The winter holiday season is an appropriate time to reflect on what we are grateful for, especially this year of pandemic, disruption, loss and turmoil. I spend a lot of time advocating, photographing, exploring and writing about public areas. So it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking about our local public areas.
As a kid growing up in the east, I had no real exposure to public land until a road trip with my dad in my early teens opened my eyes and expanded my sense of wonder to the vastness and beauty of places like Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon and the deserts of the southwest.
Years later, as a young adult, I found my way back west. I got a summer job packing food and equipment for rafting expeditions with the Colorado Outward Bound School. I packed up my car and drove across the country to Vernal, Utah, just outside the Dinosaur National Monument.
While working at Outward Bound over the next few summers, I rose to be an instructor and built my skills as an outdoor guide and educator. Just like our students, I’ve learned a lifetime of lessons about teamwork, compassion, and leadership in stunning outdoor classrooms such as Dinosaurs, Desolation Canyon, and Canyonlands National Park.
I realized that these vast but precious wild places, along with important values such as wildlife habitat and a source of clean water and air, encourage exploration of one’s life and personal growth. I also learned that public areas in the wild are threatened. I watched in alarm as new roads and oil and gas developments penetrated deeper and deeper into the wild Utah hinterland.
Now, more than 20 years later, I think about how transforming my early experiences in the wild were. My career as a conservationist on public land has been directly influenced by my experience as an outdoor educator.
I am also grateful for the prudent conservation of public land, for the advocacy, and sometimes even for the struggles that our legacy has left on public land.
In the 1950s, just hours north of Grand Junction, a protracted battle was waged to determine the nature and future of national parks and monuments. For six years, conservationists fought and ultimately defeated a major part of the Colorado River Storage Project: two dams that would have flooded the heart of Dinosaur National Monument and drowned the rugged and painfully beautiful canyons of the Yampa and Green Rivers.
More recently, in the 1990s, the Clinton administration contemplated expanding Colorado National Monument west to include a pass of remote canyons on properties managed by the Bureau of Land Management that drains into the Colorado River.
Instead, this year we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of the McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area due to some tough stakeholder negotiations. The BLM was given the right tool to manage some of its most pre-eminent conservation and recreation areas.
The Grand Valley benefits from this preserved public space. Thousands of people enjoy McInnis Canyons every weekend: mountain biking the Kokopelli Trail system, swimming the river through Ruby Horsethief Canyons, hiking and horseback riding in Devils Canyon or to the rattlesnake arches.
This in turn benefits our local economy. Public land and access to recreational facilities have fueled Fruita’s reinvention as an adventure destination and helped diversify our regional economy. People want to come here or move and often bring their businesses or location-neutral jobs with them.
For this holiday season, I’m celebrating our conserved public lands, places like McInnis Canyons and Dinosaur National Monument, and how they help make the Western Slope a great place to be.
Scott Braden is the director of the Colorado Wildlands Project. He lives in Grand Junction.
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