York Times.

I am giving you a link to an archived copy so that you won't have to deal with the paywall: "It's Public Land. But the Public Can't Reach It."

Not bad reporting, but I bet Hal Herring is mighty pissed off over having a quote edited to make him sound anti-hunter.

First, the app:

This was the “game changer,” he has said. By collating state and county data and putting it on a microchip, [OnX founder Eric] Siegfried turned the project in the scrapbooking room into a company that just received more than $87 million from investors and that understands the American landscape arguably better than the government does.

It turned OnX almost overnight into a popular tool for the nation’s 15 million hunters.
In answering the question of who owns what, OnX helped bring to light how much public land — often highly coveted — is not reachable by the public. That’s because private landowners control access.

Enter some Wyoming hunters who "corner-crossed" from one section of public land to another to access a highly desirable but "land-locked" public land for elk hunting. They were arrested for trespass, acquited, but then sued by the landowner, "Fred Eshelman, a drug company founder from North Carolina."

The "boots on the ground" conservation group Backcountry Hunters & Anglers got involved.

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers helped the Missouri hunters find lawyers, rallied its 35,000 members for support and started a GoFundMe page, which has raised more than $110,000 to pay the hunters’ legal bills

“What judge, jury or person with two firing brain cells is going to say that crossing that airspace is worth $7 million?” [BHA's Wyoming co-chair] said. “That’s not going to happen. It’s absurd.”

Mr. Eshelman did not respond to an interview request for this article. Discussing the case in an email statement to The Wall Street Journal this month, he said “forcible trespass” was a safety issue and could affect the property value.

If OnX supercharged the question of who gets to go where — though the company declined to take a side in the case — Backcountry Hunters & Anglers gave it an influential platform.

 Read the whole thing and stay tuned.

Check Out Colorado's State Trust Land Map Server

It is an interactive map of all lands managed by the State Land Board.

From a news release:

Our public map provides data about our 2.8 million acres of surface trust land and our four million acres of mineral estate. We’ve made our GIS layers available to the public with tabular information about leases, rights-of-way, Stewardship Trust designations, the Public Access Program, acquisitions, patents, and more.

Plus, you can overlay your own Shapefile, CSV, or KML files on top of ours. Zip your files and use our new ‘Add Data’ tool, located in the top right corner of our map

If you go to the basic map, there will be a menu of map layers on the right-hand side of screen. You can check "SLB leases-recreation," but be aware of one thing — not all "recreational" leases provide public access for hunting and fishing.

Some State Land Board lands are leased to individuals or hunting clubs, etc. So click on the parcel to get the leasing info, as shown in the screen shot here.

When 'Influencers' Go Wrong

Remains of a social-media influencer eaten by wolves (I wish).

I used to hang out a lot with hunting and fishing writers — even published a little myself —and one sure conversation was always "How can you provide information without giving away too much?"

Do you say you caught this perfect trout "in such-and-such a pool on the South Platte River," or just "in the South Platte River below Cheesman Dam," or "in the South Platte," or "in the mountains southwest of Denver"?  Because it was true that outdoor writers' work could send the hordes to places that previously had been lightly pressured.

Now everyone who catches the fish has to put it on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And that pisses off some people who say that "influencers" are ruining the outdoors.

"There's a picture of me just a few months old and in a backpack, with my parents taking me for a hike through a national forest where I grew up," says Steve [not his real name]. "And as I've grown, my love of the outdoors has grown."

But also growing is Steve's frustration with influencers trampling over his beloved open spaces to get that perfect photograph.

"I drew the conclusion between the rise of this disrespect and the rise of Instagram and social media," he says, speaking to the BBC from a mostly rural area in the western US. "So I decided to start an Instagram account, to fight fire with fire."

So what did "Steve" do? He started an Instagram account called Public Lands Hate You, with posts like this:

You probably know that this account has a bone to pick with influencers who engage in harmful and illegal behavior on your public lands and post it publicly for the world to see. Not only are the initial actions of these influencers undesirable, but by posting their behavior for thousands of people to see, influencers are giving their followers the wrong idea about what is acceptable on your public lands.⁣

Trampling wildflower meadows. Introducing beauty products into hot springs. Crossing closure fences. Off-leash dogs in leash-controlled areas. Approaching wildlife. Ignoring drone laws. All for the perfect shot to promote themselves and their sponsors.⁣⁣

⁣And there is an associated website: Public Lands Hate You, with the slogan "Our public lands are not a prop!" 

It's not that people go to these places, it's that they break laws or disrespect the land in order to get the perfect photo to illustrate their perfect curated life.

Go have a look. Raise a litte ruckus. Those who live by the clicks can die from the clicks.

The Conspiracy to Take Away Public Lands

John Gale from Backcountry Hunters and Anglers speaks to a rally
at the Colorado State Capitol in February 2015 (Durango Herald).

There is a threat to public lands in the West, and the mainstream media are largely igoring it. Even HighCountry News is ignoring it, but then HCN more and more  focused on California — that must be where the big donors are).

Unlike the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion of the mid-1980s, this is stealthier.

State legislatures in places like Colorado and Montana are seeing bills introduced urging that public lands administered by the federal government — Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, maybe even National Parks Service — be turned over for the states for management.

Doing so would be “more efficient,” “closer to the people,” whatever. The states, of course, would not be able to take care of them.

Can you imagine Colorado footing the bill for a bad forest fire season? Even my state representative, Jim Wilson, R-Salida, who strikes anti-Washington poses (“Personally, I would like to see the Feds out of the picture”) admits it:

If the Federal government were to give the land to the state of Colorado, how would we be able to afford the management costs?  I doubt that the Federal government would give back to the Colorado all the public tax dollars that are spent annually on those lands.  Not to mention the PILT (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) dollars that are used by Colorado counties to fund essential services as well as education.  And, to sell and/or develop the land to afford to manage the land is like eating your seed corn...not a sustainable practice!

But this stealth movement keeps puttering along.

You can imagine the scenarios if a state with a lot of public land, such as Utah, got ahold of it. Everything would be wide open — even more than now—to leasing for drilling and mining. Wildlife, water quality, etc., would not be be merely in the back seat; they would be clinging to the rear bumper of the development-mobile.

Since the state always is short of money (roads! schools! Medicaid!) the pressure would be on to start selling. The buyers would line up:

(a) energy companies
(b) mining companies
(c) rich people wanting huge ranches (doubling as private hunting grounds
(d) other land developers

So who is bankrolling this movement. My bet is (a).

There has been some media coverage, but it is isolated. No one is connecting Montana with Colorado, for example.

Some sample headlines:

Colorado Wildlife Federation's "Public Lands Update":

Throughout the 2015 legislative session of the Colorado General Assembly, CWF defended public lands managed by the US Forest Service and BLM from two bad bills: Senate Bills 15-039 (an attempt to confer concurrent state jurisdiction over federal lands) and 15-232 (to study how the state could manage these lands). Both bills were rejected. Colorado, as well as other western states where similar bills have been proposed, does not have the financial resources or personnel to take over management of a huge additional 23-million acre portfolio of public lands that are managed by BLM and US Forest Service. The likely outcome from such transfers would be sales of some of these irreplaceable lands to private interests.

 "[MontanaGovernor Steve] Bullock Vetoes Federal Land Task Force Bill”

"A careful reading of the bill … reveals that the transfer of public lands is still very much in the sights of the task force,” Bullock’s veto letter says. “My position on this issue is crystal clear: I do not support any effort that jeopardizes or calls into question the future of our public lands heritage.”

If you backpack, hike, hunt, fish, look for mineral specimens, collect mushrooms, take photos, or do anything else on public lands, imagine losing that access. You would be no better off than a Texan.

Cannabis and Water Law: A Western Reportorial Twofer

Despite the huge importance of water issues in Colorado — headwaters of four or five major rivers (depending how you count) and home of more water lawyers than anyplace — news outlets often don't cover water issues well.

On my first reporting job, at the now-vanished Colorado Springs Sun, it seemed like my colleagues found water issues to be arcane and scary. "Water is hard," to paraphrase Teen Talk Barbie. 

On my second reporting job, I sat out to educate myself — with not a little help from the late Charles "Tommy" Thompson, long-time general manager of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District — or as I liked to think of it, the secret government.

The concepts of Colorado water law are fairly simple, but their permutations are endless, and the system operates like warring tribes — if you don't fight, you lose.

But add cannabis culture, and suddenly water issues are not just vital, they are sexy!

"Water District Votes Dry on Pot" (mostly paywalled)

"[Pueblo West] water available for pot growers; St. Charles Mesa keeping moratorium"

"Pot Shop Battles for Water Supply" 

But this is all the legal stuff. Drought-stricken California sees legal, semi-legal, and outlaw grows using up water and polluting streams:

"Pot Farm Pollution: Too Dangerous to Deal With?"

"Study Finds Medical Pot Farms Draining Streams Dry"

Why the NRA is Wrong on Public Lands

You would think that a magazine called American Hunter would be interested in preserving high-quality wildlife habitat. But you would be wrong.

American Hunter is published by the National Rife Association. Now generally I support the NRA, or I would not have paid for a life membership.

Not only does the NRA support 2nd Amendment issues, although not always as quickly and nimbly some would ask, but it works in the background in many ways for the shooting sports. They make insurance affordable for small local shooting ranges, for example.

But when it comes to public lands management, you have to wonder who they are working for.

Example: an article in the December 2011 by J.R. Robbins, managing editor of their hunter's rights department, titled "NRA Backs Bill to Increase Hunter Access."

Now reading that, you might think that Robbins was talking about areas to which hunters did not currently have access. But you would be wrong, again.

Hunters have access to these Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. I hunt them. My friends hunt them.

So what is the NRA's problem here? Simple, these are Inventoried Roadless Areas. They are managed as wilderness areas.

Here in Colorado, for example, those are good spots for elk. All kinds of studies show that the more roads you have, the fewer elk will stay in the area (see p. 4). (Here is one for Roosevelt elk in Oregon—PDF download.)

And what the NRA wants is motorized access. Rmmm rmmm roar!

Why? Look the advertisers. Back cover: Cam-am ATVs. Inside: a full-page add for Yamaha ATVs, and a third-page ad for Moose ATV batteries, plus a 1.5-page gushing "advertorial" review of the Ford 150 pickup truck.


The NRA Is a very top-down organization. They don't have boots on the ground. There are scores of members in my little county, but no one asks our opinion on roadless-area management. Nor do they have a volunteer network following these issues the way that many conservation groups do.

Ducks Unlimited knows that you can't hunt waterfowl without wetlands. Trout Unlimited knows that you can't fish for trout without cold, clean waters.

Evidently the NRA knows that you can't sell ATV advertising unless you are consistently anti-roadless area.

I will never forget the time that I attended a senator's public meeting on one roadless area in Chaffee County. The NRA's state representative, some guy from Denver who looked like he did not get outdoors very often, got up and gave the official line: roadless bad.

He was followed by a number of local hunters who all said some varietion of the same thing: "I'm an NRA member too, but I am in favor of the proposed wilderness designation because it is good for wildlife — and I don't mind walking."

Who do you think impressed the senator more?

So you might think that a hunting magazine would want to protect the future of hunting through the protection of wildlife habitat—public-lands habitat which can be hunted right now and which does not need "increased acess."  But not when it's the NRA's magazine.

'Mustang Mythology'

Conservation writer Ted Williams takes on the "feral-horse lobby" in Audubon magazine.

A feral horse is a far greater threat to native ecosystems than a cow. When grass between shrubs is gone cows move on; horses stomp the shrubs into the dirt to get the last blade. What’s more, when cattle deplete forage they’re moved to new allotments, and they’re taken off the range in winter. But horses pound vegetation all year. And because horses live on range incapable of consistently sustaining them they sometimes starve and, in the process, cause the starvation of such sensitive desert creatures as sage grouse, bighorn sheep, Gila monsters, pronghorns, and desert tortoises. Not only will horses beat springs and seeps into mud holes, they’ll stand over them, running off wild ungulates, people, and even sage grouse.

The feral-horse lobby dismisses these facts as fiction concocted by the BLM on behalf of the cattle industry.

Some follow-up here on his blog.

Like many Colorado journalists, I once wrote my obligatory news feature on the program in which state prison inmates in Cañon City work with wild horses to make them adoptable.

But there are thousands more horses than there are people who want them. And slaughtering them has been made almost impossible. So they end up in corrals.

Yet the mythology persists.

Dog Rules Lead to Conflict with Division of Wildlife

Some northern Colorado residents are upset with a Division of Wildlife decision to ban all dogs—except those engaged in hunting—from two state wildlife areas, Lon Hagler and Lonetree Reservoir. (Note sentence in red on the linked pages.)

As reported in the Loveland Reporter-Herald,

State officials have said the ban was the result of complaints from neighbors and hunters about aggressive and unruly off-leash dogs.

The local wildlife manager received 15 complaints over two years, and her boss took seven in the same period, state officials have said.

The meetings were public, but the residents who have come together to try to reverse the ban say they never knew the proposal was even out there.

The information was posted ahead of time on the Colorado Division of Wildlife website. But it was not easy to find.

Loveland resident Connie Kogler — one of the leaders of the Stop the Dog Ban committee — said it took her two full days of digging on the website to find anything.

Now there is an online petition to get the CDOW to reverse its decision.

Neither the petitioners nor the newspaper seem to be addressing the larger issues, however.

One is that state wildlife areas near urban areas are often treated by the non-hunting/fishing public as just more parks or "green space"

This is not their purpose: they provide wildlife habitat and basic hunting/fishing/birding opportunities and only minimal amenities: a parking lot, a boat ramp, maybe an outhouse.

Since hunters and anglers pay for them (the CDOW gets no state tax money), the Division in 2006 required users without a hunting or fishing license to buy a  $10 "habitat stamp."

In 2009, that requirement was quietly dropped, possibly because the CDOW saw it as unenforceable.

Another is the uncontrolled dogs off-leash problem.

Yet another is the "neighbors" issue. How often have we seen someone move in next to a state wildlife area because it is "green space" and then freak out when hunting season comes and ohmygod they are shooting over there.

Of course, if these were state parks there would be lots more regulations, including on dogs, not to mention entrance fees and all the rest.

Cannibis in Colorado Forests--and Predictable Outrage

Following the recent discovery of 14,000 marijuana plants somewhere on the Pike National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service decided to take a larger look at the problem.

Forest Service officials said Wednesday they believe illegal immigrants are being brought to Colorado for mass cultivation of marijuana and they are leaving behind a trail of trash, pesticides and other debris that has damaged public forests and polluted rivers.

We know what country most of these illegal immigrants are coming from--Finland. You can tell from the trash that they leave behind them: koskenkorva bottles, empty jars of cloudberry jam, gnawed crusts of karjalanpiirakka, high-end cell phones, and saunas made from pine poles and blue tarps.

Predictably, Colorado's professional Finnish activists are screaming about ethnic prejudice.

It's a real problem when a bunch of people carrying out an illegal activity on public land decide to defend their little patch of it with snipers armed with deadly Mosin-Nagant rifles. You're walking along with your fishing rod or birding binocs and kaboom!

In all seriousness, this is not cool. If you want to grow dope, do it in the basement, not on my public lands.

A close relative got involved in that whole national-forest growing scene in northern California some years back, and I was real happy when she saw the light and got out of it before anything bad happened to her.

M. and I had a real "Oh shit" movement some years back when we were counting owls for the Bureau of Land Management. On our first hike into one counting area, we rounded a bend in the trail to find stacks of coiled plastic pipe and other construction materials, way way far from any road.

My first thought was "pot plantation!" My second thought was, "Here in Colorado above 8,000 feet?? Is the growing season long enough?" (Evidently it is in places.)

We saw no one. Later we returned and figured out that the rancher with the grazing lease had brought in those materials to pipe water to a stock tank. What a relief.

Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary

According to the Denver Post, Senator Ken Salazar will accept the post of Secretary of the Interior.

As one-time employees (in a small way) of the DOI, M. and I are moderately happy to see him in the job. (I wonder if he will make any progress with the Indian oil-royalties quagmire.)

At least we hope that under Sec. Salazar there will be less political meddling in scientific research.

Interior Secretary Speculations

John Orr at Coyote Gulch summarizes speculation about who will be the next Secretary of the Interior, a big item for us Westerners.

I have seen some blogosphere gossip that the job was offered to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, but I cannot find a link offhand.

At least Richardson would know what the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management do. But apparently he wanted a foreign-policy job -- Secretary of State -- and not getting that, will take Commerce instead.

GAO: Boarding Wild Horses is a Money-Loser

Costs of the Bureau of Land Management's wild-horse management program are spiraling out of control, reports the Denver Post.

Far more horses are just being kept in holding pens than anyone wants to adopt, says the federal General Accounting Office.

"The program is at a critical crossroads," the GAO report said. "Within the program's existing budget, BLM cannot afford to care for all the animals off the range, while at the same time manage wild horse and burro populations on the range."

There is a program by which state prison inmates care for and break horses, which are later adopted. Everyone loves it -- it's a feel-good news story. When I worked for the Cañon City Daily Record, I wrote a feature about it too.

The horses find homes, the inmates have a purpose in their lives, everyone wins.

But it places only a fraction of the horses that are rounded up.

The simple fact is that the horse-adoption market is finite, and not everyone who wants a horse wants a mustang.

The BLM has relied on adoption programs that require people who adopt the animals—protected under the wild horse act—don't sell them for slaughter. The agency also keeps older animals or those deemed unadoptable in long-term facilities. Some live for 15 to 20 years in the pens.

"Since 2001, over 74,000 animals have been removed from the range, while only about 46,600 have been adopted or sold," the report said.

This is the unanticipated dollar cost of the sentimentality that keeps the mustangs out of dog food cans and butcher shops. (Via Colorado Independent.)

UPDATE: BLM tries shuffling money and horses while talks continue.

The Mammoth Hot Springs Elk & People Rodeo

Elk wandering on the lawn of Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. Note the bull on the left. Click to embiggen.

I don't know how long that semi-tame elk have hung out around the hotel and old Fort Yellowstone grounds. I'm sure that decades ago, it was the easiest way for visitors to see them. But encouraging bears with open garbage dumps made them easy to see too, yet the Park Service abolished that practice eventually.

When we visited on Oct. 3, the rut was in full swing, I could see at least five bulls from the steps of the visitor center (the old Army post's BOQ). Two had harems and were acting acutely aware of each other, with occasional bugling and aggressive body language--at a safe distance.

But the park rangers were in a bigger lather than the bulls.

At the visitor center we had Anna Pigeon with a bullhorn herding visitors around: "You're between two bulls!! Up on the porch!!!"

Someone in a patrol car dashed back and forth, light bar flashing, flicking his siren, and barking confusing orders at drivers over his PA system: "Stop! Go! Turn! Stop!"

Another ranger placed orange cones on sidewalks and driveways, constantly rearranging them as the elk moved around. It was almost an artistic performance.

M. made various dry comments about "testosterone poisoning," referring, I think, to the bull elk.

I thought of UN peacekeepers in Bosnia: Lots of activity, but no real effect on the conflict.

But then the Park Service is 20 percent about preservation and 80 percent about crowd control. (Or maybe that should be 10:90.)

M. and I waited until the rangers' attention was elsewhere, then strolled towards where the Jeep was parked. Someone shouted through a bullhorn--I gestured towards the parking lot and kept going. And we left.

I suppose that if they are going to have semi-tame elk, they could bring in some semi-tame wolves. Then no one would have to leave the hotel to see nature in the raw. Visitors could sit in the lovely Art Deco hotel dining room, listening to the big-band music on the sound system, and watch predation in the parking lot.

Or they could start discouraging elk from hanging around the hotel complex.

UPDATE: Yellowstone's web site has a page of videos of people getting too close to elk and buffalo. You can watch rutting elk attacking cars at Mammoth. But given the road layout, there is no other way for drivers to go, so why does the NPS allow the "tame" elk?

Candidates Still Ignore Western Public-Lands Issues

Ed Quillen's Denver Post column from August 19th, "What the West Wants to Know," is worth reading, if you missed it. He rightly asks,

The pundits who analyze such matters also predict that New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon will all be competitive states that will get a lot of attention when the campaign heats up after Labor Day.

So why the sense of disappointment? Because I haven't heard much mention of "Western issues," even though we're supposed to be important players this time around.

Check out his questions for the candidates, about the Forest Service fire-fighting budget, for example.

As for me, I would like to ask Senator McCain, "Who is your pick for Interior Secretary?" Because if it's another James Watt, there is no chance you would get my vote.

And I would like to ask Senator Obama, "Without any help from your staff, could you name three agencies within the Department of the Interior?"

Governor Palin could answer that question, I'm sure -- of course, she is probably at odds with all of them.

Quillen is right: Neither McCain nor Obama has addressed these issues.

Senator McCain at least produced rare bipartisan unity in Colorado's senatorial delegration with his off-the-cuff remark about re-visiting the Colorado River Compact, causing both Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard to shout, "No way!"

But does Obama know what the Compact is and how it influences population patterns and agriculture in the Southwest and Southern California? I wonder.

Whoever wins, I see plenty of non-partisan issue-oriented activism ahead.

Bureaucratic Idiocy: the Forest Service

Journalists are starting to put "cash-strapped" in front of Forest Service the way that they put "tiny" in front of Rhode Island.

Here on southern Colorado's San Isabel National Forest, our local ranger district is making noises about closing recreational facilities such as picnic areas and campgrounds.

This is not only stupid and wrong, it would be a huge historic irony.

When you set the Forest Service's "multiple use" doctrine against the realities of the San Carlos Ranger District, here are the realities:

• Mining: minimal.

• Grazing: some, but much less than there was perhaps forty years ago.

• Watershed protection: always important, but sort of passive.

• Timber: less important than in the "get the cut out" days of the 1980s, even. I see fewer timber sales than there were back then, and of the three small sawmills adjacent to the ranger district, at least one relies entirely on private lands. There is no one to even bid on a big timber sale.

• Recreation: the main use of the forest. In fact—here is the history part—the very first national forest campgrounds in the Rockies were built on the San Carlos District. (But the FS institutional memory is usually afflicted with bureaucratic Alzheimer's.) The San Isabel NF is all about recreation and not much else.

Take away recreation, and how will those FS staffers justify their jobs?

Right now, this planning exercise was stopped by a decision by the 9th Circuit federal courts that the FS's new speeded-up planning process violated federal environmental laws. So nothing is happening right now—no public meetings.

If it is really all about the budget, the USFS (Agriculture Dept.) plays that game even worse than the National Park Service (Interior Dept. The Park Service, which has its own nonprofit cheering section, has been known to close or threaten to close something prominent, like the Washington Monument at the height of tourist season, if they need to make a point about money.

So why not close down a national forest: campgrounds, offices, the whole thing?

Of course, to do that, some political appointee at the agency's head has to be willing to take a risk.

Don't hold your breath,

Bureaucratic idiocy: the Park Service

This may be the month when I blog about stupid decisions by public lands management agencies.

Let's start with Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

M. and I camped there last month on our way to my nephew's graduation in western Colorado. The view was spectacular, the birds sang -- and before 8 a.m., the screaming started.

A local running club had arranged an early morning race on the park roads. Superintendent Connie Rudd or her staff had thoughtfully placed the finish line right next to the campground. So all the campers in tents and thin-walled trailers got to hear some aging cheerleader types yelling stuff like, "Yay, Joey! Way to go! Woo-hoo!"

You may think that that bird song is a better early morning aural experience. Not at Black Canyon.

If every carload of runners paid the entrance fee, however, then some management goal was closer to being met.

You readers probably have your own tales. Feel free to share them.