An effort to designate 32 areas as wilderness across Colorado was launched again in Washington on Wednesday.
The Colorado Wilderness Act was introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, and it could protect two large areas in Montezuma County, with support from local officials.
Among 715,000 acres up for consideration are 15,000 acres in the Weber-Menefee Mountain area, between Mesa Verde National Park and La Plata County.
The park has been managed as a Bureau of Land Management wilderness study area since 1980, but the potential to make the designation permanent raised some questions locally.
“We are very concerned about Menefee Mountain,” said Larry Don Suckla, a Montezuma County commissioner.
There are communication towers on top of the mountain that serve the west end of the county, and he wants to ensure that wilderness designation would not impact the maintenance of those towers.
Another wilderness study area, Cross Canyon, which stretches across 13,000 acres southwest of Cahone, is also part of the legislation. The canyon is in both Montezuma and Dolores counties.
Suckla said he did not have enough information to comment about the Cross Canyon designation at this time.
The future of the bill is highly uncertain because versions of similar legislation have been introduced repeatedly since 1999. The bill was originally crafted based on data gathered by conservationists around the state, including Durangoan Mark Pearson.
Pearson, a longtime local wilderness advocate, sees the bill as a vehicle for conversation that can help get individual parcels designated as wilderness.
“I think it’s very difficult to enact big, sweeping pieces of wilderness legislation,” he said.
But work on the Colorado Wilderness Act helped the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area and Dominguez Canyon Wilderness Area get designated in 2009.
Going forward, he said it is likely activists will have more success convincing Congress to designate individual wilderness areas, such as the Dominguez Canyon area, rather than many dispersed parcels.
But he said it is important to keep fighting for wilderness designation because it gives land managers a baseline to measure how a landscape functions without any human interference.
Wilderness designations also protect a unique recreational opportunity, he said.
“Just from the human perspective it’s increasingly valuable to have places that require a level of humility and understanding that we are not in charge when we go into them,” he said.
mshinn@durangoherald.com
