Preserving the Colo. Plateau

A bill before the U.S. Senate seeks to establish the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area and the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness Area in southwest Colorado. These lands include Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and aspen at higher elevations. The area is named for Spanish Franciscan missionary-explorers Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Francisco Antanasio Dominguez, who began to look for a new route to the coast in 1776.

On July 16, 2008 the U.S. Senate Public Lands and Forests Subcommittee held a hearing on S.3065, the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area (NCA) and Wilderness Act, a bill U.S. Senator Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) introduced to better manage and protect the rugged canyon lands of the Uncompahgre Plateau on Colorado’s western slope. (The full text of the bill is at www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-306 ).

The proposed NCA would include 210,677 acres of federally-owned land on the Uncompahgre Plateau, of which approximately 66,255 acres would be designated as the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness Area. The plateau is the watershed for four major drainages of the Colorado River—Dolores, Gunnison, San Miguel and Uncompahgre rivers). Giving the Dominguez-Escalante area a National Conservation Area designation would place the area within the national landscape conservation arm of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM), which receives a greater funding for recreation and resource protection than other BLM lands.

Aug. 10-11 was the fourth annual “wild Uncompahgre weekend” to support the legislation and commune with the area’s nature. Among those attending the event, sponsored by the Colorado Environmental Coalition (CEC), was Tom Wolf, author of the new biography, Arthur Carhart: Wilderness Prophet. Carhart (1892 –1978) was an environmentalist, conservation writer and one of the first Forest Service landscape architects, if not the first. Working to preserve the plateau is just the kind of environmental cause Carhart lived and worked for.

The Dominguez Canyon Wilderness area ranges from upper Sonoran piñon-juniper desert along the Gunnison River, to Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine and aspen at higher elevations.

Supporters of the bill hope to see some action on the measure by the 110 Congress before it gets pushed aside for larger national political issues.