Colorado plays the long game on nearly three million acres of state trust land

By Birch Malotky

Senator Dylan Roberts might be one of the few people in the Colorado state legislature who has been interested in state trust land for years. This widespread but generally misunderstood type of land is often lumped in with public lands, but it has a specific and unique purpose that sets it apart from national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and so on. Trust lands—which the federal government granted to states when they became states—are managed to support K-12 schools and other public institutions, usually by making money to fund them.

Most state trust lands have been leased for agriculture, mining, and logging, but not all parcels—which are scattered all over Colorado— have good soil, or minerals, or forests. Roberts says there are “small tracts of land within cities and towns or along highways that aren’t going to be used for traditional leasing ever, and are not wildlife corridors or anything like that, so they’re not generating any economic value.” The senator, who represents a district with “some very high-cost communities that deal with significant housing challenges,” thinks that building affordable housing on these random bits of trust land could make good money for the schools while helping keep working families where they are needed.

He points to a quarter-acre plot “right in the heart of Denver that was state trust land and, for whatever reason, hadn’t been developed or sold.” The Colorado State Land Board, which manages state trust lands, built affordable housing on the parcel back in 2022, and “that became the model,” Roberts says. When he started looking at state trust land in his district, which spans much of northwestern Colorado and includes places like Vail, Aspen, and Breckinridge, he discovered several promising parcels “along already existing transportation corridors and near other residential and commercial development.” Through these efforts, one project is already moving forward in Dowd Junction, between Avon and Vail.

As the 150th anniversary of Colorado, and its state trust lands, approached, Roberts connected with a number of other legislators and organizations interested in exploring and expanding these kinds of creative uses of trust land. Together, they drafted and passed HB 1332 last spring, which instructs a working group to conduct an analysis of state trust lands and write a report with recommendations on opportunities to advance affordable housing, conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, recreation, and renewable energy.

The act, presented as a kind of sesquicentennial performance review, is the latest juncture in a long history of Colorado figuring how to make the best out of a group of lands that were designated for a certain purpose, but weren’t optimally designed to fulfill that purpose. Throughout that time, the scattered, widespread nature of the parcels has proven both challenge and opportunity, and has required creative thinking and a reckoning with the legal and moral responsibility of managing not only for this generation or the next, but for generations far into the future.

Most people have never heard of state trust lands. Matt Samelson, an attorney with Western Environmental Law Partners who helped advocate for HB 1332 and has been appointed to the working group, admits that it’s “a pretty weird little corner of the land world.” The Colorado State Land Board Director, Nicole Rosmarino, says that most Coloradans are not aware of the specifics of her agency’s mission. But that agency is the second largest landowner in the state—responsible for 2.8 million surface acres and 4 million sub-surface acres—and its mission goes back to the founding fathers, Manifest Destiny, and a desire to measure and divide the world into a uniform grid.

Before the Constitution was even adopted, a newly independent America turned to securing its claims to the western frontier, wanting to ensure that new territories did not try to split off from the young and fragile republic, and also that they would hold to the democratic ideals of the revolutionaries. Many saw public education as essential to preparing the nation’s citizens for their civic duties, but funding was a problem. The settled, eastern states had an established tax base, but yet-to-be-formed western states did not, and the federal government was in massive debt from the war.

Cash poor but land rich, the Continental Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which divided the West into square townships, among other things. Each township was made up of 36 sections of one square mile (640 acres) each. The 16th section, located at the heart of each township, was reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within said township.”

This one provision laid the foundation for more than a century of land grants, from Ohio’s statehood in 1803 to Arizona’s in 1912. Totaling more than 80 million acres, the school land grants made during this period were nearly as large as those made to the railroads. So, this is where the question of a system designated for a purpose, but not designed for it, begins. Why were the grants made in this pattern? How, exactly, were these lands meant to support public schools? And why the 16th section?

It’s tempting to imagine that a central section was reserved for the purpose of actually hosting a schoolhouse, such that each township was organized around its civic core and distributed across the countryside with mathematical precision. It does seem to fit with the intellectual zeitgeist of the revolutionaries, who were enamored of rationalism and the idea of an agrarian democracy. But if that was the intent, realities on the ground rendered it more symbolic than practicable, creating a mismatch between how the lands were distributed and how they came to be managed that has created challenges for administrators ever since.

At the least, it seems the Continental Congress did intend for there to be a school in every 36-square-mile township in the West, which explains why the grant pattern was one parcel in each township instead of a single block of school trust lands. The evidence is in the way that the initial grants to new states were directed to township-level governments for the exclusive benefit of that township’s schools. The vision was not a statewide, state-administered school system, where land or a school in one township could support a broader area, but rather one characterized by self-sufficiency and local control.

This likely reflects, in part, post-revolutionary uneasiness with centralized government, but it was a fundamental flaw in both purpose and design. The reality of settlement and western landscapes meant that population centers formed around travel corridors, arable land, military outposts, and other strategic features, rather than the artificial boundaries of the rectangular survey system. This left plenty of townships lacking people, governments, and the need for a school.

In response, Congress changed to whom the grants were made, and for whose benefit. By the mid-1800s, it was granting land to state governments rather than local ones, for the support of schools statewide rather than exclusively for schools in the township where the land was located. But which lands were granted did not change, so the basic pattern of reserving a little bit of land all across the state persisted. This created a kind of checkerboard land ownership that people today sometimes call “the blue rash” because of the way that state trust parcels—light blue on many maps— pock the surface of many western states.

The scattered nature of these lands is the first challenge that trust land managers have had to contend with over the years. Smaller, discontinuous parcels don’t offer the management efficiencies that larger parcels do, and they are more vulnerable to impacts from the lands around them. “The checkerboard makes it hard to have consistent management,” Samelson says, “because the surrounding uses and surrounding ownership may just have a very different perspective than the state does.” For example, he asks, “How do you manage a little 640-acre parcel inside of a Wilderness Study Area? Are you actually going to generate money from that?”

In Colorado—which received sections 16 and 36 in each township “for the support of common schools”—the checkerboard mostly overlays the eastern plains, with far less state trust land appearing west of the Continental Divide. That’s partially because Colorado didn’t receive sections that were already spoken for, including a lot of the Ute reservation, which at that time covered roughly the western third of Colorado.

In today’s Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations, there are still no state trust lands—a sharp contrast to many states. A Grist report found that Utah, for example, claimed more than half a million acres, or 5.7 percent, of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, while the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota is nearly 20 percent state trust land.

In answer to the difficulties of the checkerboard, Colorado has, over the years, successfully traded away many of its trust parcels that were surrounded by Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, and pursued consolidation. It now holds title to several properties of 25,000 acres or more, including State Forest State Park and a number of ranches. But land exchanges can be complex and slow, and require a landowner who is willing to trade, so plenty of those 640-acre sections remain.

As to the question of how the reserved sections were meant to support schools, the 1967 Lassen v. Arizona Highway Department Supreme Court case implies that at least some of the granted lands were intended to be used as building sites for schools. Indeed, the Maxwell Schoolhouse in Buena Vista still stands today as a historic site on Colorado trust land. But the court also goes on to say that because “the lands were obviously too extensive and too often inappropriate” for “actual use by the beneficiaries…the grant was plainly expected to produce a fund, accumulated by sale and use of the trust lands, with which the State could support the public institutions designated by the [Enabling] Act.”

This practice of funding schools through leasing and sale was well-established in the colonies when the Land Ordinance passed in 1785 and is, for the most part, exactly what happened. The states created before 1851, like California, sold all or most of their state trust lands, with at least one case of granted lands being given to teachers in lieu of salary. The younger states tended increasingly towards retention and leasing. Colorado, which was formed in 1876, still holds 62 percent of its original granted lands, with older states retaining as little as 3 percent and younger states as much as 91 percent. For the states that retained their granted land, leasing reflected the primary industries of the 19th and early 20th centuries—farming, grazing, logging, and mining.

Most states also developed a permanent fund to house trust land revenue (from sales and leasing), the earnings from which could be distributed to schools. Colorado was the first state required to do so. Over time, administration of these land grants evolved into, and has been interpreted by courts as constituting, formal trust arrangements, in which the state (the trustee) has the legal responsibility to manage the land and the permanent fund (the trust corpus) with undivided loyalty, good faith, skill, and diligence, for the benefit of public schools and other named institutions (the beneficiaries).

In Colorado, 95 percent of trust lands benefit K-12 education, with smaller grants supporting public buildings, the penitentiary, and state universities. Another pair of trusts, called the internal improvements and saline trusts, benefit the state park system. This pair of trusts includes land within 13 of Colorado’s state parks, for which the parks themselves are the beneficiaries but have to contract with the State Land Board to use. Samelson calls this situation “perhaps unduly complicated,” and it’s part of why he and others first got involved with HB 1332.

Across all Colorado state trust lands, leasing generated $230 million last year, with the permanent fund producing another $50 million in interest. About half that went back into growing the permanent fund and half went to the Department of Education’s Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program. The program supports school construction and renovation, fixing things like boilers and roofs, particularly in rural Colorado where there is less of a tax base.

While many states, Colorado included, have at times taken their trust responsibility to mean maximizing revenue generation, this management strategy can be in tension with the duty to sustainably manage trust assets, such that they can continue to benefit future generations of schoolchildren in perpetuity. This tension came to a head in Colorado in 1996, when voters approved a constitutional amendment that asserts “that economic productivity of all lands held in public trust is dependent on sound stewardship, including protecting and enhancing the beauty, natural values, open space, and wildlife habitat thereof,” and instructs the board to manage state trust lands to “produce reasonable and consistent income over time.” Amendment 16 also created a 300,000-acre Stewardship Trust “to preserve the long-term benefits and returns to the state” by managing the lands specifically for their natural values.

The ballot measure was a sharp rebuke to the maximization-focused management of the time, which had led to a series of high-profile controversies around proposed uses of trust lands—including what would have been the nation’s largest commercial hog farm, sited along the South Platte River near billionaire Phil Anschutz’s hunting lodge.

Amendment 16 was accused of violating the trust mandate, but the courts ultimately found that encouraging “sound stewardship” and “reasonable and consistent income” was not corrupting the purpose of the State Land Board, but rather providing guidance on a management approach for achieving that purpose—one that upholds the long-term health of the trust.

As to the final question of why the founding fathers reserved the 16th section specifically, the Supreme Court justices write in Cooper v. Roberts that it was meant “to plant in the heart of every community…grateful reverence for the wisdom, forecast, and magnanimous statesmanship of those who framed the institutions for these new States.” It would also promote “good governance and the happiness of mankind by the spread of religion, morality, and knowledge.”

Apart from this largely symbolic gesture, it was likely just as good a method as any other to systematically grant largely unexplored land to unknown future states. It still can’t be called optimal—while states ended up with some land that was excellent for generating revenue to fund schools, they also had plenty that was steep and dry, lacking trees or minerals, or too far away from roads, rivers, and towns to be useful. Congress did give more land to the more arid states (two sections per township and then four), but the disparate value of granted lands, in addition to their small, scattered nature, has remained a challenge through centuries of trust land managers trying to meet their constitutional obligation. For most western states today, a small percentage of the granted sections generate the majority of revenue, while the rest produce more marginal incomes, or in some instances, no money at all.

But Rosmarino, the Colorado State Land Board director, says we have to be careful about using too broad a brush on the issue. The distribution of trust lands is an advantage, she says, for the opportunity it affords to build relationships all across the state, with local governments and lessees that live and work close to the land. Isolated sections can be integral parts of larger projects, from multigenerational ranches and farms to new, utility-scale renewable energy projects. They can also, with creative thinking, support “projects with a pretty small footprint that have provided big results financially for the State Land Board,” as well as the community and the environment, she says.

For example, a sale of 400 acres of state trust land surrounded by development in Erie yielded $40 million for the state’s permanent fund. In southeast Colorado, the City of Lamar plans to purchase electricity from a solar garden being built on 30 acres of trust land. And there is that quarter-acre lot in the middle of Denver with the affordable housing development that inspired Senator Roberts.

Colorado also hosts some of the West’s only ecosystem service leases on state trust land. In one case, when a water utility needed to offset the impact a new reservoir would have on the federally threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, the State Land Board restored and enhanced 222 acres of habitat on state trust land. This created the state’s first species conservation bank, which has generated around $750,000. In another case, a 200-acre floodplain on the South Platte River became a wetland mitigation bank that offsets gravel mining elsewhere in the watershed. That lease has generated more than $2 million for Colorado’s schools, on a property that was appraised for less than $200,000. For both the jumping mouse and wetland mitigation projects, grazing was able to continue on most of the property.

These kinds of projects can turn the challenge of the checkerboard into an asset, says Mindy Gottsegen, the conservation services manager who developed and runs the State Land Board’s ecosystem services line of business. That’s because a diverse land base can mean access to diverse markets, and the State Land Board is continuously expanding its leasing program to take advantage of that dynamic.

Of course, legacy industries remain integral to Colorado’s school trust—96 percent of land is leased for farming and grazing, and 82 percent of revenue comes from mineral extraction, particularly oil and gas development. But, Gottsegen says, “We have areas of the state where we think there’s no oil and gas, and it’s very arid. Now all of a sudden, we know that there are big helium reserves there, and we have access to that because of the checkerboard pattern.” All it takes is for a new market to develop, and a property that didn’t seem like it had much to offer 30 years prior is suddenly worth a lot more.

Amendment 16’s intergenerational outlook helps preserve these kinds of opportunities. By dialing down the pressure for immediate, maximized return, the amendment allows managers to forego near-term development and keep their options open on any given parcel of land. And the emphasis on sound stewardship has provided fertile ground to explore leasing for things that preserve or enhance the value of land while still making money for the beneficiaries, like regenerative grazing and wildfire restoration for carbon credits, which Gottsegen is currently working on.

The founder of a land trust and a former advisor to the governor, Rosmarino sees her position, and these kinds of projects, as “a great convergence of my background in conservation and agriculture, and also my interest in being really entrepreneurial in generating revenue for a good cause.” That’s why she welcomes working with the State Trust Lands Conservation and Recreation Work Group, which was formed by the passage of HB 1332 last spring. “We really see it as an opportunity to showcase how innovative we are trying to be,” she says, adding that “creative solutions can come from anyone and anywhere.”

Senator Katie Wallace, who co-sponsored HB-1332 with Senator Roberts and Representative Karen McCormick, says that “the goal of the working group is to see how state trust lands can support conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, and recreation, while still honoring and uplifting the duty to generate reliable revenue for our public schools.” The bill’s proponents hope it can provide support for the State Land Board’s existing efforts and inspire new projects, particularly by “pulling in a lot more voices from a lot of different perspectives,” says McCormick.

The State Land Board is “a pretty lean organization, and because of its small size and the sheer amount of land they have, a lot of times they end up having to be reactive to proposals coming from outside entities,” says Samelson. They have still managed to do some really exciting and creative work, says John Rader, who was part of the coalition that advocated for the bill, but “there hasn’t been a comprehensive, holistic approach that gathers stakeholder input,” he says.

So, the bill establishes what Wallace and McCormick both call a kind of mind trust, featuring 24 members representing the trust beneficiaries, agriculture, oil and gas, conservation, recreation, affordable housing, and the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes, as well as experts in economics, law, and real estate. “We kept adding seats to the working group,” says McCormick, “which tells you that folks saw the importance of having their voices in the mix.”

The group, which only just convened for the first time in October, is instructed to inventory state trust lands for their potential to support these various goals—for example by identifying parcels that contain habitat for Colorado’s species of great conservation concern—and to analyze the various tools and mechanisms available to achieve them—like conservation leases and land swaps. They will present their recommendations in an interim report by March 16 and a final report by September 1, 2026.

The idea, Samelson says, is to create space to have a proactive conversation “outside of the pressure cooker of the capitol dome,” where a wide variety of folks can mull over all the different options and available avenues “and come back with a package that, hopefully, has been thoroughly poked at from different angles.”

All the bill’s sponsors and proponents emphasize that the intent of the group is not to displace or discount legacy users of state trust lands, but rather to look in the margins of what’s already happening for new opportunities to make the whole corpus of trust lands work for the beneficiaries. “How do we look at those parts of the corpus that aren’t oil and gas, or agriculture?” asks Wallace.

Samelson, for example, is interested in what he calls inholdings and edgeholdings—those tricky 640-acre parcels that can be hard to manage on their own. Rader, who is the public lands program manager for the San Juan Citizens Alliance, is also interested in inholdings, particularly in nearby Lone Mesa State Park. “That’s our small window into state trust lands,” he says, “and from there the conversation just started ballooning outward.”

The twist with those Lone Mesa inholdings, and state trust land in 12 other Colorado state parks, is that they’re part of the land grant that was made to benefit the state park system. So, you end up with a weird situation “where Colorado Parks and Wildlife [which manages state parks] is both the lessee and the beneficiary,” says Rader. Since it doesn’t make sense for Parks and Wildlife to pay rent that would be given back to the agency, they enter into beneficial use agreements, often short term, where no money is exchanged. On the state parks side, “that doesn’t give us a lot of certainty about longterm management for conservation and recreation,” says Rader, “and it doesn’t generate a lot of revenue for the State Land Board, so it’s kind of this double inefficiency.”

Thinking about creative management solutions for the lands that benefit state parks is one of the working group’s first tasks. Also intended for the interim report is a look at the Stewardship Trust that arose from Amendment 16. The amendment “says that the lands are supposed to be managed to preserve and enhance their natural values,” says Rader, “but it doesn’t really define natural values. It doesn’t tell the state land board how to manage for them. It doesn’t say what uses are compatible or incompatible with those natural values.” He’s hoping the working group can define some terms and establish clearer procedures. Beyond those specific trusts, Rader just wants to know what’s out there in terms of creative uses of state trust land, particularly when it comes to making money while conserving the land.

It’s a timely conversation, in part because “we are in a really tough budget situation and we have been for a really long time,” according to Wallace, “and that makes any revenue stream absolutely irreplaceable.” But more than immediate need, everyone seemed to feel that this moment—150 years after Colorado first received its trust lands, and 30 years after Amendment 16 established the twin pillars of sound stewardship and reasonable and consistent income—was simply ripe for reflection.

“There hasn’t been a comprehensive look at how we are using our state trust lands in quite a long time,” says Roberts, “and the practical reality of our state is changing. We’re struggling with issues like housing and wanting to promote more outdoor recreation and protect the environment, and this is a chance to get some of the best and brightest minds together to look at the opportunities to maximize the value of every state trust land—not just the big parcels, but the small parcels too.”

Birch Malotky is the editor of Western Confluence magazine and writes from Laramie, Wyoming.

Header image: Lowry Ranch. (Raquel Wertsbaugh)

The complicated legacy of allotment legislation

By Autumn L. Bernhardt

Consider a pronghorn doe embarking on her yearly migration route or simply traveling an intermediate distance in search of better grass. Over the course of her journey, she may cross streams, roads, and fences. She may also cross different types of public land managed by state and federal agencies, as well as private property located in various counties. Then imagine that this same doe ventures onto a reservation that has been subject to allotment legislation. While on the reservation, she not only passes through tribal lands, but also private property owned by tribal citizens and private property owned by non-tribal citizens.

As she crosses these varied physical and legal landscapes, the entity with jurisdiction over this doe also changes. In some cases, it may be unclear who is responsible for her, creating challenges for environmental code enforcement and wildlife management. These challenges in environmental management are just a taste of the complexity in other areas of tribal administration and regulation.

For the most part, governments have authority to pass and enforce laws within their territorial limits. But tribes are often frustrated in this by the legacy of federal policy known as allotment, which broke up reservation lands into private property parcels and authorized the sale of lands deemed “surplus.” Allotment dramatically reduced the size of reservations and created a political geography that invites jurisdictional confusion and conflict between the federal government, states, tribes, and private landowners. In the almost century and a half since allotment began, the law has been slow to deal with its fallout, and even today, clarity and regulatory coordination remain elusive.

To understand how allotment impacted reservations, some basic understanding of land tenure and trust law is helpful. Reservations are held in trust by the federal government. Tribes, with their own distinct governments, have beneficial ownership of these lands. This means that the federal government holds legal title, but tribes are still recognized as owners with certain rights and expectations of use and possession of land. As a trustee, the federal government has a high fiduciary duty to tribes as trust beneficiaries, which implies good faith and even-handed dealings. In the foundational Cherokee Nation v. Georgia case, the Supreme Court likened this special trust relationship to that of “a ward to his guardian,” while also noting that the Cherokee tribe was “a distinct political society separated from others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” Despite the duty a guardian should have to act in a ward’s best interests, this ward-guardian analogy has been used, at times, in a more paternalistic way to justify absolute discretion by the federal government in its relationships with Native nations.

Most reservations were tribal trust land before the General Allotment Act of 1887, which took tribal land out of trust, converting large holdings within reservations into private land that could be bought, sold, and taxed. The act—sometimes called the Dawes Act because Congressman Henry Dawes from Massachusetts guided it through the legislative process—somewhat resembled the Homestead Act in operational terms. It awarded roughly 160 acres to each family head who was on a tribal roll (or Dawes roll), although the acreage varied between grazing, agricultural, and timber land, and, after subsequent amendments, depended on who the intended allottee was. The act also contained a mandate for the disposal of reservation lands that the federal government deemed “surplus,” which were sold to settlers. Although the General Allotment Act played a predominant role in allotment policy, several surplus land acts and allotment acts that only applied to a single tribe also contributed to the fracturing of land ownership.

At first, allotted land would be held in a different kind of trust, where the allottee, rather than the tribe, was the beneficiary. During this period, which the act set at 25 years, the allottee didn’t have full private property rights, and the state couldn’t tax the land. After the trust period ended, the land would be private, “fee patent” land that could be taxed by the state and sold by the allottee, who could also be granted US citizenship. Sometimes the federal government extended the trust period. A competency commission, typically made up of non-tribal citizens involved in federal-tribal affairs, could shorten it by finding the allottee to be “competent.”

While some tribal allottees still have land holdings within reservations, many allotted parcels that were originally awarded to tribal members eventually transferred into the hands of non-tribal members. Tribal allottees may have been willing sellers in some instances, but in other instances they may have been pressured to sell or lost lands due to tax default or mortgage foreclosure. Economic conditions on reservations were dire, forced assimilation to new food economies without regard to ecological realities was ill-fated, and Indian Service agents and their successors in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) could be heavy handed in their control of the daily lives of tribal members, including how tribal members ran their own farms and ranches. Furthermore, tax notices came in the mail to sometimes remote destinations in a language that tribal members did not always speak fluently. For these reasons, early “competency” findings were often criticized because they subjected the allottee to taxation and pressure from land speculators sooner rather than later.

Allotted lands did not slip through the hands of tribal allottees because tribal societies lacked any concept of private ownership. Although nomadic tribes had communal territories that sometimes shifted with the seasons and migration patterns, a number of more location-bound tribes had designated fishing, hunting, and agricultural lands reserved to families or clans. Tribes in the Southwest did pool their resources to operate communal irrigation systems, and some Great Plains tribes hunted buffalo collectively, but in both cases harvested crops or game often went home to individuals and family units. The story of allotment is more complicated than can be explained in a line or two. Tribes had their own laws and customs and were submerged into a completely different set of customs and laws.

The allotment era came to an official end in 1934, with Section 1 of the Indian Reorganization Act declaring that reservation land shall no longer be allotted. Covering more than just allotment, the Indian Reorganization Act came about after a study known as the Meriam Report documented many of the failures of allotment and federal administration of tribal affairs. But a lot of land had already been allotted, leaving reservations reduced in size and with land tenure alternating between tribal and fee patent lands that were owned by either tribal members or non-tribal members.

The checkerboard metaphor has been in common usage for a long time, but comparing maps of allotted reservations to checkerboards can be a bit misleading. Checkerboards are uniformly spaced and suggest some sort of deliberate planning and organization. The map of the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, by contrast, looks a bit like digital camo. The map of the Nez Perce reservation looks like small islands of tribal land floating intermittently in an ocean of non-tribal allotted land. Reservations can be lightly to heavily allotted, but roughly three-quarters of all reservations were allotted to some degree.

Like so much of American law, allotment was born out of a particular time and a particular set of cultural narratives. Having begun during the thrust of Manifest Destiny, allotment was ostensibly assimilationist in nature. Along with government-funded boarding schools, missionary conversion efforts, and the creation of reservations themselves, assimilation policy was regarded by its advocates as the gentler arm of Federal Indian policy, especially in comparison to extermination strategies like the Indian Wars. Assimilationists, such as John Wesley Powell, aimed at making Indigenous peoples in the US more palatable to, and theoretically more integrated in, dominant society by making them more like dominant society in dress, speech, religion, gender norms, and thought. Although assimilation was deemed less forceful, it was still coercive. R. H. Pratt, who acted as superintendent of the notorious Carlisle Indian Boarding School, summarized assimilationist theory when he said: “A great general had said that the only good Indian is a dead one…I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

In the case of allotment, assimilation meant compelling Native Americans to become “pastoral and civilized” by doing agriculture the way Euro-Americans thought agriculture should be done. That translated to breaking apart communal tribal land, assigning individual land parcels to tribal members to farm and graze, and making tribes perform irrigated agriculture on arid private real estate more suitable for buffalo migration, with little to no capital or equipment. Its advocates claimed that allotment was good and necessary for the development of Native Americans and the only viable means to ensure their physical survival given the aggressive behavior and attitude of the country. Henry Dawes, the sometimes-namesake of the act who was opposed to both slavery and Indian-ness, said he wanted to “rid the Indian of tribalism through the virtues of private property.”

Despite this sentiment, the motives underlying allotment were mixed. Teddy Roosevelt famously described the General Allotment Act as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” Allotment presented an opportunity to open reservations for settlement and relieve the government of its trust responsibility and obligations toward tribes—a new tactic, but not a new goal. At the time allotment came into being, only a few dissenters voiced concerns that it was a thinly veiled pretext for speculator land grabs or condemned the expressed concern for the welfare of Native people as barely masked greed for tribal land. Colorado Senator Henry Teller was nearly alone in prophesying that “if the people who are clamoring for it understood Indian character, and Indian laws, and Indian morals, and Indian religion, they would not be clamoring for this at all.”

Consistent with the assimilationist attitudes of the time, tribal consultation and consent were not robust concepts or deemed necessary for the allotment process. Although special allotting agents were sent to reservations to obtain agreement from the tribes, allotment was a foregone conclusion in the minds of its advocates. Some tribal members may have initially thought of allotment as a way to get the federal government and its agents off the backs of tribes or to bring prosperity to the tribe, but there are historical accounts that show a deep suspicion of allotment as well. This is likely because before allotment came into being, the federal government “re-negotiated” many treaties to significantly reduce the reservation land base—once tribes were relatively confined to reservations and their military might had diminished.

In one case, tribes pushed back against the lack of consent in an attempt to stop allotment of their reservation. Article XII of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek with the Kiowa and Comanche tribes stated that further cession of tribal land would require the signatures of “at least three-fourths of all the adult male Indians.” But in 1892, when David Jerome went to Fort Sill on behalf of the federal government to get support for allotment of reservation lands, he only obtained 456 signatures, a significantly smaller percentage than the treaty requirement. Tribal members also made complaints of a mangled translation of agreement terms and some signers requested to have their signatures removed. They wrote letters to Congress, sent a delegation to Washington, and testified in opposition to allotment, but despite these clear repudiations, Congress ratified Fort Sill allotment by means of a rider to a bill concerning a separate reservation in Idaho in 1900. When the reservation of the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches was opened up to settlement, a Kiowa leader named Lone Wolf brought a lawsuit against the US government that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the Supreme Court ruled in 1903 that Congress can abrogate a treaty, or render it void, without the agreement or approval of the tribe—in this case, by allotting a reservation without sufficient signatures. The Supreme Court linked this power of treaty abrogation to that special trust relationship between the federal government and the tribes, writing that “Congress possessed a paramount power over the property of the Indian, by reason of its exercise of guardianship over their interests.” The court also held that despite the criticisms of fraud and coercion, “we must presume that Congress acted in perfect good faith.” The case carried the weight of precedent for many years and stagnated the waters of tribal self-determination, leaving lasting marks on Indian Country.

Subsequent cases have, however, softened the precedent laid down by Lone Wolf. In particular, the 1980 United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians case was similar to Lone Wolf, in that the US government took land—in this case the Black Hills, by military force and threat of starvation—without the signatures of the three-fourths majority of Sioux men as required by the Fort Laramie Treaty. In this decision, the US Supreme Court somewhat side-stepped the question of treaty abrogation but declared that the Sioux Nation was entitled to just compensation for the land that had been taken a hundred years prior. Importantly, this case suggests that judicial review can act as a check on congressional power in Indian affairs.

Consent for allotment, and the question of treaty abrogation, is not the only decades-long legal battle to come out of the allotment era. Another major legal question arose around how the allotted parcels themselves were owned and managed. Over time, ownership interests in the parcels that tribal members were able to hold onto became fractionated due to tribal allottees dying without wills. Lawyers call this dying intestate. In the absence of a will that specifies how property, such as a land parcel, is to be distributed, property is split according to statutory probate laws. Generally, that meant that allotted parcels were divided among family members and heirs. Over generations, this led to some parcels becoming fractionated down to the thousandths.

Allotment was in many ways too much, too soon, and in the wrong way. Allotment land parcels, like homestead parcels, were by and large too small to support farming and ranching by small family units in arid country, and fractionation of ownership only exacerbated this ecological reality. Between this challenge, the complexity of managing land among a multitude of potential decision-makers, and likely some attendant government pressure, tribal allotment parcels often ended up being leased.

The BIA was supposed to lease allotted lands, place funds in Individual Indian Money accounts, and distribute the proceeds to owners, including owners who had highly fractionated interests. For decades, tribal members contended that allotment parcels were leased with little regard for fair market value and operated as a subsidy to non-tribal interests. They also voiced concern that the land was run into the ground due to poorly managed leases where over-grazing and over-tillage were rampant. Complaints that the BIA could not account for hundreds of millions of dollars and that account beneficiaries did not receive what they were owed eventually found their way to court through the Cobell class action lawsuit.

Cobell began in 1996 and has a storied history, with a DC federal district judge saying that “it would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program than the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust.” At one point, this judge also ordered the BIA to disconnect their systems from the internet to avoid potential transfer and embezzlement of land lease funds. After the original judge was replaced at the request of the government, which claimed he had an anti-government bias, the case made its way to appeal. Finally, in 2009, the individual Indian trust account beneficiaries and the federal government reached a settlement. Among other agreements, $1.4 billion was to be distributed to Individual Indian Money accounts and $2 billion was earmarked for a Trust Land Consolidation Fund to purchase fractionated allotment land interests and transfer title back to tribes.

The idea of consolidating fractionated allotment parcels and returning them to tribes was not a new concept, but the means to accomplish the return of land has caused some conflict. In 1983, Congress passed the Indian Land Consolidation Act, which originally required fractionated interests that were less than 2 percent of an allotment parcel to escheat, or pass back to, the tribe rather being split among heirs, which would increase fractionalization. The act has been amended several times now to respond to successful lawsuits claiming that it was unconstitutional under the 5th Amendment to “take” these interests without just compensation. Now, to avoid unconstitutional taking claims, fractional allotment interests must be purchased with consent of the seller at fair market value. Additional provisions also authorize tribes to adopt land consolidation plans and probate codes that apply to allotment land interests.

All these decades of laws and lawsuits—only some of which are mentioned in this article—and the digital camo of land ownership they produced underlie the jurisdictional complexity on reservations today. Reconsider the pronghorn doe in search of greener grasses. The person or government that can make decisions about her may depend on whether the land is communal tribal trust land, allotted land owned by tribal citizens, or allotted land owned by non-citizens. It also might depend on whether Congress has passed a relevant statute dictating jurisdiction in a particular matter, and how higher courts have interpreted that statute according to the specific facts of the case.

In Montana v. US, another highly analyzed case, the Supreme Court held that tribal regulation of duck hunting and trout fishing did not apply to non-citizens on their own private allotment land within the Crow Reservation. Although the court also provided that tribal civil regulation might apply on noncitizen private land when “necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control internal relations,” jurisdictional determinations appear to be circumstance specific. As both people and wildlife transition between different jurisdictions, landscape-scale regulatory coordination may be desirable but remains elusive, given the legal dynamics tied to allotment.

In truth, reservations and tribes would not exist if allotment had worked the way some of its proponents wanted it to. The consequences of allotment implicate Federal Indian law, property law, Constitutional law, probate law, wildlife management principles, legislative interpretation, and so much more.

Autumn Bernhardt has over twenty years of experience in environmental matters and has worked as an entrepreneur, professor, and attorney. Bernhardt litigated water disputes between states as a Colorado Assistant Attorney, served as an Assistant Tribal Attorney for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and now provides environmental consulting services.

Header image: Wildlife regularly cross jurisdictions on their daily and annual migrations, which can complicate environmental code enforcement on reservations that have been allotted. (Tom Koerner/US Fish and Wildlife Service).

Wolf management in the Alps requires attention to science and people

By Francesco Bisi

The first wolves to enter the Alps in nearly a hundred years found themselves in southeast France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992. Like the area’s glacial lakes, Bronze Age rock carvings, and “perched villages,” the wolves were a relic of a time past. Once abundant and widespread, centuries of organized extermination had whittled down Eurasian wolf populations to nearly nothing, and had eliminated them entirely from the Alps by the early 1900s.

But wolves did not go extinct across Europe, and in the last 50 years, relict population have naturally spread back into parts of their old range. Their return has sparked conflict, and with it, the need to bridge social, administrative, and disciplinary boundaries. At least, that’s what partners of LIFE Wolf Alps EU —an interdisciplinary, multi-national project I supported as a researcher—think is the key to moving towards coexistence, rather than returning to a time of hatred and fear.

Wolves have been systematically trapped, hunted, poisoned, and bountied for over a millennium, from England and Scandinavia to the Balkans and Bavaria. In France, Charlemagne institutionalized the practice around the year 800 when he created the “louveterie,” an elite corps of hunters tasked with eradicating wolves. More than a thousand years later, France killed its last wolf in the 1930s.

But, as wolves became less of a threat to livestock and life in a rapidly industrializing world, and with the growing popularity of new environmental ideals, the fervor for extermination faded before the job was done. In 1979, when the Bern Convention made wolves a strictly protected species throughout Europe, about a hundred wolves remained fragmented in the Apennine Mountains—which run from toe to calf along Italy’s boot. A few more sheltered in the most remote parts of Slovenia’s Dinaric Alps, with diminished populations elsewhere in eastern Europe. These have been the most important source populations for the species’ natural recolonization of the Alps.

In addition to new protections, wolves benefitted from the decline of traditional rural economies and gradual depopulation of the mountains—particularly the most remote regions—as pastoralists and others sought better services and opportunities at lower elevations and in cities. This opened up habitat not only for wolves, but also deer, boar, and other prey species, making the Alps a lower conflict place with better food than they had been in centuries.

Over the course of two decades, the Italian Apennine wolves made their way towards the Alps, finally reaching France in 1992, the same year that the species saw further protection in the European Union (EU) under the Habitats Directive. From there, they have continued to expand through the crescent-shaped range, first reaching Switzerland in 1995, Italy in 1996, and Austria in 2008. In more recent years, wolves have also entered the Alps from southern Slovenia, the Karpathian mountains (Slovakia), and the central European lowlands (Germany, West Poland, Czech Republic). In each country, breeding pairs and resident packs lagged well behind the first wolf sighting, in some cases more than a decade.

The returning wolves face a world that has largely forgotten what it was like to live alongside them, but has not forgotten how to fear them. While those first Mercantour wolves found what National Geographic calls “the last terre sauvage in the Alps,” the range as a whole is not wild. The Alps still support 14 million people across 6,000 settlements, and a deep tradition of agriculture is bound up in both the culture and the landscape. Wandering shepherds and their cattle, sheep, and goats are iconic to the region, and their grazing maintains high alpine meadows and other distinctive ecosystems that support rich biodiversity and endemic species. Many see wolves as an existential threat to this precious and delicate system, raising questions about the feasibility of human-wolf coexistence.

The LIFE WolfAlps EU project believes that such a sprawling, complex issue needs to be addressed at the same scale—with a coordinated, population-level outlook rather than fragmented management limited by administrative and disciplinary boundaries. Spanning France, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia, the team has worked for the last decade on a two-part approach. First, establish a solid baseline understanding of the wolf population and its spread in order to develop unified, scientifically-grounded information and messaging. Second, work along nine different “axes of intervention,” to foster understanding and reduce conflict between wolves and people.

Part one began in Italy and Slovenia in 2013 with a focus on “knowing before acting,” meaning years of data collection on the wolf population, human attitudes, livestock depredation, poaching, and more. Wolves typically occur at low densities in rugged terrain, making basic monitoring a challenge. A lack of consistent methodology adds to the difficulty, especially when trying to compare data between administrative authorities in multiple countries. The WolfAlps team addressed this issue by training 512 participants—including volunteer associations, professional researchers, and public authorities—to collect standardized data through snow tracking,
wolf howling, genetic analysis of biological samples, and camera trapping.

During this time, I was in charge of wolf monitoring in the Lombardy region in the central Italian Alps. Most of the activities took place during winter, and for the first time during a snow-tracking activity, I came across evidence of a deer killed by a wolf. This discovery made me realize that I was not alone in the wilderness. However, the most significant aspect was that, while I was out there looking for tracks in the snow, many other operators were conducting the same monitoring efforts across the Alps.

These shared and scientifically collected data were the first step for researchers and managers to speak a common language over such a broad landscape, which aided credibility and coordination. Sharing this information took many forms, from a Wolf Alpine Press Office to newsletters, social media, conferences, an interactive, traveling exhibition, a theatrical show, art contests, a children’s book, and more.

Overall, the first project laid the foundation for a broad network of stakeholders and partners working together on a shared and coordinated conservation program. Other early activities included assessing the threat of dog-wolf hybridization, supporting preventative measures, and implementing anti-poaching efforts.

Rucksacks full of scientific knowledge, listening to people became the next most important step for conservation. The second project, which began in 2019, expanded to include France and Austria and made improving human-wolf conflict its primary focus. Particular attention was given to understanding the needs of those most impacted by the wolves’ natural return and working with them to share knowledge and explore solutions for coexistence. In this project, I continued to coordinate the monitoring activities in the Lombardy region and participated in numerous meetings with shepherds, hunters, and environmental protection associations to discuss the wolves’ return to the Alps and what it meant for them.

Shepherds have perhaps the oldest and most persistent reason to resent wolf recolonization—livestock depredation. A 2023 report by the EU estimates that wolves kill at least 65,500 head of livestock each year, nearly three quarters of which are sheep and goats. The report also notes that wolf-killed sheep comprise just 0.065% of the EU’s total population of 60 million sheep, but at a local level, livestock loss can be unbearable.

Depredation rates are typically lower in areas where wolves never disappeared. For communities where wolves were absent for nearly a century, however, herders have largely lost the habit of coexistence with predators, including constantly accompanying free-ranging livestock and the use of guard dogs. Adapting their herding practices can mean increases in cost, work, and stress for farmers who are already struggling, and solutions like electric fences are not always feasible or sufficient. Capacity and expertise also vary widely between professional herders with large flocks and hobby farmers.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, researching, supporting, and experimenting with best practices, particularly through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, can contribute to making Alpine pastoralism more sustainable, thereby preserving a unique cultural institution, rural livelihoods, and important habitat. Talking directly with people about these options, I noticed, tended to be more effective than simply giving them money to buy prevention tools or as reimbursement for livestock predation.

Hunters are another stakeholder group that have expressed concerns over wolf recolonization, seeing them as competition for game species. Rather than dismiss these concerns, WolfAlps designed a series of participatory studies that involved hunters throughout the process of investigating the wolves’ impact on wild prey, particularly red deer. Researchers found that the impact of wolves on game populations is minor compared to hunters themselves, but hunting management may need to be adjusted in some areas where wolves have returned.

The project has likewise taken seriously the rural Alpine residents who fear for their safety, discussing potential risks (like improper food management and uncontrolled domestic dogs) and holding an International Conference on Bold Wolves. In the last 40 years, there have been very few cases of wolves attacking humans in Europe. None of them were fatal, and they were mainly caused by habituated wolves. The 2023 EU report concludes that “the risk of people being attacked by wolves is incredibly low in the modern world.” However, I often heard people claiming the opposite, possibly influenced by media misinformation.

By creating regional dialogue platforms where people could express their concerns and feel heard, WolfAlps has perhaps not fully changed minds, but at least opened a door to greater trust and understanding. In my experience, even the people who shouted at me during meetings would sometimes come up afterward and thank me, not because I solved their problem, but because I listened to them.

These conversations have also revealed an opportunity for the wolf to shed light on a much broader context. Local community meetings often ended with the idea that wolves are not themselves the whole problem, but rather the straw that broke the camel’s back; people use the time to talk about other challenges for farming and rural living. In this sense, the wolf becomes their microphone.

I also saw how in regions where wolves have been present for 30 years or more, both wolves and humans have been able to coexist, even though the conflict has not been entirely resolved. In these areas, the greatest challenge is not pushback from the public, but rather administrative fragmentation that complicates effective conservation and management.

These stakeholder engagement platforms are just one part of the project, which also includes Wolf Prevention Intervention units, a host of trainings, hybridization prevention, development of eco-tourism, an Alpine Young Ranger Program, anti-poisoning dog teams, and more—almost too much to keep track of. But “the complexity of this project is its strength,” says one final report, and I agree. As human beings, we are integral parts of ecosystems, and our interactions with nature—wolves, in this case—take many forms. Therefore, it is crucial to consider all these aspects comprehensively.

As of 2023, wolves have been detected in every EU country except the islands of Ireland, Cyprus, and Malta. The population was 20,000 and climbing. Given wolves’ legal protection and unassisted spread, the Alps will probably never be wolf-free again. Which means it will probably never be conflict-free, either. But hopefully, through a multi-pronged effort happening at the same time all over a huge region, the Alps will learn how to live with wolves in a way that protects the region’s ecological, social, cultural, and economic values. And it may even be that wolves can become a bridge that forces people to think beyond boundaries.

Francesco Bisi is a zoologist and research fellow at Insubria University in Italy. An expert in alpine vertebrate monitoring, his research focuses on wildlife conservation and human-wildlife interaction and he teaches a course on sustainable use of wildlife. During the LIFE WolfAlpine EU project, he has been responsible for wolf monitoring activities in the central Alps for the Lombardy Region and has been involved in stakeholder engagement through sharing information about species distribution and wolf population dynamics.

Header image: The first wolves to step foot in the Alps in nearly 100 years appeared in France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992. (JP Valery/Unsplash)

Local communities lead the protection of an endangered antelope 

By Tesia Lin 

In the 1990s, Kenya’s hirola antelope population “plummeted from 15,000 to an estimated 300-500 animals,” says retired professor Dr. Richard Kock. As chief veterinary officer for the Kenya Wildlife Services at the time, Kock became involved because a virus called Rinderpest was a suspected cause of the antelope’s rapid downturn. The veterinary department was a new feature of the young agency, as was an emphasis on community-based wildlife management. Kenya’s declining wildlife, including hirola, had spurred the reorganization of government conservation agencies and a growing focus on including different stakeholder perspectives in order to better regulate and meet management goals. The changes, within Kenya and broader African conservation communities, were not smooth ones, Kock recalls.   

An early test for the new agency came when Elders of the Somali ethnic group sought the agency’s aid in their stewardship of the hirola antelope. “They were saying, ‘We really like this animal, and we don’t want it to get taken away.’ They felt that they had a right, in a sense, to decisions made with this animal, as it was sort of sacred,” recalls Kock. But the team didn’t at first listen to their suggestions, reasoning that state authorities had rights over the antelope, not local people. “Being sort of arrogant conservationists, we thought, ‘Well that’s a nice idea, but we’re thinking something else instead,” says Kock. Suspicious of the motives of local people, the team instigated relocation of a substantial number of hirola to Tsavo National Park to reinforce a small, previously translocated population. Without seeking further advice from the Elders, this created tension.  

While places like Kenya are scientific meccas for foreign researchers hoping to work with “exotic” wildlife, people trained in other parts of the world are no match for the wisdom that local and Indigenous communities provide when it comes to cultivating or stewarding the land and its resources. Because these communities have persisted for centuries among eastern African wildlife, their understanding of the balance between people, wildlife, and the land is both deeper and more expansive. 

Thus, when the Somali Elders requested assistance with a fenced-in sanctuary that would protect the hirola from predators, Kock recounts the idea as contrary to (what was then) best practice. “Their requests went against some [Western] principles of conservation,” he says. Fences cut animals off from the rest of their habitat, creating barriers to migration routes and reducing access to water and other resources. This can be particularly problematic in arid ecosystems like those in eastern Kenya, where water and good forage are already scarce.   

But the team didn’t have many more promising options. Captive breeding had been fruitless and expensive in other countries and was considered unsuitable for this shy antelope. National parks and reserves had worked for other large mammals, including predators, but that success made them unlikely to support hirola. The sandy-colored antelope are highly visible in today’s grasslands, herd in small numbers, and leave their young relatively unprotected, all making them easy prey. Putting them in parks where predators were thriving could hurt the hirola numbers or stall population growth. Expanding national parks to encompass the hirola would also displace local people, whereas moving the hirola to existing parks isolated them from a beneficial environment alongside deeply invested protectors—the Somali community.  

The Somali people have lived alongside hirola “since time immemorial.” The antelope, which Kock calls “living relics,” are thought to have existed in Kenya for almost 7 million years. As recently as the Pleistocene (which ended around 12,000 years ago), populations roamed from the Horn of Africa to the continent’s southern tip. However, as the climate changed, so did the vegetation. Open, desert-like land that previously sustained the hirola dwindled and fragmented, pushing them closer to pastoral communities, where the antelope found benefit in cohabitating with cattle. Cattle sites were better fertilized, resulting in more grass for consumption, and humans were protecting their livestock from predators, which increased hirola survival rates too. 

Rather than see this as a conflict, Indigenous communities observed connections between the hirola, livestock performance, and land fertility. Only nourished land was capable of sustaining both hirola and cattle, and the presence of hirola suggested healthy cattle, since the two are vulnerable to droughts and the same diseases. The hirola presented no harm to cattle and instead became tied to cattle well-being.  “They became a symbol of good things, achieving a sacred value among the people,” says Kock.  

As Kock and his team learned more about the depth of this relationship, they also realized the infeasibility of Western conservation ideologies. Echoing a need for change during this same time period, the hirola was re-classified into its own genus, Beatragus, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature to elevate the species to critically endangered. This re-classification not only generated more interest and resources for conservation efforts, but it built momentum for the team to re-evaluate their approaches to restoring hirola populations. They began to accept that the Somali Elders—strong and committed in their efforts to save the hirola—had knowledge integral for maintaining hirola populations and that overlooking their advice would be data missing in the conservation effort. Kock says, “We didn’t have to work with the people, but it was the sensible thing to do to manage the species, so we eventually felt it was important to more concretely give them our support.”  

As the millennium turned, a new community-based organization, the Northern Rangelands Trust, was set up out of the Lewa Conservancy (which Kock directed at the time). Partially motivated by the tension and misunderstandings surrounding previous hirola translocations, this innovative trust developed to address the growing need for involvement of local and Indigenous communities with wildlife related issues on a local level. Unlike government-owned national parks and reserves, trusts and conservancies tend to be smaller community programs that actively incorporate local people into stewardship. The trust worked with the Somali ethnic community to fulfill the Elders’ suggestions for a fenced refuge, and in 2004 laid the framework that became the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy. This conservancy is owned and managed by local, Indigenous people and is focused on empowering the pastoralist communities. Given the opportunity to sustainably manage both their rangelands and hirola populations, the conservancy has since begun to see the recovery of the antelope. 

“Problems at home need a home-grown solution,” says Dr. Abdullahi Ali. Ali is an Indigenous Kenyan, founder of the Hirola Conservation Program, and a University of Wyoming alumnus. He has always shared his home of Garissa—a small town situated by the Tana River in eastern Kenya that calls itself “Home of the Hirola”—with the antelope. Its enduring presence throughout his life inspired him to pursue a conservation career that puts his Indigenous knowledge first.  

Growing up in the midst of Kenya’s changing conservation policies, he often noticed how scientists external to Indigenous communities would come in and misunderstand the situation at hand.  For example, he says the enthusiasm for African predators caused scientists to seek out proof that predators were responsible for declining hirola populations. This excluded other factors contributing to hirola decline, such as habitat degradation, and it would have highlighted predator control as a solution. But predator control is resource intensive and, because “Africa has a multi-predator system that is key to ecosystem health,” Ali says, it could upset the delicate balance of natural and human communities.  

For Ali, protecting the hirola is about maintaining that balance through grassland restoration, a more approachable method backed by his research. Ali’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wyoming focused on the impact of habitat degradation on hirola antelope. He found that habitat change in eastern Africa from open grasslands to forested woodlands had been accelerated by the loss of elephants that no longer removed a lot of the woody trees. He believed that this could be remedied in a way that benefitted both local communities and ecosystems. Since “almost 70% of wildlife in Kenya thrives and coexists on community land,” he says, restoring grasslands to support the hirola also helps sustain people’s livelihoods.  

Now, Ali’s Hirola Conservation Program endows eastern Kenyan communities with resources to conserve hirola, and inadvertently livestock, at a local level. The program employs people to essentially replace the work of elephants by thinning trees and planting native grasses. These same people then harvest the grass seeds and sell them back to the program. Farmers also receive suggestions on how to selectively graze their livestock on these grasses to ensure sustainability, and communities learn to help monitor hirola populations.  

Given that the people have strong intrinsic cultural attachments to the land and wildlife that provides for them, many communities have established their own small conservancies, blending centuries of inherited knowledge and observation with modern needs for conserving wildlife. These smaller, more localized conservancies are a powerful tool for conservation and community development, Ali says. “Conserving in our own land improves the living standards of our communities, and helps minimize competition and conflicts.” 

If given space and inclusive voices, both Ali and Kock believe that ecosystems can recover—and thus, people can recover. Ali believes, “When you empower the communities, you can feel a larger impact of conservation,” not only for the animals, but for the people. Despite the earlier involvement of many stakeholders in hirola conservation, it was the integration of foreign ideologies and science with locally-led approaches that drove the development of solutions that ensured both hirola and human well-being. Ali believes that “there is a lot of conversation globally about putting conservation in local hands; we should add to that momentum. We all want to save the animals and the planet.”  

Tesia Lin is an ex-wildlife biologist and current biological systems researcher. She is passionate about learning from communities whose lifestyles and cultures are historically intertwined with their land, and is grateful she has the opportunity to share their stores.   

Header image: These sandy-colored, desert-adapted antelope are highly visible in todays grasslands, making them more vulnerable to predators. (Hirola Conservation Program)

As chronic wasting disease spreads, wildlife managers plea for strategies that could work

By Christine Peterson

No one knew why the deer were losing weight, struggling to stand, and then keeling over, dead. So for years in the 1960s and 70s, researchers at a Colorado State University research facility recorded the mystery by collecting tiny slivers of the deer’s brains and filing them away.

Then one day a PhD student named Beth Williams unearthed those slides. Under a microscope, each sample appeared filled with holes, like the brain tissue had turned into Swiss cheese. Those holes, she realized, were similar to the ones veterinarians had already identified in sheep brains, and the always-fatal illness with no cure was coined chronic wasting disease (CWD).

As she and other researchers sounded the alarm, the strange new disease spread from Colorado to Wyoming, and then Nebraska and South Dakota, killing any deer or elk it infected. In 1996, Williams gave what now feels like a prophetic piece of advice about managing CWD: “You’ll have to be aggressive,” she said. “Remove all sources…and all potential movement. Cut wider and deeper than you ever think necessary. The deer will come back; but you’ll get one chance. If CWD gets widely established, you’ll have it for a very long time.”

In the decades since, states that followed her advice, like New York and Minnesota, have so far mostly kept the disease at bay. But in places like Wyoming and Wisconsin, which have largely lacked the will to cut as deep for as long as disease experts say is necessary, CWD has continued to spread. “There is apathy from both the wildlife managers but also the public,” says Brian Nesvik, director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “Does this worry me? Absolutely.”

Today, CWD has become one of the thorniest wildlife diseases of our time, infecting deer, elk, reindeer, and moose in three-fifths of the US and portions of Canada, Norway, and even South Korea, with prevalence rates as high as 60 percent. Despite this, most experts and wildlife managers agree that it’s not too late to act. Try something, they say. Don’t just watch and wait.

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Chronic wasting disease, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathy as it’s known to scientists, is caused by the buildup of misfolded proteins called prions, which kill brain cells and leave holes in animals’ brains. Infected animals become lethargic and emaciated, wasting away until, inevitably, they die. Because it isn’t a bacteria or a virus, it can’t be treated with antibiotics or prevented with traditional vaccines.

The disease first spreads among animals largely through nose-to-nose contact. Once CWD is established in a population and animals shed prions onto the landscape, experts believe individuals can then contract the disease through infected soil or even, possibly, through prions clinging to blades of grass.

Researchers know that deer contract the disease at higher rates than elk, which contract the disease at higher rates than moose, though no one knows exactly why. Bucks seem to be infected twice as often as does, likely because they tend to move and socialize more.

Left unchecked on a landscape, it moves slowly—it took about 40 years for CWD to creep from southeast Wyoming to the western portions of the state. But humans have given it a lift by moving captive elk and deer between businesses that raise them for food or hunting opportunities. Saskatchewan imported the disease in a captive elk from South Dakota in the late 90s. South Korea then unknowingly imported an infected elk from Canada in 2001.

Because there is no cure, and infectious prions may linger on the landscape a long time, CWD researcher Krysten Schuler, a wildlife disease ecologist and director of the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, says the best way to contain the disease is to limit possible sources of transmission. Stop treating deer and elk like livestock that can be shipped between captive facilities, particularly across state lines, she says. Explain to hunters that carcasses should go to landfills or carcass-disposal facilities and not get tossed on the side of a dirt road, where they could potentially infect nearby herds. Don’t transport brain or spinal tissue to new areas.

New York, where Schuler works, took this lesson to heart when it identified the disease in an infected deer from a captive deer facility that was made into chili for a local fire hall event in 2005. After the first discovery, officials found more positive deer at another captive facility, and ultimately paid to depopulate both businesses. Since then, they’ve worked on keeping the disease out by banning facilities from importing live deer or elk from out of state, prohibiting hunters from bringing intact carcasses in from other states, outlawing baiting and feeding to reduce gathering spots, and surveilling herds especially in high-risk areas. The state has even paid meat processors and taxidermists $10 and $20, respectively, to send in either a head or lymph node for testing.

The state is proof, Schuler says, that CWD can be isolated. “There’s an obligation to try and stop it and not just throw up our hands and say it’s going to be everywhere.”

Bryan Richards, the emerging disease coordinator at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin, advocates for an even simpler approach: reduce the number of deer gathered in close quarters by thinning herds. It’s the same one Williams recommended almost 30 years ago.

When CWD popped up in Minnesota in 2011, wildlife managers used sharpshooters and a late-season deer hunt to try and reduce the spread. Since then, the state regularly culls several hundred deer from hot spots where infections pop up before the disease has a chance to spread. And the strategy has largely worked. Officials believe only one herd has established CWD, and rates hover around 1 percent.

But this aggressive response only seems to work with a public prepared for what trying to control CWD requires. Years before the CWD outbreak in Minnesota, the state culled whitetail deer in its successful fight against bovine tuberculosis, a disease that can sicken and kill both whitetail deer and cattle. Because of that, says Kelly Straka, head of fish and wildlife for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hunters and the general public knew what to expect.

In contrast, when researchers in the rolling foothills of the Norwegian mountains discovered CWD variants in a herd of reindeer, the swift response was deeply unpopular. They essentially eliminated one population, killing more than 2,000 reindeer, says Atle Mysterud, a university of Oslo professor who has studied CWD for years. They’re monitoring the spread of CWD in another one.

That initial attack was met with uproar from the public, and Mysterud is not sure Norway will be so aggressive again. “We should have clearer goals. Current aim is ‘limit, if possible eradicate’ – but limit vs eradicate involve quite different actions.”

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In Wyoming, where CWD is established in many, but not all, deer and elk herds, the state has had to walk the line between limiting the spread and managing infected populations.  “For the vast majority of the time, we didn’t engage in any meaningful statewide management,” says Justin Binfet, a wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. But now the state has a new CWD plan, which he hopes will help Wyoming turn a corner.

The plan, finalized in 2020, calls for reducing deer or elk densities at potential hot spots like center irrigation pivots or haystacks and directs Game and Fish to sample at least 200 buck mule deer and 200 elk out of each of the state’s herds every five years. It also says thinning herds or increasing buck hunting in some herds may be necessary to conserve the state’s abundant wildlife. But the latter has proved challenging to enact.

In 2022, a mule deer herd in the early stages of CWD infection lived tucked up along the east side of Wyoming’s Snowy Range. Rates of the disease in buck deer were around 8 percent, a far cry from the 40 percent or even 70 percent in mature bucks farther north.

Research in other herds showed that left unabated, prevalence would inevitably increase. It also showed that CWD spreads first in bucks and then into does. Cut down on the number of bucks, especially big, old bucks, which are prized by hunters but are more likely to carry the disease and spread it around, and potentially control the disease.

So Lee Knox, a Game and Fish biologist, made a plan. He held a series of public meetings explaining CWD research and gauging hunters’ thoughts on increasing buck harvest. At the time, the herd of almost 4,000 deer had about 40 bucks per 100 does. Many other Wyoming herds keep buck numbers around or under 30 bucks per 100 does, and states like Minnesota hold their herds often around 20.

He proposed, and many of hunters in those early meetings agreed, to offer 100 more buck tags spread across four hunt areas and allow hunters to look for them in November instead of exclusively during the first two weeks of October.

But before the concept could even make it to the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission the following spring, online hunting forums exploded. Game and Fish was trying to kill all of the area’s bucks, people said. In a deer population that is already struggling, increasing hunting would ruin opportunities to shoot big bucks in the future. The outrage reached such a fever pitch that the department pulled the proposal, saying it was just not the right time.

“You’ll hear people say the cure is worse than the disease, which is not true at all,” Knox says. “But the public wants a guarantee, and we can’t guarantee anything.” Two years later, CWD prevalence rates in the herd now hover around 15 percent.

The story illustrates the difficulty of trying to reduce CWD’s spread by increasing hunting in a state where mule deer are so prized they adorn license plates, and herds are struggling from drought, development, invasive species, and disease.

Game and Fish Director Nesvik doesn’t blame people. Increasing hunting or thinning herds is a hard pill to swallow when populations are already lower than people would like. Plus, he said, “the public can’t see the disease killing deer. They know there’s less deer, but they go to the things that are simpler to understand. They think, ‘Well, we know mountain lions eat deer, so mountain lions are the problem.’ I think that people are having a hard time believing that CWD is actually having an effect on the population.”

Wyoming officials are also quick to point out other differences between combatting CWD in New York and Minnesota and fighting it in the Cowboy State. The Midwest’s abundant deer stay relatively put, while deer and elk herds in the West migrate dozens if not hundreds of miles, which complicates efforts to slow the spread. Managing a landscape steeped in the disease, they say, is also very different than keeping the infectious prions out.

Once the disease has already taken root, even Schuler and Straka say there’s no reasonable way to get rid of it. At that point, entities are left to manage through monitoring the spread and trying to keep prevalence down. But if support for cutting deeply once to prevent CWD’s establishment was difficult to come by, the will to cull year after year just to maintain disease levels has been even more elusive.

Wyoming wildlife managers once dramatically increased hunting in a deer herd in Thermopolis but soon discovered CWD was already enmeshed in the area. After two years, the public’s appetite for keeping deer numbers low dropped, hunting returned to usual, and rates spiked.

In Wisconsin, where disease pathologists first detected CWD in three deer killed by hunters in the fall of 2001, wildlife managers took the arrival seriously. They made deer hunting essentially unlimited in many places, required hunters shoot a doe before they kill a buck in others, and department officials culled deer. But when they sampled more than 40,000 deer the following year, they found another 205 cases. The disease, it appeared, had already taken hold.

Six years later, the hunting public had had enough. They were willing to invest in a short-term solution, it appeared, but not one that could last forever.

“Ultimately, populations are managed by hunters, and hunters wield funding and influence,” says Richards with the USGS. “As long as agencies keep producing lots of deer and big deer, the influence hunters apply is positive. But if hunters are unhappy, then the legislature takes over.”

Hunters wanted to go to back to the good old days of hunting, when the forests and fields were full of big deer, before culling dropped the number of overall deer. So the state legislature ordered an analysis of the efforts, and upon learning the results were inconclusive told the Department of Natural Resources to stop. Hunting seasons returned to normal, deer numbers bounced back, and now, 20 years later in a state with two million whitetail deer, prevalence rates in some areas are over 50 percent.

Somewhat ironically, Richards has a paper coming out this year that looks back at those early efforts to contain the disease and found that they did, in fact, help curb the spread.

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Researchers and wildlife managers like Richards and Nesvik are frustrated by the general lack of willingness to do anything, the desire to just go back to the days before the disease gripped the landscape, before hard decisions like thinning herds needed to be made. Even in places where prevention has largely been successful, like Minnesota, “there can be a perspective of impending doom,” says Straka. “You can continue to do whatever you want, but the threat will be there.”

“It’s a wicked problem,” Richards says. “There’s no easy answer and no one group by themselves can manage the outcome.” But researchers agree that states need to work together, sharing infection data and comparing strategies to aggressively prevent the disease’s spread and keep prevalence down in infected populations.

That’s not likely to happen unless CWD spreads to humans or domestic livestock like cattle, Richards says. Or, adds Nesvik, if a study could show irrefutable proof that reducing densities in areas like Wyoming’s rolling sagebrush and rugged mountains works.

Schuler thinks by now the message should be clear. “The one constant with CWD is it always seems to get worse, but I don’t think people are really trying to make it better,” she says. “I think we need a groundswell of hunters and conservationists and the public to talk to their elected officials and say, ‘This is really important to me, and we need to do something about it.’ Because the status quo is we’re losing, and we’re losing pretty badly.”

Christine Peterson is a freelance journalist covering the environment, wildlife and outdoor recreation for local, regional and national publications from her home in Laramie, Wyoming.

 

Header image: D026, a female deer that was studied as part of a collaboration between the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, University of Wyoming, and United States Geological Survey to better understand chronic wasting disease and how it affects mule deer populations. She was collared southwest of Casper, Wyoming and died in October 2021 at five years old because of CWD, which is always fatal. Photo by Justin Binfet.

An opportunity for all

Perspective by Ashlee Lundvall

One August morning in 1999, I swung my legs out of my bunk and pulled on a stiff, new pair of Wrangler jeans. I was at a teen camp in Wyoming, and I had chores to complete before we left that afternoon on a backpacking trip. Little did I know that day would be the last day I stood on my own.

Growing up in Indiana, I was a year-round, four-sport athlete, starting the school year with volleyball and moving through basketball, fast-pitch softball, and slow-pitch softball. After hitting six feet in the 6th grade, basketball had become a special passion of mine. I loved the teamwork, the physicality, the competition, and I found a sense of deep satisfaction every time I stepped on the court. Sports were my identity, and the future I imagined for myself. 

In a split second, that was all taken away. Following a freak accident at that camp in Wyoming, I found myself sitting in a wheelchair, listening to doctors tell me I would be seeing the world from a much shorter vantage. My dreams of a career involving sports were demolished as I struggled to accept a new identity in a paralyzed body.

This was a challenging time for me, but it was also a time of growth and discovery. I realized that sometimes it takes more courage to let go of old dreams that you don’t even recognize anymore in order to move on to new opportunities. I knew I wanted to help others, and I understood my journey had purpose, but I didn’t know where that would lead me. 

During graduate school, I met a young man from Wyoming. We shared a love for the outdoors and we both wanted to start our new life together out West. When we returned to Wyoming, I found that the rugged beauty of the land hadn’t changed, but I had.  I was presented with a choice; I could hide away in self-pity, or I could venture out in the wild and find a new purpose. As intimidating as those mountains seemed, a spark within me craved the challenge. I was eager to discover a new field, a new competition, a new team. And I found it outdoors.

These days, you can find me hunting, flyfishing, camping, and four-wheeling miles of mountain trails. The vast Wyoming landscape has become my arena, the place I seek out that deep satisfaction from my youth. I have found healing in the outdoors, and along the way I have forged lasting friendships and rediscovered a passion for sharing it forward. 

Now my drive is to protect this opportunity for future generations while ensuring that it is accessible to all, regardless of their ability level. Everyone deserves the chance to uncover the adventure and rich fulfillment that I have found outside. 

I believe, in the words of the Sisterhood of the Outdoors, that “we have to give it away to keep it.” We must conserve these wild places, and that will only happen if we are willing to share our knowledge and experience and passion. If we don’t show the next generation the path, we risk losing this way of life. But if we give freely and joyfully, we can see it grow and flourish. 

So share your story. Take a kid fishing. Look for philanthropic opportunities in conservation. It doesn’t take much to make a difference, but you have to be looking for the hole that only you can fill. And you have to be willing to fill it.

Some may see my disability and believe my life is thin and bleak. I hope they pause long enough to glimpse the richness and pure joy I have unearthed. And I pray they can find that same life-altering experience.

Ashlee Lundvall is a wife and mom who lives on a farm in Powell, Wyoming. She is the Head of School at Veritas Academy. Ashlee serves on the Wyoming Game & Fish Commission as well as the Wyoming Hunger Initiative.

Skyrocketing housing prices drive residents out of desirable outdoor recreation communities

By Kristen Pope

Jackson, Wyoming, is famous for its amazing outdoor access, but finding an affordable place to live there is a perpetual struggle. “We know that housing [in Jackson] is very expensive and it’s out of reach for most of our seasonal and younger workers who are less established in their careers,” says April Norton, director of the Jackson/Teton County Affordable Housing Department. In Jackson, the median sale price of a single-family home in 2022 was $3.5 million, a record high for the community. Due to the high cost and shortage of housing, as many as 40 percent of local workers live outside the county and make lengthy commutes, sometimes on icy, snow-packed roads in nearly white-out conditions. During the busy summer season, some live out of their vehicles on nearby public lands. Other long-term residents have simply moved away. 

And Jackson is not alone. For many small mountain towns, the very features that attract people also make them challenging and expensive places to live. Communities throughout the West endowed with natural amenities—nearby forests, mountains, trails, beaches, and wildlife—are seeking ways to capitalize on the economic opportunities that come with outdoor recreation and tourism. At the same time, they strive to avoid sacrificing the characteristics, such as quiet trails and little traffic, that make these places so desirable to live in the first place. 

Researchers from Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonprofit research group, explored the challenges communities like Jackson face, along with potential solutions, in a recent report entitled The Amenity Trap: How high-amenity communities can avoid being loved to death. 

The term “amenity trap” describes “a place with natural attractions that make it a great place to live but also threaten it,” as throngs of tourists strain local infrastructure while short-term rentals and wealthy residents, including part-time residents, drive up housing costs for local workers. So, what can communities do to escape the trap? The report authors offer a range of solutions and examples that communities can consider to provide more affordable housing for local workers.

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The housing crisis, in both affordability and availability, is a nationwide problem, but a few factors make it especially acute in outdoor-oriented communities throughout the Mountain West. Located in rural areas with great outdoor access, these towns are generally considered nice places to live, where people can admire gorgeous scenery and embrace an active lifestyle that may involve skiing a few laps or going for a trail run on their lunch break. Those qualities also attract people looking for second homes, remote workers, and tourists, all of whom compete with locals for limited housing. 

And the competition is stiff. Wealthy individuals may purchase second (or additional) homes in cash, making their offers more attractive and higher than those from people relying on mortgages, which generally cannot extend above a house’s appraised value. Limited buildable land and a limited labor force also make housing problems especially pronounced in some outdoor amenity communities.  

This housing shortage detracts from quality-of-life for residents and can even imperil their ability to remain housed.  The Amenity Trap report cited a 2020 study saying median rent increasing by $100 per month is associated with homelessness rising by 9 percent. A 2022 Teton Region Housing Needs Assessment survey found nearly half of renters in the region who chose to complete the survey had been forced to move in the past three years, often more than once, due to factors like their residence being sold or converted to a short-term rental or a significant rent increase. When fewer properties are available for local workers to rent, this drives prices even higher. 

“When communities have a deep toolbox to draw from, I think they can start to move the needle.” Megan Lawson

Many of Jackson, Wyoming’s, vital workers, including teachers, healthcare workers, snowplow drivers, and emergency responders, live outside the county or even across the state line in Idaho. Commuters can be stranded in inclement weather, and driving long distances every day isn’t cheap. The Teton Region Housing Needs Assessment found these commutes cost an average of $500-850 per month. And commuting negatively affects communities when those hours behind the wheel each day cut into time engaging with loved ones or participating in civic life. 

“In the next five years, we need to build 2,000 housing units just in Teton County, Wyoming,” Norton says. And the number is almost double when considering the wider region, including Teton Valley, Idaho, and northern Lincoln County, Wyoming, she says. But finding a place for new structures is a challenge since 97 percent of the county is public land—mostly Grand Teton National Park and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Of the 3 percent that is private land, several thousand acres are under conservation easement or other restrictions, leaving a very small footprint for building homes. The lack of housing availability is a factor that, coupled with soaring costs, has pushed many long-term residents to move away.

These problems echo around the Mountain West. In Big Sky, Montana, census data shows that 78 percent of Big Sky’s workforce now faces commutes of more than 40 miles. Further, many of the communities that Big Sky workers commute from also face housing stresses. The Big Sky Community Housing Trust reported the average cost to purchase a nonluxury condo at nearly $1.2 million. They also reported a 0 percent vacancy rate for long-term rentals at the end of 2022.

David O’Connor, the trust’s executive director, says a healthy vacancy rate would be closer to 5 or 6 percent, where market forces can impact rent levels. “So probably the greatest impact of a 0 percent vacancy rate is unfettered growth in rental rates,” he says. “There just is no throttle then to try and keep those rates down because from the perspective of the market, demand is then infinite and supply is not, so it’s just basic economics and the price goes up.”

Communities can be reactive and try to stop growth, do nothing and wait, or be proactive and plan ahead. According to the Amenity Trap report authors, trying to restrict growth by methods such as limiting building permits can have unintended consequences like driving up the cost of available housing. 

“When communities are faced with change, it’s very understandable to want to put the brakes on, but what we’ve seen is that it doesn’t affect the attractiveness of your community, it doesn’t affect the desirability, and people still want to come there,” says Megan Lawson, economist at Headwaters Economics and co-author of the report.

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The Amenity Trap report describes a range of tools communities can consider to address housing for local residents. “With all the different strategies that communities are using around housing, there’s no single program or policy that’s going to solve the housing challenges these places are facing,” Lawson says. “But I think … when communities can try, can have a deep toolbox to draw from, I think they can start to move the needle .”

One strategy is to make more rental units available to local workers, including by incentivizing homeowners to rent to local workers. Durango, Colorado, offered “ADU amnesty” to legalize existing unpermitted “accessory dwelling units” such as apartments above garages and in backyards. Now, Durango is incentivizing the construction of new ADUs by offering $8,000 rebates for a set number of ADUs that meet certain requirements, including the owner renting it to a local worker who uses the space as their primary residence, and committing to the program for two years.

Big Sky, Montana, provides financial incentives for homeowners to offer long-term (one- or two-year) rentals to locals, with higher amounts for homes that have more bedrooms to hold entire families. However, without guardrails these types of programs risk benefitting investors and second homeowners more than local residents. In a similar “Lease to Locals” program, Summit County, Colorado, had to cap the amount owners could charge renters after some set rates the local workforce generally couldn’t afford. 

Limiting short-term vacation rentals is another way to make more homes available to local residents. Bozeman, Montana, uses zoning to restrict short-term rentals in certain neighborhoods. While such measures can increase available housing, they can also be controversial since they impact residents and businesses running short-term rentals as income sourc es. The Big Sky Community Housing Trust also provides local homeowners with cash incentives to put permanent deed restrictions on their properties that prohibit short-term rentals and specify occupants must work locally. Jackson, Wyoming, is working on a similar deed restriction program to ensure more homes are occupied by members of the permanent local workforce. 

“It hits two birds with one stone,” Norton says of Jackson’s program. “It’s providing stable housing for someone who is working locally, but it’s also protecting community character, so we don’t have to build up bigger all the time. We can protect some of these cool funky houses in town, too, that have been workforce housing and hopefully will remain workforce housing.”

In some outdoor amenity communities, a few local businesses such as ski resorts provide employee housing for a limited number of employees. For example, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort offers limited housing for full-time employees including shared 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartments with no pets allowed and very limited parking. Another option is a shared motel room with two queen beds, one bathroom, and a mini fridge and microwave, but no kitchen. This motel is a 20–30-minute bus ride from the ski resort, and pets are not allowed. Vail Resorts also offers housing options for employees who don’t mind having roommates. In many communities, there are more people seeking employee housing than beds available.

Another approach communities can take is to build more houses, if land is available for construction. Jason Peasley, executive director of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, says the housing issue has existed for more than 40 years and part of the solution is to increase housing supply. After an anonymous donor gave 534 acres of open land adjacent to Steamboat Springs for affordable housing, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority began planning the Brown Ranch project. The county’s current housing shortfall is 1,400 units, and the project includes plans to build 2,300 new homes by 2040. Neighborhoods will be built for affordability and sustainability, as well as connectivity and health equity.

“We can expand the size of our community to accommodate our workforce and make sure that those who work in Steamboat and want to live in Steamboat have that option,” Peasley says.

In another effort to create additional housing, the Big Sky Community Housing Trust is building RiverView Apartments, a federally-funded low-income housing apartment project scheduled to be ready in 2024. 

The difficulty of creating additional housing spans beyond planning. It also requires people to physically build the structures for people to live in. A short supply of labor (as well as housing for laborers) compounds the housing challenge in many outdoor recreation communities. The Amenity Trap report discusses modular housing as a potential solution being used in parts of Colorado. Rather than requiring workers to spend weeks or months on-site building a home from the foundation up, modular homes are built in a centralized location, such as the Fading West factory in Buena Vista, Colorado, and then transported, installed, and finished in less time than building on-site. “Prefabricated and modular homes are typically not distinguishable from traditional stick-built houses and, importantly, must meet the same building code as stick-built homes,” the report states, adding that such homes can cost 10-20 percent less than homes built on-site.

Funding is another challenge that limits housing programs. Different communities turn to approaches like debt financing through bonds, which may rely on funding from local property taxes, and forming partnerships between public and private entities to spread out costs of housing solutions. Others focus on taxing tourism to help pay for housing programs and solutions. Steamboat Springs, Colorado, now charges a 9 percent tax on short-term rentals, which is estimated to bring in $11 million for affordable housing initiatives, including the Brown Ranch Project, over the next 20 years.

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As communities already entrenched in challenging housing situations seek innovative solutions, other communities that are starting to develop their own outdoor recreation economies can plan ahead. Escaping the trap and addressing severe shortages of affordable homes requires, the report authors say, proactively creating comprehensive housing solutions ahead of or along with economic development plans, not after the fact. By learning from places like Jackson, Wyoming, and taking the lessons from the Amenity Trap report to heart, communities can create housing solutions in tandem with developing ways to boost their economies and enhance quality-of-life for residents and visitors alike. The report’s authors emphasize that each community is unique and will need its own set of tools to address its individual situation.

“The challenges around housing that communities are struggling with right now are not new,” says Lawson, but now there is “a much broader group of people who are interested and paying attention to our policies around housing.” She says as community members see more people affected by a lack of affordable housing, they are starting to understand how housing challenges affect their neighbors, local businesses, and other aspects of community. This sets the stage for community leaders to take action.

“I think the challenges are a lot more visible now, and that gives an opportunity for more voices at the table around changing our housing policies.”

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com.

 

Header image: Steamboat Springs, Colorado, (Steve Estvanik, Shutterstock).

A vision for bringing passenger rail back to the rural West

Words by Nick Robinson, artwork by Graham Marema

Steel wheels glide along a track as the conductor announces, “Next stop, Thermopolis!” Outside the window, pronghorn antelope gallop across the sagebrush. The train slows to match their speed and then enters a tunnel. On the other side, striking granite walls of the Wind River Canyon come into view.

This vision of passenger rail travel across Wyoming is purely imaginary, but might it one day become reality? Today, no travelers ride the rails in Wyoming or South Dakota, making them the only two states in the continental United States without passenger offerings. Instead, trains here transport almost anything except humans, while citizens rely on cars to get from one community to the next, and many who can’t drive have no options at all. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if conductor whistles rang out once again, and accessible passenger rail service connected towns in the rural west?

If Dan Bilka and Charlie Hamilton get their way, that just might happen. The two lead All Aboard Northwest (AANW), a regional passenger rail advocacy group whose vision is to create a transportation network that offers environmental, equity, and economic benefits throughout the northwestern US. The way they see it, folding passenger rail back into the greater transportation fabric could benefit underserved populations and act as a development engine for rural communities across the West.

Passenger rail has a robust history in the region. Trains carried travelers across the western United States starting in the late 1860s. I met Mark Amfahr, a transportation consultant from Minneapolis, while he was in Laramie digitizing a Union Pacific Historical Society collection at the American Heritage Center. “A first-class passenger car would look and feel like this room,” Amfahr said, motioning to the decadent curtains, detailed woodwork, and grandiose western paintings adorning the walls.

Locomotives required stops to refuel and change crews along routes, Amfahr explained. Key stops grew to depots and became “the reason why people located where they did, and why those communities developed…a base for jobs or employment.” Settlements grew. The Overland and Pioneer Routes, operated by Union Pacific and Amtrak respectively, snaked alongside present-day Interstate 80, serving people in Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Green River, and Evanston and providing the common traveler access to an ever-growing West.

Societal shifts following World War II began to alter the transportation landscape. Veteran pilots returned home, and commercial air travel entered the scene. Flying became popular for long-distance journeys, and the automobile was king for short to medium length trips. Funding supporting rural passenger rail linkages dried up in the late 1990s. Ridership dwindled as routes began to disappear. The last Amtrak passenger train to serve Wyoming departed from Green River on May 10, 1997, and all stations closed the next day.

Now, All Aboard Northwest is working to reverse those closures and bring passenger rail to even more small towns across the West.

“We have found the statistic is around 30 percent of the US population doesn’t drive,” says AANW Secretary Charlie Hamilton, who himself is unable to drive. “Either they are too old, too young, they’re too poor, they are disabled, or they are concerned about the future. And that number is only getting bigger.” Offering alternate modes of transportation can attract new visitors for communities hoping to grow in a sustainable manner, Hamilton believes.

“There are the 3 Es. We call them the environmental benefits, the equity benefits, and economic benefits,” Hamilton says. The AANW website lists examples such as reducing automobile pollution, expanding access to services for underserved communities, and bringing in tourists to overnight in small towns. “No matter where you are on the political spectrum, most people will say yes, I can get behind at least two of them. There is a lot of interest in making this happen not only in big cities, but in small places too.”

Toward this vision, AANW organizes an annual “Train Trek” outreach series, where members travel by car meeting with groups interested in establishing passenger rail service. In 2021, the trek centered on Wyoming. Stops included not only historically serviced cities, but towns that were never connected to major cross continental routes. “The smaller communities really got it best,” Hamilton said about towns such as Greybull and Thermopolis, where residents were drawn to the value of being able to travel to larger cities for services not offered in the immediate area. One meeting resulted in a series of letters from Wyoming residents to policymakers at the United States Department of Transportation, each echoing the sentiment, “People live here too.”

According to AANW President Dan Bilka, this was the first time in recent memory that the Department of Transportation heard from Wyoming residents about their desire for passenger rail. Reinstating service is popular on both sides of the aisle, and the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification and Development Program aims to identify communities that could be viable candidates for intercity passenger rail. All Aboard Northwest acts as a mediator for communities wishing to submit applications for consideration.

Imagining a future where citizens of the rural West can ride trains from town to town is not that much of a stretch. Many historic depots still anchor small towns. “[The depot] is that critical access point for the community, but they are also regional hubs, and as they were in history,” Bilka explains. “The depot is the gateway and entryway into the community.” Local leaders are realizing this and are already envisioning the transition back to former use.

I can imagine myself standing on the platform as a train rumbles idle at Depot Park in Laramie, Wyoming. Doors of the sleek cars slide open and passengers file out. A seated woman wheels herself down a ramp and is greeted by a friend. Kids run to playground equipment at the park while parents sit at a newly built eatery. I hear letters click on the split-flap display board. Listed under departures is Malta, Montana, the endpoint on a north-south route that transects Wyoming. I step aboard and find my seat. The train departs the station, gaining speed as it glides northward. Full steam ahead.

 

Nick Robinson is an adventurer interested in sustainable modes of transportation. He can be seen cycling around Laramie, Wyoming, on a green vintage Schwinn bike.

Graham Marema is pursuing her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming, with a concurrent degree in environment and natural resources.

How place and technology meanings shape conflict around outdoor recreation development

By Wes Eaton and Curt Davidson 

In the fall of my first semester as a visiting professor at the University of Wyoming, a stranger knocked on the half-open door to my new office and said, “There’s a town in Wyoming where people are saying that an outdoor recreation development proposal is tearing their community apart. Want to look into it with me?”

The stranger was Curt Davidson, a new professor of outdoor recreation and tourism. I had never heard of the thing stirring up the controversy, a via ferrata, which Davidson described as a protected climbing route—rungs, ladders, and cables installed on cliffs to assist climbing. It was the community conflict that intrigued me; people around Lander, Wyoming, were increasingly divided on the prospect of building a via ferrata in the nearby Sinks Canyon State Park. I am a social scientist specializing in conflict and collaboration around controversial environmental issues. I wondered if lessons from conflicts around water management and energy transitions, which I’d studied in the past, might apply in the world of recreation development. I told Davidson I was in.

As we began meeting and interviewing the people of Lander, we soon found that via ferrata meant much more than iron rungs and ladders, and rarely even that. We wondered if what seemed to be an intractable controversy about specific issues might instead be viewed through the lens of how Sinks Canyon State Park and via ferrata mean different things to different people. We hoped this lens could help foster understanding in the situation at hand, as well as provide a means for decision-makers and developers to sidestep future conflict.

We began our research by reading up on Lander, a former mining town southeast of Yellowstone National Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation, now known as a recreation destination and gateway to the Wind River Mountains. Between the Winds and Lander, the middle fork of the Popo Agie River runs through Sinks Canyon, where visitors access campgrounds, hiking and biking trails, and sport climbing from a state highway. Sinks Canyon State Park covers 600 acres near the mouth of the canyon, while the rest is managed mostly by the US Forest Service.

Next, we scoured news articles to find out how the situation got to where it was. From what we could tell, officials from Sinks Canyon State Park had released a new master plan in October 2020, following a series of public meetings and a public comment period. The plan included a proposal to install a via ferrata on a north-facing cliff in the canyon, which a group of community members had pitched as a way of attracting visitors and boosting the local economy.

After the plan’s release, a retired Wyoming Game and Fish biologist and peregrine falcon expert raised concerns that the proposed via ferrata route crossed a known nesting site, kicking off what quickly emerged as an organized campaign. Lander residents rallied around the mantra “Keep Sinks Canyon Wild” and formed the vocal citizens group Sinks Canyon Wild, which distributed yard signs, knocked on doors, and organized community events. A group of about 40 opponents even surprised Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon on the Lander airport tarmac when he flew in to attend another event.

In the face of growing criticism, someone close to the debate suggested an alternative site on a south-facing cliff called the Sandy Buttress, but that didn’t end the controversy. In addition to concerns about the peregrines, critics accused Wyoming State Parks of ignoring public comments, making decisions behind closed doors, and valuing the state’s outdoor recreation economy over local concerns. As the campaign against the via ferrata grew, vocal support dwindled to a private matter. By the time we arrived, Wyoming State Parks was the sole public voice for via ferrata in Sinks Canyon.

Our first visit put us at the Middle Fork Restaurant on Lander’s Main Street in time for a late breakfast. Our rented university sedan gave us away as outsiders, but when we announced that we were researchers interested in conflict surrounding the via ferrata issue, the community opened to us, with thoughtfulness and engagement from all sides.

We began interviewing people that day. Over the course of three months, we spoke with 29 stakeholders, including recreators, wildlife enthusiasts, business owners, Wyoming State Parks employees, area residents, and local tribes. During our interviews, as well as informally at the Lander Bar, we were often told, “I don’t understand the via ferrata.” This could mean, I don’t understand why someone wants the via ferrata here, as well as I don’t understand why people are so upset over building it here. These weren’t statements of ignorance, but claims offered with humility. People in Lander and elsewhere, while clear about their own positions, were genuinely flabbergasted by those on the other side of the matter. Within this gap in understanding, we heard “via ferrata is tearing this community apart.”

As researchers, we were not trying to parse out who was right or might be at fault, or claiming to have special insight as to whether the via ferrata should or shouldn’t be installed. In fact, less than a year after we completed our interviews, Wyoming State Parks canceled the project, rendering what ought to be done a moot point. Instead, we aimed to better understand the fundamental drivers of different positions on the issue by focusing on the idea of “fit.”

A substantial body of social science research says that community support for new development is most likely when the technology involved is seen as “fitting” with a place. A perceived mismatch brews resistance. Because people draw on their personal experiences and community norms when forming ideas about the world around them, the same place and technology can mean very different things to different groups. As such, there is a wide range of ways people feel about or relate to a place (place meanings) that can match or mismatch a range of ways people view a technology (technology meanings). Social scientists disentangle and map these various possible combinations into “symbolic logics,” where a position of support or opposition is the logical conclusion of a particular pair of place and technology meanings.

Using these ideas, we proposed that critics in Lander saw the via ferrata as inappropriate for Sinks Canyon, whereas proponents saw via ferrata as a natural fit. This framework is useful for making sense of seemingly irreconcilable differences because it shows how any position is perfectly reasonable, given a certain view of Sinks Canyon and a specific way of thinking about via ferrata.

Take for example the people we interviewed who see Sinks Canyon as a wild and sacred place. They emphasized the diversity of wildlife along the park’s canyon walls and the dense riparian habitat along the Popo Agie River, pointing to the opportunities for wildlife enthusiasts. They highlighted that Wyoming Game and Fish has an agreement with State Parks to “preserve and manage important habitats for wildlife.” They also frequently referenced Indigenous groups and culture and were concerned that the proposed location “puts this via ferrata now right at the entrance of the canyon, right on a cliff that has petroglyphs and pictographs, right on an area that is culturally very significant.”

Now consider those who insist that the rungs and cables of a via ferrata would be an eyesore, saying, “We don’t need more junk going on up there, you know?” To them, the physical infrastructure—the rungs and cables—of the proposed technology doesn’t fit with the place’s wild aesthetic. They stressed this mismatch by labelling the via ferrata things like “playground,” “jungle gym,” and “plaything”—objects belonging in more developed recreation spaces.

Others opposed the via ferrata because of a different mismatch of place and technology meanings. They agree that Sinks Canyon is a wild and sacred place and objected to what they saw as the via ferrata’s commercial nature. The proposal at the time used a concessionaire to manage the route and included what officials hoped would be a nominal fee; opponents declared this out of sync with the public nature of a state park. Focus on the commercial dimension aligned with larger suspicions people held about the role of private interests and political motivations in the project, which ultimately came to symbolize valuing economic progress over wild places that ought to stay special. As one critic said, “We need a whole different lens to look at the planet, and my attention to the via ferrata is about that. It’s a little, trivial, kind of ridiculous thing, but it represents [an inability] to grasp the fragility of our planet and Wyoming’s unique place in how wild it is compared to the rest of our planet, and especially our country.”

Even proponents of the via ferrata agreed that it did not belong in wild spaces, with one saying, “I would not want the next via ferrata to be in the middle of the Wind River Range, on Gannett peak and the Gannett Peak Wilderness Area.” But to that interviewee and others, Sinks Canyon State Park is not wild. Instead, they called it a “gateway” and a “transition zone” between the wilderness of the Wind River Range and the development found below. Some called the state park a “planned” place, pointing to existing recreational infrastructure like parking lots, restrooms, campgrounds, and the highway running through it all. The pocketed, limestone cliffs themselves have made Sinks Canyon a hotspot for rock climbing, with more than 500 developed sport routes (although most of these are in the national forest, not the state park).

Another interviewee pushed back on the idea of the canyon as sacred, particularly the proposed via ferrata location at its mouth, saying “You’ll not find any sites where [Indigenous groups] did any camping or any ceremonies, no evidence of that activity.” Instead, it is a “pass-through,” used for travel, migration, foraging, and hunting—but not for sacred purposes.

To many sharing these pro-via ferrata views, Sinks Canyon State Park is seen as an appropriate place for new recreation development that avoids encroaching on what they see as truly sacred or wild places elsewhere. In general, via ferrata proponents focused not only on the technology as a form of recreation and education in keeping with the canyon’s current use, but also as a way of enhancing and equalizing that use.

The canyon’s cliffs currently offer mostly expert level climbing routes. In contrast, the via ferrata’s handles, cables, ladders, rungs, and safety clips could make climbing more accessible to more users. One advocate was excited that “we could open this up to underserved populations and have ways of allowing school groups and college groups and you name it. The opportunities are there for us to use this in an equitable way.” More generally, the via ferrata represented increased access to the health benefits of outdoor recreation by providing another means for people to spend time outside.

Another proponent highlighted the via ferrata as an interpretive tool that would complement the state park’s educational activity repertoire, saying “I see this more as an education tool to teach the climbing sport or climbing pastime lifestyle, but also teach about the beauty and the history of Sinks Canyon.” In this view, climbing the via ferrata would fit in alongside visiting the mysterious sink and rise of the Popo Agie River, experiencing the diverse local wildlife, and exploring hidden waterfalls and caves. It’s not a threatening, novel technology so much as “one more hook to catch kid’s interests,” as one interviewee said, or a way to increase visitors’ “stay time,” another said.

Other folks who saw Sinks Canyon State Park as a place of extensive use and development still attached a different meaning to it: the canyon is vulnerable to, rather than ideal for, additional development. To them, further alteration represented a line in the sand they didn’t want to cross, with one saying, “My greatest worry is basically that Sinks Canyon is death by a thousand cuts. You know, this [via ferrata] gets it a hell of a lot closer to the thousand. I mean [the park] is just a small area.”

Many interviewees shared stories of trampled paths, increased trash and pet waste, and overuse of the canyon by recreationists of all types. They worried that what was once the norm for them within the park—solitude, peace, wonderment—was disappearing, and that more users brought in by the via ferrata would only add to the problem. “If we don’t limit ourselves and ask ourselves to lighten up our footprint in the outdoors,” said one via ferrata opponent, “we’re going to trample it to death.”

Our research generated a figure illustrating some of these “symbolic logics” of fit that underlie support for, or opposition to, the via ferrata proposal. Admittedly, this framework does simplify things. Making meaning in everyday life is hardly so concise or linear. Nor are the given examples exhaustive of all the possible meanings and combinations of meanings people ascribed to place and technology.

There were, for example, people who saw Sinks Canyon as a recreational space but didn’t view the via ferrata as a legitimate form of recreation, saying it wasn’t “real” climbing. There were also those who saw via ferrata as worthwhile but blamed the shortcomings of the south-facing Sandy Buttress, warning it would be “a rinky-dink version of what a via ferrata should be.”

Despite the simplification, these logics remain a powerful tool for illuminating and charting out the values, motivations, and deep place attachments shaping peoples’ contrasting views on what is good for their community. This can get us a long way towards our research goal of building understanding among supporters and opponents, if people are willing to learn about, and take seriously, the meanings others hold that are different from their own. They can still disagree about whether Sinks Canyon is a wild place or a transition zone, but if they set aside their doubt for a minute and try on the other position, they may see the logic in it. We like to sum this up by saying, “If you’re furious, get curious.”

A close look at our symbolic logics reveals additional insights. First, it can be perilous to ignore or violate locally salient place meanings, no matter how beneficial a technology seems. In the case of via ferrata, even a technology that increases recreation’s accessibility (which is generally viewed favorably) was no match for concern for protecting a space that symbolized threatened wilderness. Second, different combinations of place and technology meanings can lead to the same position, which opens creative thinking for sidestepping potential outdoor recreation development disputes.

Communities and decision-makers wanting to manage contention around outdoor recreation development might take advantage of these insights when designing community engagement processes. A project leader might begin by finding out which meanings are tacit and prevalent for a place. This could give a sense of what types of development might fit well. Next, they could join, extend, or begin a new community dialogue to build understanding and potentially forge new, shared meanings along the way.

The best time to tap into and create shared meanings is before a big development announcement. That’s because people often hold multiple meanings for the same place—recreating in a place they hold sacred, for instance—but these meanings tend to congeal when someone feels “their” place is threatened. New technologies often constitute a big threat to place; the via ferrata proposal, for example, catalyzed the Sinks Canyon Wild citizens group dedicated to protecting Sinks Canyon when there wasn’t one before. Once a community builds a shared understanding, it can work to identify a reasonable “fit” between place and outdoor recreation development.

In this way, lessons learned from the Sinks Canyon via ferrata conflict, which appears to have ended, might assist other communities and decision-makers wanting to get ahead of conflict around outdoor recreation development. The authors, Wes and Curt, hope to support and continue learning from and with Wyoming leaders willing to build on this approach for current and future projects.

Wes Eaton is visiting assistant professor with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. His work is on the science and practice of collaborative approaches for managing complex socio-environmental challenges.

Curt Davidson is an assistant professor with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. His work focuses on recreation with special attention given to recreation development, health and wellness, and experiential education.

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Acknowledgments: We thank the stakeholder interviewees who shared their stories with us. We lightly edited some interviewee quotes to protect personal identities. Our research was funded by the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation, Tourism, and Hospitality (WORTH) Initiative, which is the sponsor of this issue of Western Confluence

Header image: Climbers enjoy a via ferrata in Spain. (Photo by Frantisek Duris on Unsplash.)

Rock climbers in a remote Wyoming canyon may help shape national public lands climbing management

By Nita Tallent

On an early summer day in 2018, a group of sport rock climbers—packs laden with ropes, quickdraws, harnesses, shoes, and chalk—clambered up a makeshift trail in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming. They were eager to ascend the steep, awe-inspiring limestone walls strewn with pockets, cracks, ledges, jugs, and crimps that promised to deliver challenge and exhilaration.

“We noticed some excessive use of glue in routes at a really well-established area up in Mondo-Beyondo,” recalls Mike Ranta, cofounder of the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society. “We had no judgement on that at the time.” However, their opinion began to shift when they saw how many new routes included holds manufactured through chipping, drilling, and gluing the rock. Such manufacturing is anathema to standards for climbing route developers to “leave the rock in as close to its natural state as possible.”

A booming popularity in the area alongside ambiguity over what constitutes ethical route development has made Tensleep Canyon the stage for an outdoor recreation conflict. Now, as the Bighorn National Forest resumes work on a climbing management plan for Tensleep Canyon to both address issues associated with overcrowding and define what amount of rock alteration is allowed when developing climbing routes, climbers and public land managers around the country are watching closely. The Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan has the potential to set precedent for rock climbing management on public lands nationally.

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Tensleep Creek cuts through an evergreen shrouded canyon down the southwest face of the Bighorn Mountains in northcentral Wyoming. Climbers have scaled the towering limestone and dolomite cliffs of Tensleep Canyon since the early 1980s when the “godfather” of Tensleep, Stan Price, hand drilled and installed ten bolts to set “Home Alone,” one of the first sport routes in the canyon. Hours from any major airport and lacking the glamor of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, residents and recreators believed the canyon was immune from being overrun. However, in the 30-plus years since rock climbers with ropes saddled over their shoulders first burrowed into these forests, word of the canyon as a treasure chest of routes waiting to be established spread.

Since the 1980s, climbers have developed more than 1,200 climbing routes in the Tensleep Canyon area. After local climber Aaron Huey and others compiled The Mondo Beyondo: Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming, the first published guidebook to the canyon in 2008, climbers and route developers flocked to the area. Today, climbers from around the world have discovered the canyon, making it the central jewel in the crown of any self-respecting sport rock climber. Still many local climbers would have preferred the jewels stay a secret.

The surge in popularity has brought problems. Heavy traffic and illegal parking along the Cloud Peak Skyway (Hwy 16) and Forest Road 18 create safety concerns. A weaving network of unapproved trails to crags is eroding soil. Dispersed camping sites close to waterways and the road are on the rise. Uncontrolled dogs run amuck. Masses of climbers inadvertently spread invasive plant species such as houndstongue and Canada thistle in addition to leaving behind human and pet waste and litter. At the base of climbing walls, staging areas have compacted soil and damaged shrubs and grasses. Boisterous crowds interfere with nesting raptors.

Recognizing that recreation was on the increase, in 2005 the Bighorn National Forest published a Forest Land and Natural Resource Management Plan announcing that within 10 years a climbing management plan would, “inventory existing rock-climbing routes including approach, associated trail locations, and human impact,” in Tensleep Canyon.

In 2011, the Access Fund, a national climbing advocacy organization, created a Tensleep Canyon stewardship group, now known as the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition, to work with the Bighorn National Forest on the climbing management plan. The Access Fund’s goal was to collaboratively develop a plan “that both preserves the current climbing experience at Ten Sleep [sic], while conserving the resource for future generations.”

However, 2015 came and went and the promised plan had yet to be created. By the time Ranta and his buddies witnessed manufactured holds and chipped rock in Tensleep Canyon in 2018, it was not unusual to find climbers from around the world crowding at the base of the crags, anxiously waiting their turn. In that same year the Access Fund included Tensleep Canyon as one of “10 Climbing Areas in Crisis,” noting that “world-class climbing” invited crowds too great for the area to sustain.

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As the popularity of rock climbing grew in Tensleep Canyon, so did the number of route developers looking to leave their mark on the limestone walls. This was not without controversy. For those not in the climbers’ sphere, establishing a new route is the magnum opus for many climbers, the pinnacle of their progression and status in the climber community. Setting or developing a sport rock climbing route involves drilling holes into the rock and inserting bolts along an ideal line that is safe and appropriately challenging. Ideally, route setters do this with minimal impact to natural geology, flora, and fauna of the rock face. They may “clean” the route, which generally involves brushing aside loose rock, vegetation, debris, lichens, and moss. They may also “comfortize” hand holds by smoothing and sanding sharp edges typical of the Bighorn Mountains to minimize torn and bloody “climbers’ hands.”

Generally, cleaning and comfortizing in dolomite and limestone are considered acceptable modifications by modern climbers, but the “manufacturing” Ranta and his buddies encountered in 2018 is not. The Access Fund defines manufacturing (a practice which they oppose) as “any conscious attempt to expand a hold, create a new hold (drilling pockets, expanding a pocket with a tool, creating a hold with glue), reinforcing loose holds with glue, or adding/placing an artificial hold on the wall in an attempt to curate a climbing movement or experience, or to create a route other than what is naturally available.” The conundrum is in the fine line between “cleaning and comfortizing,” which many climbers accept, and “manufacturing,” which many climbers oppose.

In an attempt to self-regulate in Tensleep Canyon, Ranta and other climbers approached world-renowned route developer and owner of a nearby climber campground Louie Anderson, who they suspected of manufacturing. The actual words exchanged during the June 30, 2018, meeting are forever lost with only contradictory recollections remaining. The gist was to agree upon what was and was not acceptable for comfortizing routes in Tensleep Canyon and put a stop to manufacturing. However, route manufacturing continued.

The Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition and the Access Fund denounced the manufacturing. In addition, three original Tensleep Canyon route developers—Charlie Kardaleff, Aaron Huey, and JB Haab—posted an open letter condemning the practice on the Tensleep Canyon Facebook page. Taking the debate to a national audience, Rock and Ice magazine published the letter in 2019. In addition, citizens reported the damage caused by the manufacturing to the Forest Service believing that it was the Forest Service’s role to stop the practice.

In July 2019, a few climbers, frustrated by the Forest Service’s failure to police the manufacturing, closed manufactured routes by removing bolts, clipping bolts flush with the rock surface, filling holds with glue, and affixing bright red padlocks to the lowest bolts. If the intent was to generate a reaction, that intent was met. The Forest Service, the Access Fund, and Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition quickly condemned the bolt cutting and padlocks, which escalated tensions and further divided forest users.

On July 19, 2019, much to the dismay of many in the local and national climbing community, Powder River District Ranger Traci Weaver issued an official regulation prohibiting any new route development until release of the Forest Service’s long-promised climbing management plan (which was slated to be completed by 2015, yet still in 2019 nowhere to be seen). Soon after Weaver’s announcement the Access Fund released a statement which denounced both route manufacturing and “vigilante bolt chopping” forecasting concern that due to these actions the “climbing community could lose the privilege of climbing in Ten Sleep [sic] altogether…”

Eighteen months later the Powder River District held a virtual meeting to request input from the public about climbing in Tensleep Canyon. The goal was to identify desired condition of the forest and clarify practices that would ensure respect for the natural and cultural resources owned by all Americans yet entrusted to the care of the US Forest Service. During this February 2021 meeting, District Ranger Weaver announced that the Bighorn National Forest had contracted Maura Longden, climbing management consultant with High Peaks, LLC, to lead development of the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan.

Members of the public submitted over 500 comments both during the public meeting and in response to a scoping notice, summarized on the Bighorn National Forest National Environmental Policy Act planning web page. The public expressed a gambit of concerns ranging from the fear that the Forest Service would prohibit all forms of rock climbing; to concerns about negative impacts to natural and cultural resources; to questions about the absence of non-climber, outdoor, recreator, Indigenous, and diverse perspectives in the discussions; to other issues. The overarching concern was whether and how the Forest Service would curtail route manufacturing while allowing route development to resume.

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Despite the Forest Service’s best intentions, effort on the climbing management plan paused again following Weaver leaving her position in June 2021. In 2022, a new leadership team joined the Powder River District. District Ranger Thad Berrett, Lead Climbing Ranger Ryan Sorenson, and Recreation Program Manager Kelsey Bean began reaching out, learning about the needs of the many forest users, and signaling that efforts on the stalled plan would resume.

In 2023, the Powder River District staff continued to familiarize themselves with issues and the stakeholders, rights-holders, and national interest groups as they resumed work on the Tensleep Canyon climbing management plan. According to the Forest Service’s web page, the plan will respond to “increased development and impacts from rock climbing,” and will entail protections for soil, vegetation, geology, water, cultural resources, wildlife, and social resources. The Forest Service confirms it will codify the route development practices and ethics outlined in Best Practices for Development and Rebolting in the Bighorn Mountains and Bighorn Basin, a document the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition and Access Fund created with the Forest Service, while prohibiting manufactured holds and routes. It will also guide management for access trails and staging areas, human and pet waste, dog and human interactions with wildlife and livestock, commercial use, gear caches, dispersed camping, and visitor capacity. Climbing management plans are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act, which will allow for public participation. Ranger Berrett acknowledges that momentum on the plan has been slow and says not to expect implementation until 2024.

Meanwhile, US Forest Service leadership and climbing advocacy organizations such as the Access Fund are following the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan because it has the potential to set precedent for rock climbing management on public lands nationally. Despite the fact that 30 percent of climbing in the United States occurs in national forests, there is no national policy defining acceptable, standard practices meaning each of the more than 150 national forests must establish their own policies. The Access Fund is advocating for nation-wide guidance to bring “consistency and stability” among national forests. Eyes are on how the Bighorn National Forest codifies climbing in Tensleep Canyon because this climbing management plan may pave the way for other forest plans as well as national policy.

In addition, two bi-partisan bills put forward in Congress have the potential to shape management of fixed climbing anchors across designated Wilderness areas on public lands, according to the Access Fund. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act (H.R. 1380) from Representatives Curtis (R-Utah), Neguse (D-Colorado), and Stansbury (D-New Mexico) and the America’s Outdoor Recreation Act (S. 873), introduced by Senators Barrasso (R-Wyoming) and Manchin (D-West Virginia) intend, in part, to “bring consistency to federal climbing management policy and protect some of America’s most iconic Wilderness climbing areas,” as summarized by the Access Fund. Both bills direct public land managers “to outline any requirements or conditions associated with the placement and maintenance of fixed anchors on federal land.” They also would require agencies to solicit public comment when drafting the requirements, giving climbers a voice in shaping climbing practices on public land.

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As they await the final climbing management plan, an unofficial local climber group is promoting ethical climbing and route development. The Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society, led by Mike Ranta and Adam (Ace) Ashurst, creates updated editions of Aaron Huey’s original climbing guide. In 2023, this informal collective completed the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Guidebook 11^th edition: The Invasion, which explicitly opposes the “intentional alteration of the rock by chipping, drilling pockets, or gluing for the purpose of enhancing holds (manufacturing).” The society’s strategy is to call out manufactured routes so local and visiting climbers can avoid or boycott them out of respect for the landscape, sending the message that manufactured routes are not to be revered or tolerated.

The Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition is also doing its part to engage climbers in stewardship of Tensleep Canyon. The coalition’s Christa Melde invites everyday climbers of all colors, genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities to join the conversation around the climbing management plan. She believes the solution to sustainable climbing in Tensleep Canyon “just boils down to education.” To that end, Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition members reach climbers through one-on-one conversations about stewardship and Leave No Trace practices at crags and trailheads. They also advance engagement and education at the annual Tensleep Climbers’ Festival each July.

Everyone who Western Confluence spoke to for this article—the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition, the Access Fund, a permitted rock-climbing guide, the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society, and independent, unaffiliated climbers—expressed a spirit of renewed enthusiasm and cooperation, unanimously pledging their support to the Forest Service staff in completing the climbing management plan. Now, land managers and climbers around the country are watching to see how the Bighorn National Forest not only tackles the challenges of parking, camping, trail use, and waste disposal in a remote yet world-famous climbing destination, but also how they draw the line between ethical route development and forbidden manufacturing.

 

Nita Tallent, PhD, is a plant ecologist, retired federal natural resource professional, and a master’s student in the Haub School of the Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Her current research focuses on the motivations of private landowners to allow outdoor recreationists on their lands. Nita is also an avid outdoor recreator who dabbles in sport rock climbing.

 

Disclosure: Adam (Ace) Ashurst of the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society is the author’s step-son.

Header image: A rock climber ascends a sport route in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming. (Photo by Nita Tallent.)

Lessons from Curt Gowdy State Park on outdoor recreation design

By Katie Klingsporn

Between Laramie and Cheyenne, amid the rocky shrubland and aspen groves of Curt Gowdy State Park, 45 miles of trail unfurl in ribbons of dirt, ramps, jumps, and berms.

These aren’t repurposed two-tracks or the kind of grueling paths devised by exercise masochists. The trails were carefully—and in some cases mathematically—designed to utilize the existing granite boulders that sprout up around Curt Gowdy while maximizing angles, curvatures, and roller-coaster features to enhance flow. In other words, these trails were built according to the science of trail pleasure.

“So. Fun!” is how mountain biker Melanie Arnett describes Curt Gowdy’s trails. She has lived in Laramie for decades, where she’s watched publicly accessible mountain bike trails grow from slim pickings to a plethora. “It’s just such a treasure,” she said of Curt Gowdy. “I cannot believe this is our backyard.”

She does stay away during the summer high season, she said. That’s when hikers and mountain bikers flock from Front Range communities and beyond, crowding parking lots and campsites.

Her experience underscores some of the fundamental challenges facing land managers, outdoor recreation advocates, and conservationists working to advance Wyoming’s outdoor recreation industry. As they attempt to balance the promise of economic and health benefits with deeply held Wyoming values of empty spaces and the preservation of natural resources, many say the way forward will have to be carefully designed. A test case can be found in Curt Gowdy State Park, which champions say is a model for smart outdoor recreation design, and where a 900 percent surge in visitation post trail-building tested the landscape’s capacity to handle so much human activity.

Established in 1971, Curt Gowdy is a 3,400-acre park at roughly 7,000 feet elevation that encircles three small reservoirs: Granite Springs, Crystal, and North Crow. For much of its existence, the park functioned as a water-activity and camping park, said Todd Thibodeau, a trail builder and mountain bike enthusiast who was a Cheyenne-based senior manager for State Parks in the early 2000s. “All of our large state parks were water-based parks,” Thibodeau said, adding that the department in large part considered its function to be “providing water-based recreation and camping at reservoirs.”

He saw potential for expanding that vision through trail-building. Trails are not as affected by storms or lake levels as water sports, he said, and the water at Curt Gowdy could only accommodate a limited volume of people, keeping the park’s average visitation to about 50,000 a year. Trail-based activities like hiking and biking could offer more resilient and diversified recreation to state parks visitors.

Specifically, he was drawn to Gowdy, a park right in his backyard and one where “there was not a whole lot of use of those areas away from the reservoirs,” he said. The park’s windswept landscape—at the intersection of high plains and the Laramie Range foothills—is an unusual clash of granite outcroppings and wide meadows. There’s even a tucked-away waterfall. “I used to go hiking a lot in the park, and I kept thinking, ‘Wow, you could build an amazing trail system out here,’” Thibodeau said.

So he helped instigate talks within the agency to build state park trails, he said, laying out arguments why users would benefit from more than just campsites and boat ramps. Swayed by the potential of more users, officials decided to test the waters with a pilot trails project in Gowdy. The agency had to do quite a bit of outreach and explaining, Thibodeau said—including defusing mistaken rumors about the project’s scope—but the public eventually came on board.

Over the next dozen years, crews and volunteers created more than 40 miles of purpose-built trail at Curt Gowdy, partnering with trail-building experts from the International Mountain Bike Association to design the network.

Because it started as a blank slate, Thibodeau said, “it allowed us to really innovate and do a lot of unique things there that hadn’t really been done in many other places before. And to me, that’s maybe one of the reasons that the trail system has been so popular.”

A tenet of the design is what Thibodeau refers to as the “ski-area model” of trail development. It involves a focus on loops instead of out-and-back trails, “stacked” loops to offer users lots of options off of a main trail stem, and a progression of difficulty—with the easiest options available right from the trailhead. It also involves building “play areas” akin to terrain parks for skills development. Importantly, the trails are fun for a wide range of users, including hikers and runners. That diverse array of options was a uniting principle that guided the entire system.

Another characteristic is that trails were clustered south of the road that cuts through the park, leaving the land north of the pavement mostly undeveloped. That, Thibodeau said, leaves the natural resources and wildlife of the park’s north quadrant untouched.

The trails are also designed with the landscape’s natural features as opposed to just cutting through them, Thibodeau said. Builders utilized boulders and berms to create playful features; it’s these whoop-de-doos, jumps, and bridges that have raised Gowdy’s profile as a mountain bike destination. The International Mountain Bicycling Association gave the trails an “epic” designation, and publications like Bike and Outside magazine have sung its praises. The Crow Creek trail, meanwhile, has become an enormously popular hiking path; it leads to the park’s idyllic waterfall.

The success, of course, entailed significant time and money. Construction lasted years as crews, including volunteer labor, meticulously smoothed out grades and moved many tons of rocks. State parks pursued and secured grants and private donations. The state’s investment in Gowdy trails falls between $1.75-$2.3 million in 2023 dollars, said Wyoming Office of Outdoor Recreation Manager Patrick Harrington, not including ongoing maintenance.

The pilot project was deemed enough of a success that State Parks also built new trails in Glendo, Hot Springs, Bear River, and Sinks Canyon. In Gowdy, the trails have boosted business for bike and outdoor gear shops in Laramie and Cheyenne, Harrington said, and Thibodeau credits the trails with sparking a youth mountain biking culture in Cheyenne. And, Thibodeau said, it shouldn’t be overlooked that it offers locals like himself a sweet place to ride and recreate.

Harrington worked as the park’s superintendent starting in 2018, at the tail end of trail construction, and has ridden the trails extensively. He calls Gowdy “the little gem in southeast Wyoming” and said it “was one of the initial pieces that started launching sort of a mountain bike revolution, trail user revolution in southeast Wyoming.”

Arnett experienced this revolution first hand. When she moved to Laramie in 1998 to pursue a master’s degree in botany, she had been mountain biking for a decade. But there weren’t a lot of trail options in her new town, so she mostly hiked and ran in the early years. “It actually took me a really long time to figure out where to ride my bike,” she said.

Around 2006, a friend convinced Arnett to ride Gowdy’s trails, which crews had started building. Cattle grazing in the park necessitated constant on-and-off riding to pass through gates, and she didn’t love sharing the park with so many bovines. “I was pretty underwhelmed,” she said. However, as more trail miles—as well as cattle stiles—became available, “it started getting really fun…and in recent years, it’s just gotten so nice, it’s such a great resource for us.”

The trails are fun and flowy, Arnett said, and built in a way that helped her progress as a rider by gradually building up her skills. She even got involved in a women’s skills camp called Rowdy Gowdy, which she helped coach for years.

Arnett wasn’t alone in discovering Gowdy. As word got out, visitation ticked up. By 2019, the park that once attracted around 50,000 visits tallied 221,000. Then in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed folks to embark on domestic road trips, that tripled to 622,000.

That season was “crazy,” said Harrington, who was Gowdy’s superintendent at the time. “We would have parking lots full at 9 in the morning on a random Tuesday,” he said. It was a year that put Gowdy’s capacity, and design principles, to the test.

Spikes in usage are typically associated with resource impacts like rogue trails, improperly stored human waste, dangerously crowded parking lots, and overwhelmed staff and facilities. In many popular destinations, land managers have struggled to keep up with maintenance, staffing, and infrastructure needs in the face of growing demand. Skeptics of recreation development have also expressed concern about distressing animals, causing irreversible harm to cultural resources like Indigenous sites, and overdeveloping wild places.

In Gowdy, Harrington said, “We definitely saw throughout the pandemic, that capacity of Gowdy, that we reached that capacity.

Though the mountain biking trails and campsites received heavy use, managers said the most drastic explosion was actually in day hiking, with the bulk of people heading out on Crow Creek trail to Hidden Falls. What happened on Crow Creek during the height of COVID, Harrington said, is twofold: up to 300 people a day used it and—because they were social distancing—hikers spread out. That resulted in widening and erosion of the trail and huge parking demand.

In fact, Thibodeau and a crew were shoring up the Crow Creek trail this spring by building stairs, reinforcing grades, and armoring sections. The trail had been “hammered,” Thibodeau said. In 2020, State Parks also used federal CARES Act money to add a temporary parking lot and campground to handle the added pandemic demand.

These days, Thibodeau and Arnett both say they generally avoid Gowdy on Saturdays and during the summer high season. The agency keeps an eye on high-use areas like Crow Creek, said acting director of State Parks and Cultural Resources Dave Glenn. “I don’t know if we’ll ever say, ‘Hey, we’re full go home,’” he said. “But there’s times that we are looking at it going, ‘There’s too many people on these.’”

Still, this was not a runaway case of “build it and they will come,” Glenn said, since “they” are already coming. To him, Gowdy is more of an example of the kind of product they will use—and one the state can manage to minimize negative impacts. “We have the ability to build something and attract folks to it,” he said, “or they’re just going to go and do it on their own.”

These two choices are embodied in a cautionary “tale of two cities” Glenn often tells.

First: Moab, Utah, which he remembers visiting in the 1980s with friends and their outdoor toys, including early mountain bikes. A uranium mill had closed and Moab was economically depressed, he said. But his friends weren’t welcomed with open arms. He remembers a local telling them to “get out of town, you effing hippies!”

Despite lacking services, they had a good time, and they kept returning. And over the years, Glenn said, he watched as Moab was caught flat-footed as its wealth of red-rock resources attracted increasing crowds. “They buried their head in the sand,” Glenn said. “And they got overrun.”

The second: Fruita, Colorado. Fruita was a sleepy oil and gas town near the banks of the Colorado River with ample high-desert BLM land, but not much economic vitality. That changed when community members partnered with land managers to build trails and bike paths in a deliberate way, Glenn said, with amenities for the growing number of users like paved paths that connect communities. Today, “It is the mecca of mountain biking in the Intermountain West,” Glenn said.

The way Glenn sees it, planning for increased use, rather than fighting it, is the path that will lead to greater prosperity and success. And it’s one step toward balancing growth with preservation—“the nut I’ve been trying to crack the last six or seven years.”

After witnessing the surge of visitation at Gowdy, Harrington agrees. “I think that’s the lesson learned, is that you can get out in front of it a little bit and start managing for these higher levels of visitation.” Though visitation has cooled since 2020, Harrington believes the spike gave State Parks a taste of what’s to come.

And while a good design is the foundation of a sustainable product, the planning isn’t one and done either. The state also needs to adapt. Back when Gowdy’s trails were first being built, managers underestimated how many more people would come. They guessed that Gowdy’s visits would roughly double, Thibodeau said. Instead, they increased twelvefold.

To handle increasing growth, Harrington said his office wants to direct crowds to different landscapes and concentrate “them into those places that can sustain those higher uses.” It’s all guided by State Parks and Office of Outdoor Recreation’s philosophy: disperse crowds to alleviate heavy pressure, concentrate them away from sensitive areas, and educate users on responsible stewardship.

And while Wyoming can hold Fruita up as a model of planning, it can also learn from the ways Fruita has continually adapted to growing visitation and use.

One of Fruita’s most popular trail networks is 18 Road, in the BLM’s North Fruita Desert. 18 Road’s popularity exploded around 2010, which prompted the BLM in 2015 to designate it a Special Recreation Management Area. Three years later, a partnership group acquired a grant to develop a trails master plan. The plan, signed in 2022, was both reactive to current conditions and in expectation of growing use, said Amy Carmichael, the assistant field manager for recreation in the BLM’s Grand Junction Field Office.

The master plan’s goal is to “produce a diversity of quality mountain bicycling opportunities that add to visitors’ quality of life while contributing to the local economy and fostering stewardship of natural and cultural resources,” which sounds a lot like what Wyoming leaders want to accomplish.

The plan also aims to address negative impacts of popularity, like user-created trails, erosion, dense camping, and packed parking lots. The final document proposes to build an additional 25 miles of new purpose-built trails plus reroutes, event loops, parking, and campsites.

Fruita mountain bike advocate and photographer Anne Keller agrees with Glenn’s assessment that Fruita designed amenities to serve visitors, but she thinks the community could offer more hospitality-based businesses, camping, and better trailheads. She’s also very concerned about protecting locals from being displaced by tourism-fueled gentrification. “It’s a really existential thing that I think about a lot,” she said.

Wyoming Senator Cale Case (R-Lander) has similar misgivings about what outdoor recreation development can bring to a community. Although he stands to benefit from the industry’s growth as a hotel owner, he is also concerned about rising housing costs and jobs that only offer low pay and no benefits, alongside the overdevelopment of places people want to preserve as wild.

These are concerns worth keeping in mind as Wyoming continues to design its outdoor recreation future. Harrington thinks that more of the right kind of development, not less, is one of the ways Wyoming can ensure balance.

In Gowdy, the trail design of stacked loops and directional patterns keeps the biking trails from feeling choked even on busy days, Harrington said. If you want to spend a really lonely day on a trail in southeast Wyoming, “you can find it.” If Gowdy is too busy for your liking, nearby areas like Pole Mountain and Happy Jack offer many options, he said. Along with smart design, connections between these and other Wyoming areas can spread the growing number of users out, he said. “The more we build, the less impact we’re ultimately gonna have,” he said. “Overall, the better the user experience is going to be.”

This story was created in partnership between WyoFile, an independent nonprofit news organization that covers Wyoming, and Western Confluence.

Katie Klingsporn has been a journalist and editor covering the American West for 20 years.  She lives in Lander with her family and reports for WyoFile.

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Disclosure: Melanie Arnett is married to Dan McCoy, interim director of the WORTH Initiative, which is the sponsor of this issue of Western Confluence.

Finding solutions for human waste in the backcountry

By Kristen Pope

Among stunning red arches, balancing rocks, canyons, pinyon-juniper, and cacti, a hiker in southern Utah sees something white in the distance. Is it a wildflower? Approaching the “blossom,” the hiker instead finds something far less picturesque—used toilet paper and human feces. No one wants to come across such a scene when they’re out enjoying public lands, but as visitors flock to the outdoors, this scenario plays out frequently. Human feces in the backcountry are unsightly, gross, and unsanitary—they can contaminate water, stick to pets and outdoor gear, and sicken people and animals. While this may have been a lesser issue in the past, now as millions of outdoor recreators visit the Moab area each year, land managers and user groups are pressed to find solutions.

“A lot of people feel as though they’re in the middle of nowhere,” says Jennifer Jones, assistant field manager for the Bureau of Land Management’s Moab Field Office. “They don’t understand that there are 3 million other folks that are going to be enjoying the same scenery and trails that they are, so tucking used toilet paper under a rock may seem like an innocent step, but unfortunately, with so many people doing that [and leaving] these little toilet paper blossoms all over the place, that becomes an issue for sure.”

In many parts of the country, burying fecal matter in a “cathole” is preferred, but in southern Utah’s arid environment, human waste and toilet paper doesn’t rapidly decompose. Grand County, Utah—home to Moab along with Arches and part of Canyonlands National Parks—has made leaving “solid human body waste” behind illegal. Instead, visitors must use a portable toilet, waste disposal bag, or other sanitary method to bring their poop out of the backcountry.

To overcome the “ick” factor and normalize this important sanitary measure, Grand County and partners held a “Poop Awareness Month” in October 2022. A social media campaign featured an inflatable poop emoji that, in short videos, explored the area, demonstrating responsible and irresponsible practices. Further, Grand County’s “Poop in Moab” website provides a handy guide for visitors, including requirements and best practices, while the statewide Gotta Go Utah campaign shares a similar message. BLM and other partners also produced a series of short films about responsible visitation in Moab’s fragile ecosystem. And the state’s OHV test includes questions about packing out human waste.

Agencies aren’t the only ones tackling this issue—the BASE jump and high line communities worked with the BLM to distribute over 2,000 specialized waste disposal bags and raise funds to build new vault toilets in high use areas for their sports.

Another important piece of the puzzle is communicating what people must do with the bags once they return to the trailhead. While some communities accept used human waste disposal bags with regular trash, in Moab, garbage trucks compact trash. “We had several incidents of our staff, because we have compactor trucks, getting sprayed with human waste when it compacted and these bags blew up,” says Jessica Thacker, program manager for Canyonlands Solid Waste Authority. These workers then needed a series of shots and medical check-ups, as well as new clothing.

Grand County, SE Utah Health Department, and others collaborated to install five special bins that can safely accept the used poop bags. QR codes on bags and at retail locations share the bin locations. During a pilot run from June through early October 2022, the disposal stations collected an estimated 1,200 pounds of human waste. “That’s 1,200 pounds that we didn’t risk going onto our staff or going into the local environment. It didn’t go into the waterways, so all the better for that,” Thacker says.

Problems with human waste are not limited to Utah. In Colorado’s Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, a permitting system is helping manage visitors and the unsanitary messes some leave behind. “By getting a permit, we’re engaging [visitors] with a lot more information ahead of time that can then set them up for success being in the backcountry, including how they are going to take care of their human waste,” says Katy Nelson, wilderness and trails program manager for the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District in the White River National Forest.

While using a bag is not required, each year the forest service and partners distribute around 5,000 free bags at three trailheads. In 2017, rangers recorded 334 incidents of unburied human waste in the wilderness area; in 2021 human waste incidents dropped to 153, and it’s likely the new permit system, messaging, and bag distribution played a role.

Human waste isn’t a new issue in the backcountry, but with increasing outdoor recreation, solutions are even more important. As communities across the West advance their outdoor recreation economies, they might look to places like Moab and the Maroon Bells for how to address this unpleasant reality. 

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com.

Managing off-leash dogs on public trails

By Sabrina White

“Boulder, as a town, has always been super supportive of dogs and people recreating together off-leash,” says Lisa Gonҫalo, recreation management coordinator for the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks. “We have a long history. We have pictures from the 1970s of people hiking in Chautauqua Meadow with their pups off-leash.” Today, dogs enrolled in the Boulder County Voice and Sight Program are still legally allowed off leash on certain trails within the county. As public trails get more crowded with off-leash dogs and people, programs such as this are appearing around the country, exploring innovative solutions that let dogs happily run free while also protecting the surrounding environment and other trail users.

According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, 45 percent of all households in the US own a dog, totaling between 83.7 and 88.8 million domesticated dogs in America alone. That’s 10 times the entire population of New York City, and a 30 percent increase over the past 20 years. As these numbers continue to grow, there will undoubtably be more dogs enjoying outdoor spaces with their owners, since dogs require activity every day to stay healthy. Dogs that don’t get a chance to run around can gain weight, suffer from joint problems, or develop behavioral issues like excessive barking or unwanted chewing. While requirements vary, most dogs need between 30 minutes to 2 hours of exercise every day. Many dog owners, like Merav Ben-David, routine skijorer with her two huskies Chilkoot and Elwha, are especially fond of areas that allow dogs to explore off-leash. “There is no replacement for off-leash. Because the dog has to make decisions for themselves,” she says. “They are free to explore smells. I mean, they’re wolves, even these little ones. And their whole communication system is based on scent. And if you’re walking the dog on a leash, they don’t have the freedom to explore all the scents around them.”

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However, off-leash dogs can cause problems if they disturb trail users, attack other dogs, disturb wildlife, or leave poop behind. Melanie Torres, a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, was dog-sitting a huskie named Summit. She had him on a leash in Medicine Bow National Forest, when three little dogs ran up. The owner yelled the classic “My dogs are friendly,” but Summit was not. This story has a happy ending—the owner ran over and grabbed the dogs before anything bad happened—but it’s not uncommon for similar narratives to have much worse endings. After experiences like this, Torres believes off-leash dogs must have good recall and owners should leash their dogs when they see another dog on leash. “If your dog is not listening or paying attention,” she says, “it ruins the experience for everybody.”

Another problem is when off-leash dogs disturb wildlife, but managers and researchers are still trying to understand the full extent to which they impact wild areas. A 2008 study in the Natural Areas Journal looking at dog presence on Colorado trails, found that prey animals like mule deer and prairie dogs stayed further away from trails with dogs, and bobcat density also decreased in those areas. However, a 2011 study in Conservation Biology found that predators avoided trails in northern California based more on the number of humans present than dogs.

A more stinky concern with increased dogs on trails is poop. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a typical dog excretes an average of 274 pounds of waste every year. That’s 12 million tons of dog waste excreted in the US annually. On average, 40 percent of dog owners do not pick up that waste, leaving it on the trail with major impacts on ecological systems. Dog poop can spread bacteria and parasites like roundworm or hookworm to animals or people, and it introduces excess nutrients into soil and waterways leading to harmful algae blooms. While one dog pile probably won’t affect anything, the quantity of dogs using outdoor spaces and trails means it adds up. Dog waste collected in plastic bags also adds loads of plastic and poop to landfills.

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To address these issues, trail managers seek innovative solutions to create a culture of responsibility with dog owners, reward good behavior, and foster a sense of community. The Boulder County Voice and Sight Program is attempting to do just that. Dog owners must watch an hour-long video detailing the natural history of the open spaces and their responsibilities to control their dogs and conserve the area, and their dogs must have a rabies vaccination and dog license. The program requires participants to keep off-leash dogs within sight and under voice control at all times, to clean up after them, and to make sure they don’t chase wildlife. Failure to follow any of the rules results in fines or citations. The City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks surveys currently show 84 percent compliance, so while not everyone obeys, negative events are relatively infrequent.

To prepare dogs for such programs, many dog training companies around the country now offer classes for off-leash specific skills such as ignoring wildlife, recalling when there are lots of distractions, and off-leash heel. Mandy Kauffman, co-owner of Rockin’ E Dog Training and Consulting in Laramie, Wyoming, says, “Before a dog is ready to go out on trails outside, I think they need to have some, at least basic obedience training so that they and their handler can communicate with each other.” She emphasizes the importance of being prepared, ensuring your dog has good recall, and anticipating the types of users or wildlife you might see on the trail. “If a dog is going to be going off-leash on trails, I think that that ramps up a notch,” she says.

Effective off-leash dog programs also strive to prevent wildlife disturbances. During surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of the Boulder County Voice and Sight Program, Gonҫalo found few negative encounters. “The incidence that they observed a dog chasing wildlife was barely reportable. So, of the hundreds of observations, it was maybe a handful, like three to five, so … very small.” Other areas close trails at specific times of the year, such as during breeding or fawning seasons, when wildlife is particularly sensitive. Such regulations must vary for each trail to address sensitive local wildlife species while still allowing responsible recreation.

Addressing the poop problem especially requires creating a culture of responsibility. The City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks holds events to explain concerns with excess poop and increase visibility of the problem. Recently, they organized a cleanup of their four most frequented trails. Staff and volunteers placed flags everywhere they found a pile of uncollected poop. One of their most popular trails, Dry Creek, had 250 flags within the first quarter mile, providing a striking visual for the amount of waste. “[We were] trying to raise awareness around [dog waste],” Gonҫalo said. “The dog owners that came on Saturday were also horrified about what they saw.”

While removing dog waste prevents contamination, what happens to it after is also an important environmental consideration. Fifteen years ago Rose Seemann, co-founder of the non-profit Enviro Pet Waste Network, noticed this smelly issue and wanted to do something about it. Inspired by a USDA study that composted waste from Alaskan sled dogs, she created EnviroWagg and began composting waste from dog parks. After years of successfully creating safe and high-quality compost from dog waste, EnviroWagg now collects from more than 20 Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks trailheads. “I want to try to get across to composters that this is not nuclear waste, your compost pile is not going to blow up, you’re not going to poison people. If you compost it with everything else, it will be fine,” Seemann explains. “You just have to have all these things in place. You have to teach people not to use plastic.” Proceeds from EnviroWagg support the Enviro Pet Waste Network, which teaches people alternative ways to deal with pet waste and keep plastic and poop out of landfills.

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Off-leash dogs using public trails don’t have to harm other users’ experiences or the ecosystem. Programs like Boulder County Voice and Sight are spearheading sustainable practices and creating a culture of responsibility that allows dogs to explore to their hearts content while minimizing their impact on the environment and people. “In Boulder, I think we kind of consider pets our children and that’s how we advocate for them,” Gonҫalo says. “And so, letting them experience the outdoors and sniffing and doing all the things that dogs love to do is a wonderful opportunity for that.”

 

Sabrina White is a graduate student at the University of Wyoming studying bumble bee thermal tolerance in Michael Dillon’s insect ecophysiology lab. She is also a dog parent to Slack and Bear.

 

Header image: A man walks with an off-leash dog on a public trail. Courtesy City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks.

Jackson Hole seeks a better tourism future

By Kristen Pope

Hiking mountain trails festooned with larkspur, lupine, and arrowleaf balsamroot flowers; paddleboarding on an alpine lake beneath the Tetons; seeing playful bear cubs frolic; and watching bison graze by the Moulton Barn with a backdrop of towering peaks—these are just a few of the reasons people come to Jackson Hole. The area is known for its wild and rugged beauty, wildlife, and outdoor recreation, but increasing visitation is leading to challenges, ranging from traffic to the environmental toll of hauling the county’s trash to a landfill a hundred miles away.

To protect the environment, quality of life of residents, and visitor experience, local leaders are developing a Sustainable Destination Management Plan, starting by asking community members how visitation impacts their daily lives and what they would like to see in the future. Other groups and organizations are working to combine technical solutions—like finding a way to compost restaurant waste locally—with the human side of the resident and visitor experience.

In 2021, Grand Teton National Park recorded 3.8 million recreation visits—an all-time record for the park. Grand Teton National Park is just north of the town of Jackson—so close, in fact, that the Jackson Hole Airport is actually within the park. So, rising visitation to the park means more people in Jackson too.

Cory Carlson, Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board Chair, says that after the COVID lockdown in 2020, the board saw “an influx like nobody could have imagined in terms of demand for the destination.” The boom in visitation was good for the economy, contributing $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2020, but at a cost. “We saw the impact that the volumes were having,” Carlson says, “whether it was trash, whether it was misbehaving with the environment, whether it was the wildlife, whether it was trail usage, forest fires, campfires, things of every nature.”

In response, local leaders formed a steering committee and started to develop Jackson Hole’s first Sustainable Destination Management Plan, beginning with information gathering. In collaboration with George Washington University’s International Institute of Tourism Studies, the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board invited people living or working in Teton County, Wyoming, to complete a resident tourism sentiment survey. They expected 1,200 responses or so but were overwhelmed when 4,777 people responded to the request for feedback. They also held focus groups, interviews, and community meetings to gather more information about community members’ thoughts. Using this input, the board and partners expect to have a draft plan ready by the end of the year.

How do residents feel about tourism? Not surprisingly, 86 percent of survey respondents said it was important to the local economy. However, beyond infusing the local coffers with cash, 53 percent said the county does not receive any non-economic benefits from tourism. While the tax revenue generated by visitors contributes to public services, 61 percent say they’re willing to pay more for those services if the trade-off is fewer visitors.

The same survey found that many residents believe tourism contributes to problems in the community, including traffic issues (98 percent of respondents agreed with this) and impacts to the natural environment (86 percent agreed). Respondents’ concerns about tourism in Teton County included overcrowded sites, lack of housing, and tourist misbehavior, among other issues.

Respondents’ top two requests were to stop advertising the area (18 percent) and to limit visitation (17 percent), while others asked for no additional hotel development and stricter regulations on short-term rentals. Meanwhile, the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board has already shifted its marketing efforts. Years ago, the board focused on luring visitors to the mountain town, then shifted towards increasing visitation during off-peak times rather than the already-busy peak season. Now, they’re focusing their marketing efforts on responsible and sustainable tourism messaging.

The 2022 summer marketing campaign focuses on messages like “The best souvenir is one you can come back to” and “Take care of what takes your breath away.” The ads are focused locally and during peak summer season, from July 4 to September 5. Carlson notes that the campaign aims to create a better all-around experience for everyone.

“Some of the best marketing that we can do as a destination is to provide a really great guest experience, and if we’re overcrowding the destination that’s not going to happen, and it’s not going to provide [a good] experience for the local community, which is equally important,” Carlson says.

Focusing on sustainable tourism isn’t a new concept, already practiced by destinations around the world, including Hawaii, Park City, Venice, and New Zealand. Messaging strategies range from the staid and serious to the “Aspen Pledge,” which asks tourists to make promises like “I will carve the snow and not the trees.” While Jackson Hole doesn’t currently have a similar pledge, it’s one of many ideas that has been discussed.

These recent efforts in Jackson Hole build on longer-term desires to move toward sustainability. For decades, some locals have been working to integrate sustainability into decision-making and planning efforts.

In 1999, Tim O’Donoghue founded the Riverwind Foundation, and today he is the organization’s executive director. The foundation now manages the Jackson Hole and Yellowstone Sustainable Destination Program, which was formed in 2014. It offers resources for businesses looking to improve their sustainability practices, and works with over 400 businesses and organizations through workshops, one-on-one technical assistance, the Sustainable Business Leaders Program, and BEST (Business Emerald Sustainability Tier) certification. These resources help businesses that are eager to be more sustainable but not quite sure how to do that, especially while being profitable.

“There is this old paradigm—and it’s false—that to be environmentally responsible that that’s going to hurt your economic performance, or to do things that are socially responsible is going to hurt your economic performance,” O’Donoghue says. “They’re rather complimentary in reality.”

Aaron Pruzan, owner of Rendezvous River Sports in Jackson, is another long-time sustainability leader. He has worked on these issues since his company’s inception in 1995, and has advocated for environmental stewardship for decades. Amid brightly colored kayaks and racks of paddle sports gear, Pruzan talks about his river adventures all around the globe and in his own backyard with his family. He also talks about the importance of preserving and protecting these waterways. Pruzan, a founding board member of the Snake River Fund, was instrumental in the campaign to designate the Snake a Wild and Scenic River, and has been active in many stewardship initiatives. Now he’s working to achieve the company’s BEST certification to further cement his company’s sustainable ethos as well as create formal documentation and training systems for his staff.

Pruzan avoids selling single or limited use items and works with manufacturers to reduce packaging. When he does receive packaging materials—like blankets used to cushion boats during shipment—he repurposes them, often giving them to local moving companies. When a boat becomes damaged, the company will repair it or, if it is beyond repair, part it out. On guided trips, employees track waste and chart how much they keep out of landfills by recycling, composting, and reusing. In 2021, the company’s guides recorded 87 percent of waste was diverted from landfills—just shy of their goal of 90 percent. His team can often be seen picking up trash others leave behind at boat ramps, leaving places nicer than they found them.

Finding balance between resource protection and increased visitation is key, according to Pruzan. “We do have limits,” he says. “It’s okay to not buy into the idea that we always need year-over-year growth, and I think we need to move to a different paradigm,” though he acknowledges that may be more of a challenge for newer businesses.

Community organizations and local agencies are also working together to make city services like waste and transportation more sustainable. Currently, trash produced in Jackson, Wyoming, is hauled 102 miles each way to a landfill in Bonneville County, Idaho. The Teton County Integrated Solid Waste and Recycling’s Road to Zero Waste initiative aims to divert 60 percent of waste from the landfill by 2030, by encouraging more recycling and composting, including commercial food waste.

In terms of transportation, Yellowstone-Teton Clean Cities is working to boost the use of electric vehicles in the region, which should become easier with the network of charging stations the recent infrastructure bill is funding. Executive director Alicia Cox says driving an electric vehicle charged on the locally available grid mix—which uses hydropower and other renewable power sources—reduces emissions by 97 percent.

All these efforts have led Jackson to become an award-winning sustainability destination, including North America’s first EarthCheck certified travel and tourism destination in early 2020. While many community members are excited about these awards and certifications, O’Donoghue says he’s received calls and emails from people who are concerned about Jackson Hole receiving such top-notch awards when it’s dealing with issues like roadway wildlife kills and poor water quality in local creeks. When he receives these communications, O’Donoghue reaches out to find common ground and have a conversation. Sometimes, this leads to volunteers and partnerships. Other times, his efforts are less successful. “This journey of striving to be more sustainable has a lot of bumps in the road,” O’Donoghue says.

As the community builds a forward-thinking Sustainable Destination Management Plan, residents and local leaders are working to envision a future where conservation and economic goals coexist, and future generations can enjoy a robust local economy while also enjoying a high quality of life and a sustainable community.

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer and editor. Learn more about her work at kepope.com.