Federal land trades are meant to advance land management objectives, such as enhancing recreation opportunities and access. Unfortunately, many swaps are not initiated to directly benefit the public. Rather than federal agencies spurring land deals, private parties, such as developers or landowners, often initiate the deals that benefit themselves, not the public. Public land trades are also meant to go through a public process.

But in western Colorado alone, two of three active — and controversial — land-exchange proposals, both in the watershed between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, would circumvent standard requirements for environmental review and public comment.

A trade finalized in 2025 in western Colorado illustrates how federal land exchanges benefit the rich. When the Blue Valley Ranch gained the last three publicly owned parcels along 15 linear miles of the Lower Blue in a swap last year, the public lost guaranteed access to a Gold Medal trout fishery near the town of Kremmling.

Although Colorado gives people the right to float navigable rivers, access remains severely limited because touching landowners’ riverbeds and banks amounts to trespass. With publicly owned access to Colorado’s rivers such a valuable commodity, the privatization of BLM access over land to this beloved fishery is now a huge loss for the public.

As is typical of other public-land deals across the West, the exchange was initiated by a wealthy landowner, billionaire Paul Tudor Jones II, owner of the 25,000-acre Blue Valley Ranch in western Colorado’s Grand and Summit counties.

The landowner’s rationale was the need to consolidate his holdings, and he and his consultants had close ties to the nonprofit Friends of the Lower Blue River, which promoted the land exchange as a win for conservation and recreation. The ranch owner’s well-funded advocacy drowned out concerns from anglers and local residents about both river access and transparency. 

In its initial administrative protest, Basalt-based Colorado Wild Public Lands, a land exchange watchdog, summed up the proposed deal: “Immensely valuable public lands are to be traded away for restrictive-access easements and non-guaranteed infrastructure improvements.”

The Bureau of Land Management chose the billionaire over the public when it traded away what had been close to two miles of riverfront access along the Lower Blue River. In exchange, the public got some marginal hunting grounds and a river “park.” The park confines all riverfront recreation to a three-quarter-mile section of the Blue River. 

Blue Valley Ranch offered easements that maintained access to the riverbank for floaters on a limited basis, but the language allows the owner to revoke those easements and close off the river altogether. He is now trying to curtail river access through a permit system.  

Perhaps worse, according to a December 2025 Colorado Parks and Wildlife study, the rest of the Lower Blue River is experiencing increased fish mortality and declining river health. The study found the ranch’s efforts to boost fish population and fish size were the cause. The ranch blamed overfishing.  

Thanks to the trade, the public lost not just access, but also long-term protection of the river and its corridor, because the Blue Valley Ranch decided not to place its newly acquired federal lands under a permanent conservation easement. Protections once guaranteed by law now depend on the interests, integrity and whims of a single landowner. 

Shockingly, the BLM finalized the land exchange despite pending appeals, and the agency then declined to grant a stay of the closing pending the outcome of the appeals. It proceeded with an irreversible land transfer under circumstances that underscore the lack of fairness in the process.

In this exchange, one powerful landowner benefited at the expense of everyone else. It also highlights the ongoing privatization of public land throughout the West.

Perhaps the well-publicized outrage over Yosemite will fuel public awareness about federal agencies that abdicate their responsibilities and continually give away our natural heritage.

Erica Rosenberg is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She worked as counsel to both House and Senate Committees overseeing public lands and has served on the boards of several conservation nonprofits, including Colorado Wild Public Lands.

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In the Wallowa National Forest, Huckleberry Mountain sustains rare species like the Wallowa rosy finch, and on the Malheur National Forest, there’s an Alaska yellow cedar forest hundreds of miles inland from its core range. 

These three national forests in eastern Oregon share something in common: They are intact roadless forests now on the verge of losing the protections that have kept them free from industrial logging and new roads. These lands are also common ground shared by Tribal members, hunters, anglers, wildlife watchers and anyone who values a quiet trail into the backcountry. 

Roadless areas cover nearly 2 million acres of Oregon’s national forests, all currently shielded from clearcuts and roads by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Enacted 25 years ago, the rule was widely supported because it solved two problems at once. It restrained further road building in national forests that already faced a maintenance backlog in the billions of dollars. It also curbed the steady erosion of opportunities for backcountry hunting, fishing and quiet recreation on lands undisturbed by roads.

But now, the Trump administration is working to unwind the Roadless Rule and strip all wild forests of these protections, with a comment period to do just that ending October 6. The administration claims that repealing the rule is necessary to combat wildfire, even though wildland firefighters and scientists widely acknowledge that most wildfires start along roads.

In defending the move to repeal the Roadless Rule, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said that management of roadless areas would go through a “thoughtful process” and would not “be a free-for-all.”

It is a test case because the newly released Blue Mountains draft management plan, covering the Malheur, Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla National Forests, is the first forest management plan in the country to be drafted on the assumption that roadless protections will no longer exist.  It gives the public the first real look at what forest management without the Roadless Rule actually means. The picture it reveals is bleak.

The plan for the three forests would triple logging levels, open old-growth forests to logging, scrap the road density limits that keep elk and other wildlife secure, and substantially weaken watershed protections that keep sediment out of salmon and trout streams.  

That is hardly a thoughtful process. It’s the free-for-all Chief Schultz said would not happen.  

It also runs against sound science. Roadless areas are well established as invaluable habitats for wildlife. The Forest Service’s own wildlife reports for the Blue Mountains reference roadless areas more than 650 times.

The native salmonids that are cultural icons of this region — Chinook salmon and steelhead, bull and redband trout — depend on the clean, cold water that roadless forests provide so well. Despite this, the Forest Service’s environmental impact analysis for the new management plan devotes a mere three sentences to how stripping away conservation protections for these areas would affect wildlife. 

This matters even if you’ve never set foot in the Blue Mountains, because what happens here will most likely become the template for other national forests.  

Eliminating roadless areas sets up our national forests for more logging roads that taxpayers can’t afford to maintain, more sediment in the streams that hold favorite fish runs, fewer quiet drainages to hunt elk, and fewer refuges for threatened species that depend on intact habitat.

In the enduring words of former President Theodore Roosevelt, “Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children.”

Now is the time to defend that heritage.

Submit comments opposing the removal of roadless protections in the Blue Mountains plan by September 30.

Keats Conley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives in Idaho and is senior policy and planning specialist at Defenders of Wildlife. When she worked for the Forest Service, she served on a specialized forest planning team.

Chapter 8 has been changed. It once read “The draft plan, covering 720,000 acres..” and now reads, “The draft plan, covering over 720,000 acres..”

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But on July 3 of last year, five federal departments filed rules in the Federal Register that gutted their own environmental review regulations. Agriculture. Interior. Energy. Transportation. Defense filed twice. All six took effect the day they were published, with public comment invited afterward, if at all.

It wasn’t a secret. An executive order signed the previous January had given every federal agency 12 months to revise its environmental procedures, and July 3 was the deadline. The rules shrinking public comment didn’t themselves go out for public comment.

Why would a government work this hard to stop hearing from people?

In April 2024, at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, an oil executive complained that his industry had spent $400 million lobbying the previous administration and rules still hadn’t been changed. Trump’s answer to the 20 or so executives in the room was that they raise him a billion dollars. He was specific about the return — more oil and gas leases auctioned on federal land. He called it a deal.

The Washington Post and The New York Times reported the “deal” within a month, and two congressional committees opened inquiries, but nobody in the administration disputed it.

Trump’s Forest Service chief came from a vice presidency at one of the largest lumber producers in the country.

Interior’s third-ranking official holds grazing permits on a quarter-million acres managed by the BLM and got an ethics waiver this March to work on ranching and grazing issues. The agency’s grazing overhaul covers 155 million acres while narrowing who’s allowed to object.

The BLM’s director made his fortune in oil and gas. The BLM gave the public seven days to weigh in on stripping protection from the country around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which the Park Service describes as a “sacred and deeply personal place for many Indigenous peoples.” Comments were accepted online only and public participation cut from 90 days to 10.

The Forest Service wants to slash comment on a timber project from 30 days to 10, delete the meeting where objections used to get worked out in a room, and hand review of your objection to the official who made the decision to which you’re objecting.

The 2001 Roadless Rule protected 58 million acres of national forest land from development and took 430 public meetings and 1.6 million comments to write. The Agriculture Department recently erased the rule with 21 days of public comment and not a single public meeting.

I’ve heard talk about whether it’s time for a march on Washington. Meanwhile, here’s what works.

Last summer a proposed bill in Congress would have forced the sale of 3.3 million acres and put 250 million more acres on the table, but hunters and anglers and hikers and Westerners who would sooner eat their hat than call themselves environmentalists made so much noise that Republican senators went after it in public.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers alone logged nearly 115,000 calls and emails. The bill died. Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee says he’ll be back for it — and I believe him — but it died.

Comments still matter even when they lose, because they go into the administrative record, and the record is what a federal judge reads two years later. When the Agriculture Department collected 46,845 comments on dismantling the Forest Service, it found 82 percent opposed yet answered none of the objections. That silence became a claim in a lawsuit this January.

Every comment filed and every phone call puts one more name on a list of people paying attention, and that list is the only thing that has ever stopped this internal destruction. It isn’t foolproof. Erasing the Roadless Rule drew 625,737 comments and the rescission is proceeding anyway. What the public land sell-off had that the Roadless Rule didn’t was a vote that a member of Congress had to cast with their name on it.

The pendulum swings, as it always has, and when it turns, how much of the damage gets undone might come down to how many of us showed up on the day it happened.

Will Pattiz is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is co-founder of More Than Just Parks, a public lands advocacy and media organization.

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What we literally have in common – own in common – are our public lands, our national parks and forests. In the West especially, glance at the photo library on your phone and it will probably look a lot like the person’s next to you in the coffee shop. Your parents’ and grandparents’ faded photo family albums probably have similar pictures too. That’s because our public lands shape us. They hold our uniquely American stories.

Memories of that backcountry trip. High meadow lakes. Campfires. A bird dog, smiling next to grouse. A successful deer hunt. A first fish. A family picnic. Close your eyes for a second, and you can probably see your own moments in a wild place.

All of this comes from the wild public lands we all still own. Which is why it is so unsettling that the administration continues to try to hand those places over to the highest bidder. And why it’s so disturbing that they are pushing deeper into our forests, threatening future generations’ freedom to experience what we have been lucky enough to know.

It’s hard to keep up, but the direction is clear: sacrificing our wild public lands.

Recently, the president tossed aside executive orders from Presidents Nixon and Carter that formed the foundation for how agencies manage recreation on our public lands. The process is called travel management planning and it helps identify the best places for ATVs, dirt bikes, horses, hikers and mountain bikers so people can enjoy public lands safely, responsibly and without undermining each other’s experiences. We have enough public land to support many different ways of getting outside, but only if we plan carefully. 

These agreements can be hard to forge, but they help protect access, reduce conflict and keep public lands healthy for all. By ending the basis for them, the administration has left many public land users rightfully nervous about what will happen now.

Meanwhile, the media reported that the administration plans to direct the Forest Service to open lands recommended for wilderness designation to development and other damaging uses. Through an ongoing review, the administration has also signaled it plans to take a similar approach to more than 100 million acres of wildlands managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The result would be permanent and intentional: wild places degraded so badly that they would no longer qualify for wilderness designation. Because once wildness is gone, you can’t bring it back.

Most troubling of all is the largest proposed rollback of conservation protections in American history. The administration has announced it intends to remove protections on 45 million acres of national forests and instead allow roads to be punched into some of our wildest public lands.

Here’s what happens when roads get built: they bring wildfire. They pollute streams. They harm wildlife. In my home state of Montana, 97% of summer elk habitat is on unroaded forests, away from civilization, high in the mountains, in cool, deep cover. Such forests also provide clean drinking water for millions of people. They are where people go to hunt and fish and camp and hike — where memories are made.

So why these attacks on our wildest forests? Why steal from future generations? Why open remote places to development when there is an enormous and urgent need to manage the forests near communities, to protect them from wildfire? Why develop wild lands when we could instead put people to work improving access and maintaining trails?

Our country is blessed with lands that are still wild, where wildlife can roam freely, cold creeks still flow, and a person has the freedom to wander. These lands are our common ground. They are where we go to remember what freedom feels like. In a way, conquering them conquers us.

One force can stop this: the people who own these lands, all of us. We can demand better of our elected officials now, and at the ballot box in the months and years ahead. Future generations are counting on it.

Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively conversation about the West. She is president of The Wilderness Society and The Wilderness Society Action Fund.

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That experience led me to understand that the current Trump administration’s unpopular plan to move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters will be every bit as destructive. It will hurt forests, wildlife and communities that rely upon our public lands and waters.

In 2020, almost 90% of the BLM employees ordered to move West chose not to, forcing them out the door. With those seasoned employees went years of wisdom and knowledge of how things are supposed to work, of how to deliver for the American people. 

Today’s Forest Service plan goes farther, aiming to close regional offices and shutter dozens of the agency’s research centers, as we face what some say will be a horrific wildfire season.  

The Forest Service and the BLM combined manage 20% of our country’s lands and waters. These public lands, the places we camp, hike, watch birds, hunt and simply wander in nature, are truly one of America’s best ideas. For Westerners, they are a deep part of our identity.

There is a reason Forest Service headquarters are based in Washington, DC. It’s where our nation’s leaders work. Believe me, I did not want to move to the capital from my home in Montana to run the BLM, but to be able to fight for Western people and places, I had to go to the seat of our nation’s power. 

I was often in the Interior Secretary’s offices. I frequently walked to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, talking through thorny problems such as how to protect wildlife while permitting transmission lines. Washington is where people manage relationships with Congress, where budgets get made.

The administration says all their changes are about bringing leadership closer to where the work happens. That’s a political talking point, and it’s false.

If DOGE’s dismantling of government agencies last year provides any lesson, then cruelty and disruption are the real point. These changes aim to create chaos, deliver the administration’s stated goal of traumatizing employees, and imperil the very existence of public lands — lands that belong to all Americans. We improve the management of our forests by giving foresters the resources they need and letting them make decisions based on sound science and collaboration, not by gutting their agency.  

Over the course of the last year, the Forest Service forced or coerced roughly a quarter of its approximately 30,000 employees to leave. In this latest round of engineered chaos, thousands of people will be reassigned and ordered to move. If BLM history is any guide, almost all will leave their positions rather than uproot their families. The agency could soon be left with roughly half its former ranks. 

Think of your job. Now, think of half of your colleagues gone. Would your organization be able to recover from the loss and demoralization to do its work? 

There are inevitable repercussions to this radical attack on our public land management agencies: Campgrounds will close. Trails won’t be maintained. High fuel loads near communities will go unaddressed. Wildfires will become even harder to fight. More sawmills will close. The health of our land, waters and wildlife will decline. With things going wrong on the ground, some will demand that these lands be transferred to states or sold to private industry.  

That’s exactly what the people in power today want. The choice of Utah for the Forest Service headquarters—home to Senator Mike Lee, who leads the charge on public land selloff, as well as to the state that is suing to try to take over millions of your public lands—reveals the administration’s true agenda.

The inevitable does not need to happen. There is one power to stop our public lands from being mismanaged to the point of selloff: It’s the outrage of the American people.

Americans overwhelmingly support public lands and want future generations to enjoy the freedoms found in them. Our public forests, rivers and deserts deserve to be treated better, and the federal land managers who work tirelessly deserve better. It’s up to us to demand it.  

Tracy Stone-Manning is president of The Wilderness Society and a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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Maloy has long criticized this southern Utah national monument that was halved by President Trump during his first term, then restored under President Biden. One million awestruck visitors come here every year and spend money in the two Utah counties surrounding the monument, whose towns total less than 14,000 residents. Yet Maloy discounts data showing the economic value of preserved public lands. She neglects the world-class scientific value of these 1.9 million acres, detailed in Biden’s proclamation.

Rep. Maloy’s attack is wily. She and the rest of the congressional delegation know there’s too much public support to ask President Trump to again chop down the monument’s size. Nearly 3 out of 4 Utah voters are on record as wanting to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante protected as a national monument.

So Utah politicians are betting the public won’t pay as much attention to management retrenchment as they would to downsizing. They’re using a controversial tactic to force the Bureau of Land Management to abandon the current Resource Management Plan—a blueprint for how the BLM puts the presidential proclamation into effect on the ground.

But monument supporters are paying attention because management plans matter.

After President Biden restored the boundaries of Grand Staircase in 2021, the BLM worked with the public for two years to create the 2025 Resource Management Plan, listening to every conceivable collaborative partner. Such plans guide decision-making for years, and this true compromise keeps ranchers’ grazing permits in place while also factoring in a warming planet, persistent drought, the need for biodiversity and a sustainable future.

Now, Rep. Maloy has obtained an opinion from the Government Accountability Office to treat the 2025 plan merely as a “rule” that Congress can overturn. This unprecedented allowance can’t be challenged in court and permits the Utah delegation to use the Congressional Review Act to kill the conservation-based plan and bar the agency from issuing any “substantially the same” plan in the future. The Trump-era plan that would take its place leaves much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.

Maloy says that emphasizing conservation “undercuts rural economic development.” Frrom 2001 to 2022, however, real per capita income grew by 41 percent in the monument’s counties.

She says that local residents and “trail users” oppose the Biden plan. This is cherry-picking. Motorized trail users always want greater access, even though the Biden-era plan left more than 800 miles of dirt roads and trails open for motorized vehicles.

When Maloy talks about “deep cultural traditions” being disrupted by the current management plan, she isn’t listening to Indigenous people who have made this place their home since time immemorial. The six Native Nations of the Grand-Staircase Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition oppose her move, noting that without the “clear roadmap for protection and conservation” provided by the current management plan, “our ancestral lands and … cultural sites within the monument would be at greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation.”

To support their attacks, Utah’s politicians use their timeworn template to argue exclusively for “the needs and voices of the people who live and work on this land.” These politicians, however, listen only to county commissioners and legacy ranchers, not to a much broader constituency.

This is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, not Grand Staircase County Park. The environmental, scientific, interpretive, and Indigenous values and potential of these public lands have national and international importance.

This new attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante from Congress—along with a parallel attack on Minnesota’s Boundary Waters—would set a national precedent with no public input that could upend public lands protection for years. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a “Wild West” for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy’s radical approach.

The exhausting years-long battle to protect the resources and restorative magic of Grand Staircase-Escalante can wear out supporters. But this place gives us no choice but to speak up once again. Staying silent puts federal agencies in an impossible position and places all of our public lands at risk. Let your members of Congress know that preservation of the monument requires leaving the current resource management plan in place.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He’s been hiking in Grand Staircase and writing about Colorado Plateau conservation for 50 years.

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Writer Stephen Trimble called it a “Valentine’s Day Massacre” after 2,300 employees of the Department of the Interior were summarily fired, leaving the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Geological Survey and several other agencies short-staffed. Eventually, the Forest Service lost nearly one-quarter of its workers.

Many rural communities reacted with shock as unemployed workers faced the sudden loss of income and benefits. Visitors were unhappy about the loss of skilled rangers and inadequate maintenance of trails and bathrooms.

As former firefighter Riva Duncan put it, the mass firings cut the muscle of the workforce, not the fat. “Cost-cutters have no idea how government works or who does what,” she said. Probationary workers, for example, were not on probation for poor performance; rather, they were simply new to their job, which might have even been a promotion.

Duncan said one fired staffer told her she was outraged by the wording of her termination, as every performance rating she’d received as a ranger on Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest was “excellent.” This was her cursory dismissal: “The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated your further employment would be in the public interest.” She had been making $19.10 an hour.

Stephen Trimble uncovered a threat to national parks in Utah as the administration solicited bids for coal leasing on 48,000 of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks such as Capitol Reef, Zion and Bryce Canyon. This made little sense, he wrote, because mining would harm the vistas of these magnificent places that attract millions of people every year. The move was part of the administration’s intent to pursue “energy dominance” on public land.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s directive to all national parks to restore “truth and sanity” to the nation’s history drew scorn from writer Ernie Atencio. He noted that history wasn’t meant to accentuate the positive, it was to describe what happened no matter how dark. The signs that went up at public lands urged visitors to report unpatriotic materials that “fail to emphasize the country’s grandeur.” By all accounts, most people responding called the directive dangerous and ridiculous.

It was the push to sell off public lands to the highest bidder that most alarmed the public. Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced that notion several times, but hunters, hikers and environmental nonprofits pushed back hard, and his plans were defeated. Then there was Trump’s nominee to head the BLM, former New Mexico Republican congressman Steve Pearce. According to Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities, Pearce was a terrible choice because he had co-sponsored several bills to “dispose” of vast public lands he called useless.

Tracy Stone-Manning of the Wilderness Society eloquently explained why public lands were so valuable to all Americans. She called them “one of the country’s great equalizers,” and said that selling off public land ought to be unthinkable.

Other opinions included Laura Paskus documenting the climate change affecting New Mexico and Arizona. Recurrent drought dried up rivers, causing hotter heat waves and consistently warmer summers.

Pepper Trail denounced the Colossal Biosciences corporation for its boast that it had used gene editing to create three dire wolves, a species that went extinct some 10,000 years ago. Trail wrote that “the most basic goal of conservation is not to preserve individual animals; it is to help populations sustain themselves in their native habitats.” Trail called the company’s claims a “delusional fantasy.”

Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff listed some of the many ways hikers screw up in the Grand Canyon, leaving plenty of traces behind. One found object was unusual, though—a vial of someone’s ashes. “I reported finding the urn to park rangers,” she wrote, “and for the next month was identified as ‘the lady who found the body.’”

A final word for Thanksgiving came from ecologist Pepper Trail, who wrote about nature’s cycle of gift exchange. “The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control,” he said. “To be alive seems a miracle.”

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, subscribe at writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives in rural western Colorado.

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A member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Campbell grew up poor and spent part of his childhood in a California orphanage, yet he led a life of excelling. He became a judo champion in 1963, winning a gold medal at the Pan-American Games; served in the Air Force for four years where he earned his GED; went on to get degrees in physical education and fine arts at San Jose State University; and honed skills as a silversmith and jeweler. His Western belt buckles were prized.

He entered politics in 1982, first serving as a state legislator. He was next elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving rural Western Colorado from 1987 to 1993, then was elected to two terms in the U.S. Senate.

When Senator Campbell switched from being a registered Democrat to a Republican on March 3, 1995, “the switch was shocking and traumatic to his staff,” said Ken Lane, his longtime chief of staff. He quit soon after Campbell’s announcement.

Lane said there was lots of speculation about why Campbell became a Republican. A major irritant for Campbell, Lane recalled, was what the senator called the “elitist” attitude of Democratic leaders in Denver and Boulder, who found him too moderate. Campbell’s main support always came from the union stronghold of Pueblo, in southern Colorado.

It was known that Republican Senator and majority leader Bob Dole courted Campbell to make the switch, and once he did, Campbell was appointed chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Campbell relished the job, advocating for Tribal rights and spurring the creation of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historical Site in Colorado, where two of his ancestors had been killed by U.S. soldiers.

Dea Jacobson, who worked in his Grand Junction, Colorado office when he was a Democrat, called him a force of nature. “He could do anything he put his mind to,” she said. He was a licensed pilot, and he also earned a commercial driver’s license, which he used in 2000 and 2012 to drive huge Colorado Christmas trees to the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Though his party changed, Jacobson said, Campbell’s politics remained the same: “He was pro-choice, pro-union and, despite criticism from some environmentalists, he backed key legislation protecting Colorado’s public lands.” Over the years, Campbell became known as someone who’d horse trade to get the bills he cared about passed.

One of his major victories was passage of the Colorado Wilderness Act of 1993, which designated or expanded 19 wilderness areas. The landmark legislation had been 13 years in the making. Campbell also worked on the creation of Great Sand Dunes National Park and helped make the Black Canyon National Monument a national park.

Campbell had a major impact on Colorado’s Four Corners region. Working with the Tribes he changed the Animas–La Plata water project to protect the free-flowing Animas River, despite criticism from environmentalists over the pumping of water uphill into a dry basin. The deal fulfilled long-overdue water rights held by the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute Tribes.

I’d called Campbell last October when I was writing a column about changes coming for the reservoir named after him—Lake Nighthorse—authorized by Congress in 1968 as part of the Animas-La Plata Project. I’d been told Campbell was in poor health, but he answered the phone, later telling me, “I’m suffering from old persons’ problems so I’m not following water wars these days. But don’t forget what Mark Twain said about water: ‘Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.’”

Jacobson wasn’t surprised that Nighthorse was affable in our conversation. “He loved newspaper people,” she recalled, and when they were on the road in rural Colorado, “he liked to stop in at a town’s weekly paper.” Though he didn’t drink, he might also visit a local bar or café to start a conversation with locals. Before long, she said, “he was holding court.”

Lane’s recollection was equally warm. “Ben was funny, irreverent and endearing, and he connected with people of all backgrounds.”

A private memorial service will be held by his family at their ranch in Ignacio, Colorado. He is survived by his wife Linda, his children Colin and Shanan, and four grandchildren.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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Throughout his political career, Pearce has worked to privatize and undermine our public lands. As a New Mexico congressman, he co-sponsored several bills to dispose of national public lands. This alone ought to disqualify him from running the agency charged with stewarding 245 million acres for current and future generations.

In a 2012 letter to House leadership, Pearce argued that the federal government owns “vast” land holdings, “most of (which) we do not even need,” and called for a massive sell-off to pay down the national debt. Pearce’s vision for our public lands is not conservation or even balanced management—it’s liquidation.

President Trump has been down this road before: During his first term, he nominated anti-public-lands zealot William Perry Pendley to run the BLM. Pendley never even received a hearing, and the White House dropped the nomination after his record was revealed. Pendley went on to write the public lands chapter of the now-notorious Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Pendley spent his career as a lawyer arguing that the federal government should not own public lands. Steve Pearce has gone even further. From inside Congress, Pearce spent 14 years undermining public lands, seeking to gut wildlife protections and sell off huge amounts of public land.

Pearce’s nomination comes as our public lands are being attacked from all sides. Over the last 10 months, President Trump has elevated officials such as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, both of whom view our public lands as nothing more than assets to monetize through drilling, mining and logging.

These officials are currently working to execute Trump’s vision of selling out public assets for private profit. Pearce would accelerate this effort, liquidating lands to the highest bidder—including corporations and luxury developers.

Even by recent standards, Pearce’s public lands record is radical. It is also unpopular. This spring, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tried to include a public land sale provision in the sprawling budget bill, framing it as a housing solution. The measure would have mandated the sale of 2-3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands.

But Lee’s amendment triggered immediate backlash from hunters, outdoor recreation groups and Western lawmakers. Within days, he abandoned the effort. If the Senate rejected Lee’s market-rate sell-off as radical, it should be easy now to reject a nominee whose goal is to get rid of even more public land.

That brings us to the Senate Stewardship Caucus, co-chaired by a Republican, Tim Sheehy of Montana, and a Democrat, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. It launched last month to “advance bipartisan efforts to conserve the nation’s lands and waters” with science-based policy. The caucus has been applauded by hunting, outdoor recreation, and conservation organizations as a promising start for defending public access and wildlife.

Pearce’s nomination is the caucus’s first real test. If its members cannot draw a bright line at a nominee who has worked tirelessly to sell off public lands and weaken laws that protect them, then its vision of “stewardship” is nothing but empty branding.

The stakes are immense. BLM’s multiple-use mandate requires balancing energy, grazing, recreation and conservation under long-term land use plans grounded in science and public input. That mission collapses if the agency’s leader believes we must “reverse this trend of public ownership” of the very lands he is charged with managing.

Westerners understand what happens when responsible stewardship is abandoned. Rural communities lose the long-term economic engine that healthy public lands provide. Hunters, anglers and campers lose access they have relied on for generations.

Steve Pearce’s nomination is a referendum on whether Congress believes our shared lands still belong to all Americans. The Stewardship Caucus and every senator who claims to care about the West’s outdoor heritage should reject Pearce’s nomination. America’s public lands are a unique legacy we pass down to future generations, not a portfolio to liquidate.

Aaron Weiss is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities and co-host of The Landscape podcast.

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Hours earlier, I scrambled up to this cliff to watch the sunset. A lot of people take in the play of light over the red rocks every evening. But the route up a boulder wall that seemed so clear in the daylight was no longer obvious in the twilight. I was stuck.

Count me as one of the many hikers who’ve found themselves in a pickle. I was lucky, though, and finally found my own way down to the trailhead below. 

These days, I’ve been researching how the busiest search and rescue team in Utah, based in Moab, responds to an average of 130 calls per year from people who are not so lucky. This team has to be ready for urgent calls from climbers, mountain bikers, off-roaders, backcountry skiers, hikers, BASE jumpers and river rafters. The team handles it all.

“A lot of emergency situations are like improv because you don’t get to say no,” said Grand County Search and Rescue member Jordan Lister. “It’s just ‘Yes, and…we will get through this together.’”

Lister is one of the dozens of first responders who share their personal stories in a new podcast series that I’m producing, called Back From Beyond. The 60- to 90-minute episodes are a collaboration between the search and rescue team, Grand County tourism and trails staff, and Moab-based KZMU community radio.

In the episode “Hiking Behind the Rocks,” hiker Jason Goldsmith talked about how he got turned around in the maze-like terrain above Moab’s rim. With a fast-moving winter storm approaching, he said he had no choice but to find shelter.

“It was a huge emotional roller coaster,” he recalled, “and I don’t recommend it to anybody.” 

Like most people who call Moab’s search and rescue for help, he didn’t get in trouble by pushing a sport to the limit. Instead, something unexpected happened and the person is unprepared. Perhaps a route takes longer than anticipated, they twist an ankle a few miles in, get turned around and lost, their climbing rope gets stuck or they didn’t pack enough water.

“When I was younger,” said Grand County Search and Rescue member Michelle Leber, “I would hear about accidents and think, ‘Oh, that would never happen to me.’ But small decisions can add up to a miserable day outdoors. I mean, how many things have we all gotten away with and we didn’t even know it?”

The podcast has covered climbers stuck on Castleton Tower, one of the most challenging desert monoliths in the world; a backcountry skier tells of coping with an injury in the remote La Sal Mountains; and an off-roader recounts what happened after flipping their vehicle off a 150-foot cliff. All the stories in this first season of Back From Beyond serve to remind people how quickly things can go south, and how much we depend on somebody helping when they do.

“Outdoor recreation is a community,” said Rachelle Brinkman, recounting her mountain biking accident in the episode, “The Whole Enchilada.” Brinkman suffered injuries after crashing her bike in technical, rocky terrain around Moab. A lot of people came to her aid that day, she said, and she now makes sure to check on any rider who might need a hand.

“We look out for each other,” she said, “and we help each other, whether you’re in search and rescue or not.”

By now I’ve talked to many people about their trips in the backcountry, and it still amazes me how many times they recall saying to themselves before setting out: “Better grab an extra layer, this battery charger, a headlamp, and also tell someone where I’m going.” They realize that one small, smart decision before heading outdoors can save the day.

If you’re exploring the rugged outback of Moab someday and need to make an emergency call for help, you’re in luck. A team of seasoned professionals with Grand County Search and Rescue will work hard to get you home safe.

Molly Marcello is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She directed KZMU News in Moab for more than six years and is the producer of the new documentary podcast series, Back From Beyond.

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