The year was 1975. Saigon had fallen and the boys were coming home. “Jaws” was in theaters, Fleetwood Mac was climbing the charts and President Gerald Ford had survived two assassination attempts.
On the other side of the county, conservationists in Southwest Colorado were celebrating a victory of their own.
After years of bureaucratic gridlock, Congress had officially designated the Weminuche Wilderness – nearly half a million acres of peaks, basins and alpine headwaters stretching across the San Juan and Rio Grande national forests – as federally protected wilderness.
“After many years, the Weminuche is here, the result of a long and arduous process,” The Durango Herald announced on Jan. 19, 1975.
Now, 50 years later, the Weminuche remains Colorado’s largest wilderness area. The goal of the original conservationists – to preserve the natural ecosystems so future generations could enjoy them – has been a success.
MK Thompson, an employee with the San Juan Mountains Association, said when she thinks of the Weminuche and the anniversary, she thinks of the Pine River Trail.
She was on a trail work trip there in August with a group of volunteers.
“You easily could have just built a road from there up to the Rio Grande reservoir ... through the wilderness there,” she said. “There could be a Starbucks and hotels, and you could go glamping, but because it’s wilderness, you can walk on your feet and you can bring llamas and you can take a horse – and that’s fantastic.”
Fifty years after its designation, the Weminuche remains intact and the mining and logging operations that threatened the area have faded into the periphery, replaced by new pressures – from climate change, growing crowds of visitors and federal budget cuts.
What has remained the same: The ethos of community engagement and stewardship to protect wild spaces that saw the creation of the Weminuche.
A designated Weminuche Wilderness area was first proposed in 1969, after passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964.
The proposal had been the subject of countless hearings, debates and letters to the editor.
Advocates in favor of the designation made many calls for civic engagement during the time period.
“The fate of the Weminuche Wilderness Area is now quite literally in the hands of local citizens,” read one editorial.
In another article, a member of the Citizens for the Weminuche Wilderness – the citizen led advocacy group that spent months drafting their own proposals for the boundaries, was quoted saying – “only if there is evidence of strong local support demonstrated at the hearings will Congress move ahead to create the wilderness area.”
The fight was divisive, according to dozens of archived news articles and letters to the editor over the six-year period.
Chicago Basin’s inclusion, a topic of much debate, was originally excluded from the Forest Service’s plan because of numerous mining claims, and the agency hesitated to include timber-rich acres.
President Richard Nixon criticized the Forest Service for being too conservative in its timber harvests, further politicizing the debate.
One La Plata County resident, Glenn Wilson, wrote to the Herald opposing the creation of the wilderness area on 11 points, saying, “I propose we forget about establishing the Weminuche Wilderness Area.”
His argument rested on the belief that harvesting as many natural resources as possible was necessary to meet the demands of a growing population, and that logging and tree-thinning benefited the forest.
He rejected the idea, espoused by many, that one finds a closer connection to God in the wilderness, asserting instead that God could be found anywhere. Additionally, Wilson argued that wilderness areas were, in his words, “discriminatory” toward disabled veterans.
His letter prompted an almost immediate rebuttal. Dennis Gebhardt, who wrote the response, began by insisting otherwise: “This is not a reply to Mr. Wilson’s letter – no! How can you reply to things as war veterans in wheelchairs and theological arguments about where God is found?”
He went on to debate the points Wilson made about job loss and the benefits of logging, none of which, Gebhardt claimed, were based in fact.
That exchange was just one of many that played out publicly during the six-year campaign, mirroring debates among legislators about what lands to include on the official map and whether to move forward at all.
At the heart of the conversation was a deeper question: whether nature’s worth is intrinsic, valuable simply for existing; or extrinsic, defined by the resources that can be extracted from it.
In April 1974, the bill to create the Weminuche Wilderness passed the U.S. House but stalled in the Senate – “in danger of being shuffled out entirely or of being drastically reduced in size before the session is over,” wrote Ian Thompson, a frequent Durango Herald editorial contributor.
Less than a year later, the bill eked through – the wilderness area protected, as it remains today.
Decades after those legislative battles, the greatest threat today isn’t development – it’s overuse.
“There are sections of the wilderness that are being loved to death,” said Lois Bartig-Small.
A former Forest Service ranger and one of the San Juan Mountains Association’s original organizers, Bartig-Small has spent years hiking, working and on llama-packing trips in the Weminuche.
She pointed to Chicago Basin as a glaring example.
“Chicago Basin is the worst part of the Weminuche, in my opinion,” she said. “We’re constantly trying to educate people – volunteers at the train drop-off in Needleton, people up in the basin – but it’s hard. It’s really a struggle.”
Once she went up regularly to speak with hikers face-to-face. Now, she said, the crowds are overwhelming.
“We need to minimize the number of people going there,” she said.
Bartig-Small said visitors leave trash and feed wild animals, which alters natural behaviors. The goats that inhabit the basin have become habituated to humans, and the influx of people and horses damage the area’s fragile ecosystem.
Stephanie Weber, executive director of the San Juan Mountains Association, said she has observed the same problem. Much of SJMA’s work now centers on backcountry education and outreach – especially since the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a surge in recreation.
“With everybody discovering how wonderful it is to be outdoors, we’ve seen significant growth,” she said.
Chicago Basin alone now sees about 5,000 visitors each summer, she said – a figure that strains the environment, and removes the promise of solitude wilderness designations were meant to provide.
“Chicago Basin is not where you go for solitude, and so it’s not meeting the conditions of wilderness,” Weber said. “Therefore, there are a lot of people thinking about, what does that mean for the future?”
That question looms larger as the agencies charged with managing the Weminuche face severe staffing shortages.
Across the San Juan National Forest, years of attrition and limited funding have gutted field staff.
Andrew Carroll, president of Backcountry Horsemen, a citizen group of horsemen and women who work on trail cleanup and stewardship projects alongside the forest service and other citizen groups, said that volunteer stewardship of the natural lands is more important than ever.
“It’s becoming more important because the Forest Service office here in Bayfield did quite a bit (of trail work), but with their budget cuts and things of that nature, they’re relying more on volunteers to get trails cleaned up and keep them in working order,” he said.
He added that, “when we’re able to assist either Durango Trails or the San Juan Mountains Association, we’re basically keeping the trails open to everybody that uses them.”
Bartig-Small said the Forest Service used to have much higher numbers of employees with “boots on the ground.” They used to traverse the trails, and give tickets to people shirking the rules.
That support is no longer there.
Unnatural beetle kill, another threat to the health of the natural ecosystems within the Weminuche, has emerged in more recent decades.
Since the initial beetle outbreak on Wolf Creek Pass in the late 1990s, it has torn through more than 120,000 acres of the Weminuche Wilderness.
Forest Service cutbacks have reduced the agency’s ability to put together trail crews to mitigate the dead or infected trees, Bartig-Small said, adding that volunteer crews and various citizen groups are picking up the brunt of the work.
For the Columbine Ranger District – which oversees much of the Weminuche – full-time staffing dropped from 24 people to just seven or eight in a single year, said Thompson, the SJMA volunteer coordinator.
But partner organizations and wilderness advocacy groups have grown.
“We have a huge staff compared to when I started. ... We used to have like eight employees. And now, including our education staff for our nature studies in the summer – we have 40,” Thompson said.
She stressed the growing reliance on nonprofits and local organizations to fill the gaps and the importance of community involvement in stewardship.
Thompson said she has stayed with SJMA for so many years because, while national issues can feel beyond reach, meaningful change can happen close to home.
By focusing on local work, she said, it’s possible to strengthen community ties – and in a place as diverse as theirs, with people from all walks of life and a wide range of political beliefs, that connection matters.
“I have hope for our little corner of the world,” Thompson said, “and that’s really all I can do.”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
