Category Archives: Public lands

As previously noted, the Antiplanner left Oregon late in October to drive to Austin for a conference. I just returned on Sunday. To keep up my reputation as an expert in public land management, I also visited eight units of the National Park System.

Cedar Breaks National Monument. Click any image for a larger view.

My first park was Cedar Breaks National Monument, and I was lucky enough to arrive after the first snowfall but before the snow got so deep that the road to the park was closed. Most of my photos use a combination of high-dynamic range (HDR) exposures of several different angles stitched together in Photoshop. This means the photos shown here are anywhere from six to 24 different exposures combined together. One nice thing about HDR is that you can shoot directly into the sun and still get great photos.

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The Forest Service has historically been dominated by foresters and engineers, so a wildlife biologist who joined the agency in 1978 wouldn’t expect to advance very far. But after getting a Ph.D. in wildlife ecology from the University of California at Berkeley, Hal Salwasser went to work for the Forest Service and quickly moved up within the agency.

In the 1980s, just a few years after he began working for the Forest Service, he was the agency’s deputy national director of wildlife and fisheries. In 1990, Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson was searching for a way out of the environmental controversies that beset the agency and asked Salwasser to run what Robertson called the “New Perspectives” program. Salwasser made an earnest effort to find new ways of managing the national forests. In one sense, the program was a dead end, but in another sense it contributed to major changes including an 80 percent reduction in timber sales.

Salwasser then left the agency for a short time to become the Boone & Crockett Professor at the University of Montana. In this chair, Salwasser not only taught students but hunted and fished with the 100 wealthy members of this exclusive club. “Am I having fun, or what?” he enthused.

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The Antiplanner turned 62 on October 1, and I celebrated by buying a “senior pass” from the National Park Service. This $10 pass is supposed to allow me free (or, at least, discounted) entry into every national park for the rest of my life.

Nymph Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Click image for a larger view.

Since I happened to be in Denver, I first used the pass to visit Rocky Mountain National Park, where I saw and heard elk bugling on my way to the Bear Lake trailhead where I hiked to Nymph, Dream, and Emerald lakes. The Park Service representative at the gate–who admitted he was older than I am–didn’t resent selling me a lifetime pass for just $10.

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The Antiplanner understands politics well enough to know that polarization is sometimes useful. But I still find it annoying when people who don’t understand an issue use it to create unnecessary hysteria. On one hand Senator Harry Reid calls people protesting federal land policy “domestic terrorists.” On the other hand, some people hope that rancher Bundy’s stand will be the first shot in a “war on federal bureaucrats.”

The Bundy issue is neither war nor terrorism. It is a simple case of trespass. It won’t be solved by turning federal land over to the states or selling it. Nor will it be solved by demonizing ranchers, property rights advocates, or federal land managers.

For one thing, we can’t give the land “back to the states,” as some people advocate, because it was never state land to begin with. With the exception of Texas and a few Spanish land grants, pretty much all land west of the Mississippi River was, at one time, federal land. When Congress made Nevada a state, it offered it 4 million randomly selected acres. The state asked if Congress would be willing to give it 2 million but let it select the acres it wanted, and Congress agreed. The state eventually sold all but 2,500 of those acres.

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Property rights activists are irate that the federal government has seized the cattle of a Southern Nevada rancher who has allowed his herd to graze on Bureau of Land Management lands. Back in 1993, the feds limited rancher Cliven Bundy to 150 animals in order to protect the desert tortoise. He responded that his family began grazing the area decades before the BLM was even formed in 1935. In protest, he stopped paying grazing fees and continued to graze 500 or more (by some accounts as many as 1,000) cattle on the land.

Bundy has lost several court cases since then and the BLM says he owes $300,000 in grazing fees. More than two decades after the dispute began, the agency finally sent armed agents in to remove the offending cattle. In the course of doing so, they arrested–and apparently roughly treated–Bundy’s son for stepping off an area the feds had set aside as a “free speech area” in order to videotape the federal action.

Nevada, of course, is ground zero for the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement the began in the 1970s promoting privatization of federal lands. There’s a good reason for that: something like 89 percent of all the land in Nevada is federal, which definitely impedes growth in the state. On the other hand, rancher Bundy’s pre-1995 grazing allotment covered nearly 160,000 acres, suggesting the land must be pretty poor quality (at least for cattle grazing) to handle just a few hundred cattle.

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