Please read and give me your opinions on this article. I'd like to wait to give you my thoughts. It's an interesting piece.
Ranchers eye protection for canyon
By BOBBY MAGILL
The Daily Sentinel
Sunday, November 25, 2007
MONTROSE COUNTY — Atop a knob overlooking the lower extremities of Roubideau Canyon, silence and splendor between the multi-hued sandstone cliffs can be nearly overpowering.
The meandering crevasse in the Uncompahgre Plateau west of Delta is as wild as a well-grazed desert canyon can be: Salt seeps leave behind a delicate white rime on the sandstone, inviting one to tiptoe gingerly across the rock. Trout dart about in shaded pools beneath large boulders, seemingly long forgotten by both time and anglers seeking aquatic trophy.
Cattle hoof prints spread across the canyon floor following a well-worn trail that crosses the stream dozens of times before ending on private land.
For cattle rancher Larry Jensen, Roubideau Canyon is a lasting, wild symbol of the Uncompahgre Plateau’s proud ranching history, one he hopes will survive the Western Slope’s population, development and recreation boom.
Jensen, who lives in Crawford, owns a grazing allotment in the Bureau of Land Management-administered Roubideau Canyon and a private inholding at its edge, where the canyon and the mesas above its rim become part of the 10,402-acre Camelback Wilderness Study Area.
“I think the ranchers have the biggest investment because their livelihood is derived from it,” he said. “I do own an inholding in Roubideau Canyon, which I am concerned about.”
Jensen said he fears the all-terrain-vehicle driving and boot-clad hiking masses and maybe even oil, gas and other mineral development could threaten his ranching operation in Roubideau Canyon, where grazing allotments date to the 19th century.
The canyon, he said, needs permanent protection.
“Anybody who can put down $100 on a four-wheeler can go outside and tear (up) all the land he wants up,” Jensen said. “They feel public land gives them license to do whatever they want. That flies in the face of proper land management. ... That’s having a detrimental effect to a fragile ecosystem, (and) the first ones to get blamed are the grazers.”
Grazing, Jensen said, takes a toll on the canyon for a while, but in the long term, it’s much healthier for the ecosystem than the damage careless off-road vehicles often do to the land.
He’s not alone in calling for permanent protection for Roubideau Canyon, which is only temporarily protected by the wilderness-study-area status.
“I’d like to see it protected to maintain its unique nature, so ranchers can continue doing what they’ve been doing for 100 years,” said rancher Jim Graziano, who owns a grazing allotment on Monitor Mesa just above Roubideau Canyon and private property nearby.
“The special aspect is its isolation,” he said. “When you go up there and you sit, you can imagine you’re the only person in the world. No traffic. No power lines. No cell phone coverage. Just you and nature.”
Graziano and Jensen have joined the Colorado Environmental Coalition in calling for Congress, local government and the public to take notice of Roubideau Canyon, a place they say needs attention now because the Dominguez-Escalante Canyons National Conservation Area proposal may soon get an airing on Capitol Hill.
The idea has the support of the Montrose County Commission, which would like to see Roubideau preserved in a national conservation area, perhaps as an eventual expansion to the proposed Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area if Congress creates it, Commissioner Bill Patterson said.
“We haven’t really officially done (anything on) this yet,” Patterson said.
The commissioners, he said, want to have a multiple-use national conservation area around Roubideau that could attract people to Montrose County.
“It’s really just a lovely place,” he said. “These are the places people look for, the kind of the Wild West people dream of, and it’s right there, very close to Montrose.”
The proposed Dominguez conservation area’s southern boundaries would be a few miles to the northwest of Roubideau Canyon. The canyon has not been a prominent part of public discussions about Dominguez, which has received conditional support from Montrose, Delta and Mesa county commissioners who insist the national conservation area be required to allow traditional ranching there to continue.
The commissioners said they want ranchers’ motorized access to the Dominguez area to continue, something sometimes precluded if an area becomes a wilderness.
The public attention some ranchers and conservationists want to draw to Roubideau Canyon shouldn’t necessarily result in a wilderness designation, said Jim Riddell of the Colorado Environmental Coalition.
The BLM recommended against a wilderness designation for the canyon in a 1991 report about the future of the Camelback study area because “there is nothing to really set the area apart,” and it is geologically uninteresting. Scenic vistas, the agency reported, are marred by roads and jeep trails.
Not so, Graziano and Riddell say.
“There’s an amazing diversity of topology and flora and fauna,” Graziano said.
Riddell calls Roubideau rife with surprises, a place of immense solitude difficult to find anywhere else nearby.
Roubideau should be off-limits to recreational motorized and mechanized vehicle use, he said, but ranchers should be allowed to continue their operations without the burden of having to deal with a wilderness designation.
“The concept of wilderness scares a lot of people because what it implies is there’s absolutely no mechanical vehicles or equipment allowed,” Jensen said. “It scares the hell out of people.”
He said he wants Roubideau managed so the ecological integrity of the land can be preserved without excessive recreational use.
But any effort to keep recreational motorized use out of Roubideau Canyon for much longer will meet fierce opposition from off-road-vehicle users, who consider the current regulations for the canyon too restrictive because Roubideau would be a perfect place to go four-wheeling in the winter, said Walt Blackburn of the Thunder Mountain Wheelers in Delta.
“What we like about it is it’s in the low country, and it’s accessible for winter time and early spring use after the snow goes off,” he said.
Blackburn said he’d like to see Roubideau included in a national conservation area wide open to motorized vehicles.
It would take an act of Congress to give the canyon the protections ranchers want or to shed the current wilderness study area moniker.
Blackburn said he is unaware of any current off-road-vehicle use in Roubideau Canyon, and he has never heard a complaint from any of the area’s grazing permittees.
Jensen said he’ll keep fighting for the canyon, joining hands with environmental groups often demonized by other ranchers.
“Some of the ranching community are really upset with me because they don’t understand,” Jensen said. “A lot of them feel that the environmental groups are the enemy, and quite the opposite is true. (I had) the realization that the environmentalists and ranchers are allies in the fight.”
There’s a lot of the deep-seated resentment between the two groups, but with the future of Roubideau Canyon in the balance, there is much more to be gained in an alliance with environmentalists than there is to be lost, he said.
“I see it as an opportunity to limit the amount of special interests and recreation use in a very fragile ecosystem,” he said.
