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This Land is Your Land
The
Bureau of Land Management,
which oversees the public domain in 12 Western states,
is caught between the demands
to use the land and the demands to preserve it.
By David
Darlington
To
me April is a month to be abroad in the landscape, when the earth
is bursting with life in the wake of winter. This urge usually
takes me to the California desert, nominally looking for wildflowers,
always taking pictures, but mainly enjoying the incomparable sense
of space, freedom, and solitude.
En route to and from my home in the San Francisco
Bay Area, I set a course through other places that are at their
peak in spring. In one representative year, I drove south along
the Diablo Range to the Carrizo Plain, a basin west of the San
Joaquin Valley, where the green hills were painted with yellow
mustard and dotted with pronghorn antelope. Then I headed east
into the Tehachapis, where my conservationist friend, Keith, takes
care of an oasis crowded with willows, migrating songbirds, and
straying dirt bikers (from neighboring Dove Springs and Jawbone
Canyon). From there I dropped into the Mojave by way of Walker
Pass, entering into the Joshua tree zone and camping amid the
Trona Pinnacles, a spectacular arrangement of tufa spires on the
prehistoric shore of Searles Dry Lake. I proceeded north through
Panamint Valley—the 1849 survival route of the Manly wagon
party, which almost perished in nearby Death Valley—circling
around Owens Lake to the Alabama Hills, where dawn emblazoned
the snowcapped Sierra Nevada.
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A veritable tour de force it was: an orgy of stunning
scenery, intriguing biology, and amazing geology, a postcard collection
of the West so compelling that a Marlboro ad was being filmed
near one of the spots where I camped. Nevertheless, in my weeks
of travels, I paid not a single entrance fee and every night I
laid my sleeping bag wherever I wanted, unconfined by public campgrounds.
No place that I visited was within the borders of a national park,
nor was any privately owned. The trip took place entirely on our
collective American commons, the "public domain" overseen by the
Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
As far as public perception is concerned, the BLM
is (at best) one of the least appreciated and (at worst) one of
the most disdained federal agencies. It has never enjoyed the
esteem given to the National Park Service or Smokey the Bear's
U.S. Forest Service, and lacks even the dim cachet of the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees endangered species.
Yet the BLM manages more land than any of those offices—a
total of 264 million acres (compared with the Forest Service's
191 million or the National Park Service's 83 million)—an
empire nearly as big as Texas and California combined, almost
half the total property held by the federal government. In addition,
the BLM controls claims on 370 million acres of subsurface mineral
resources—oil, gas, coal, gold, silver, iron, copper, uranium,
etc.—and is charged with responsibility for wild horses,
wilderness areas, historic trails, and archaeological sites. In
its most traditional and contentious role, the BLM also oversees
the grazing of millions of cattle, sheep, and goats by thousands
of ranchers.
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"The
BLM was always an agency that was told to do more with
less."
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Almost all of this takes place in 12 Western states—Alaska,
Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico,
Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The predominant feature
of BLM land is commonly thought to be sagebrush, but its holdings
include beautiful rivers, breathtaking mountains, dramatic coastlines,
luxuriant forests, and picturesque canyons—almost all of
which are open, in one way or another, to exploitation. Whereas
the National Park Service has always had a preservationist mandate,
the wide-open domain of the BLM has always been targeted for utilization.
The agency is ordered by Congress to use, manage, develop, and
protect its resources for present and future generations—a
mission as diverse (some may say schizophrenic) as its astonishingly
varied kingdom. The lack of a clear mandate—or much in the
way of restriction—that makes BLM land attractive to modern
day refugees from civilization (like me) has also played havoc
with its ecological health, as its various users have become accustomed
to having their way with the land. Among critics, the agency's
initials are said to stand for Bureau of Livestock and Mining.
Aside from philosophical arguments about its direction,
the bureau has always been handicapped by penurious funding. In
its budget for this year, for example, Congress bestowed $2.82
per acre on the BLM in operating funds, as opposed to $6.65 per
acre for the Forest Service and $16.85 for the Park Service. Given
such a state of affairs, it is no surprise that this poor stepchild
among federal land use agencies is constantly under fire.
"Miners dislike and distrust us just as much as
the Sierra Club does," Blaine Heald, one of the nine rangers charged
with patrolling 4.5 million acres of California desert, once told
me. "The BLM was always an agency that was told to do more with
less."
In
a phrase, BLM territory can be categorized as the boondocks. In
the beginning, the public domain reached from the Appalachian
Mountains to the Pacific—a 2 billion-acre empire. (Though
Native Americans might differ with his analysis, historian Frederick
Jackson Turner called it "the richest free gift that was ever
spread out before civilized man.") To encourage its settlement,
Congress created the General Land Office in 1812, helping to "dispose"
of this property by transferring it to private ownership. Eventually
the government recognized that some of it should be preserved.
Over the next 100 years, two-thirds of this realm was transformed
into national forests, parks, monuments, reservoirs, wildlife
refuges, Indian reservations, and sundry other jurisdictions.
Most of the rest—the so-called leftover land—continued
to be used by miners and ranchers, who, through such measures
as the Mining Law of 1872 (which still makes it possible for people
and companies to acquire mineral deposits for only $2.50 and $5
an acre), were permitted to reap its riches without taking care
of the sod. By the early 20th century, overgrazing and soil deterioration
had taken a serious toll on the land, so in 1934 Congress passed
the Taylor Grazing Act, which eliminated nomadic herding and required
a fee for grazing livestock. The Grazing Service, however, was
heavily influenced by ranchers, who succeeded in keeping the fees
so low that even today the BLM spends more on grazing than it
collects.
In an effort to consolidate authority over the public
domain, in 1946 the Grazing Service merged with the old General
Land Office, forming the Bureau of Land Management. The agency
still had no clear mandate, however, and only one worker for every
3 million acres that it was to oversee. When John F. Kennedy became
president in 1961, he noted that public lands suffered from "uncontrolled
use and a lack of proper management." His interior secretary,
Stewart Udall, advocated a philosophy that stressed the protection
of natural resources. The Classification and Multiple Use Act
of 1964 stated in writing that public lands should be made available
for many uses, but managed so as to sustain the environment.
The watershed year (so to speak) for the BLM was
1976, when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management
Act (FLPMA, or "Flipma," as it has been called since)—a long-awaited
"organic act" that, in theory, placed the agency on equal footing
with the National Park and Forest services. FLPMA decreed, among
other things, that flora, fauna, camping, hiking, access for off-road
vehicles, water quality, and preservation now carried as much
weight as mining, grazing, and timber harvesting. It identified
"areas of critical environmental concern" and, underlining the
BLM's role as an active steward (rather than an uninterested caretaker),
it nearly doubled the agency's budget, giving it a battalion of
badge- and gun-carrying rangers to enforce the law.
It
would be nice to report that, post-FLPMA, the BLM and its community
walked off into the sunset arm in arm toward a new and environmentally
harmonious future. But old ideas die hard, and FLPMA was soon
followed by the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a Western antifederal
movement demanding that the public domain be turned over to state
and private ownership. The movement evaporated, however, after
a sympathetic Ronald Reagan was elected president and his new
interior secretary, James Watt, slashed grazing fees and cut the
BLM budget, opening more than a million acres of wilderness to
development. (The latter action was ultimately reversed by a federal
court, which found that Watt had "failed to follow the law.")
The dust has settled somewhat since then, though
the BLM continues to evolve with the nation's priorities. Most
of our population growth is taking place in the West, forcing
more changes on the agency's turf: As parks have gotten more crowded,
the wide-open character of BLM land has become more appealing,
with space and quiet replacing oil, gold, and grass as its most
valuable commodities. With burgeoning population centers like
Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City bordering directly on BLM
land, recreation now ranks as the single biggest use of the public
domain.
The agency has responded to this shift with an ambitious
array of programs. Where its expertise once lay mainly in mining
and ranching, today it employs scientists, wilderness planners,
and recreation specialists. The BLM now manages 412 campgrounds,
136 wilderness areas, 300 "watchable wildlife" sites, 152 research
areas, 43 natural landmarks, 23 national recreation trails, nine
conservation areas, and 69 scenic "backcountry byways," or out-of-the-way
drives. The Clinton administration is considering a dozen BLM
sites, including California's Carrizo Plain and Oregon's Steens
Mountain, for designation as national monuments, aiming to retain
the bureau as manager—a role that until recently had been
reserved for the Park Service.
For longtime lovers of little-known places, the
effect is bittersweet. In spite of its apparent openness, BLM
land has historically been a world of well-kept secrets. Greater
attention is a mixed blessing, conferring both welcome protection
and increased visitation. With so much clutter already in the
West—whether in the form of heap-leach gold mines or overrun
national parks—one wonders how many more developed campgrounds
the backcountry can tolerate. Meanwhile, "multiple use" of the
land infuriates everyone who considers his or her kind of use
to be preeminent. To cite one example, should cattle continue
to be grazed in wilderness areas that are supposed to be free
of major human influence, especially when federal lands in the
West account for only 2 percent of the nation's beef? Such questions
are hard to avoid as one tours the public domain.
Following are some of the most prominent places
in the province of the BLM. For people like me, who feel the highest
and best use of land is to remain undeveloped, there's still plenty
of territory to explore (at least for the moment), but whichever
way you choose to go—toward trails and kiosks or to undefined
spaces—treat the place like your own backyard. Even with
somebody else's cows in it, that's exactly what it is.
PROMINENT PLACES
California Desert
Sand dunes, cinder cones, lava flows, Joshua trees,
piñon forests, 90 mountain ranges, 1,500 species of animals and
flowering plants, 100,000 archaeological sites—such are the
enticements of the 25 million-acre California desert, covering
fully one-fourth of the state. California actually contains parts
of three deserts—the Mojave, Sonoran, and Great Basin. Circumscribed
by the California Desert Conservation Area, this region contains
all the issues facing the BLM in microcosm: It has been historically
underappreciated but is now prized for its beauty, and it's located
alongside the fastest-growing population centers in the United
States. It was the first place in the public domain to see the
mining and grazing supplanted by recreation—specifically
hiking, camping, rock climbing, wildlife watching, hunting, and
off-road vehicle use, which is now restricted to designated routes.
Carrizo
Plain, California
In good years, wildflower displays in central California's
Carrizo Plain can be mind-boggling. A desert-like drainage basin
(its rain runoff has no outlet to the sea) between the Caliente
and Temblor mountains, this little-known valley is the largest
remaining example of the San Joaquin Valley grassland ecosystem.
Decorated at its northern end by Soda Lake, a seasonal playa that
hosts thousands of sandhill cranes in winter, the Carrizo also
harbors several endangered species, including the San Joaquin
kit fox, giant kangaroo rat, and antelope ground squirrel. Evidence
of Chumash Indian occupation is on display at Painted Rock, one
of California's preeminent examples of prehistoric art. Meanwhile,
the Temblor Mountains are one of the best places on the planet
to see the effects of earthquake creep: As afternoon shadows deepen
on the western face of the range, each streambed takes a dogleg
to the north when it hits the San Andreas Fault, etching a series
of dramatic S-curves into the scarp.
Alabama
Hills, California
Marlboro ads are the latest in a long line of film
images issuing forth from this spot. Situated between the town
of Lone Pine and Whitney Portal in California's eastern Sierra
Nevada, the "hills" are a collection of eroded granite boulders.
Their backdrop is the snow-covered Sierra crest, topped by the
highest point in the continental United States, 14,494-foot Mount
Whitney. Owing to this spectacular juxtaposition, the area has
served as location for countless Westerns. Even for amateur photographers,
the place is not to be missed—though you must get up at dawn
if you want to witness a show-stopping spectacle: the first rays
of sunlight hitting Mount Whitney, then making their way down
the Sierra to ignite the Alabama rocks. After it's over, hike
or bike to your heart's content.
King
Range, California
Very few parts of the California coast are innocent
of asphalt; Highway 1 shadows nearly its entire length northward,
finally giving up and turning inland when it runs into the King
Range, a section of shoreline so inaccessible it has been dubbed
the "Lost Coast."
This was the nation's First National Conservation
Area, a category exclusive to the BLM—in this case a spectacular
60,000-acre zone of cliffs, canyons, beaches, redwoods, old-growth
fir, and chaparral. The terrain is rugged and steep, rising 4,000
feet less than three miles from the sea; nevertheless, it contains
hundreds of miles of trails for hiking, driving, and biking. The
Lost Coast Trail, a legendary backpacking route, follows the beach
in the north, taking to the hills in the south. Anglers and divers
flock to the area for salmon, steelhead, and abalone.
Steens
Mountain, Oregon
Steens Mountain is the scenic wonder of southeastern
Oregon. The tallest mountain in the northern Great Basin, it's
not unlike a 30-mile-long Sierra Nevada, with a long and gentle
western slope that tops out at 9,773 feet and then drops precipitously
to the Alvord Desert in the east. The ecological difference between
those environments is dramatic, the upper slopes receiving four
times as much rain as the desert below and supporting herds of
bighorn sheep and groves of quaking aspen. The top of Steens is
the highest point that you can drive to in Oregon—an opportunity
afforded by the 66-mile Steens Mountain Loop Road, which traverses
the entire massif, skirting an enormous quartet of glaciated,
U-shaped valleys and crossing the wonderfully named Donner und
Blitzen (thunder and lightning) River. Several campgrounds are
situated along the way, though in most years the entire loop is
snow free and open only in August, September, and October. Steens
Mountain is also relatively close to the volcanic marvels of the
Diamond Craters Natural Area and National Historic Oregon Trail
Interpretive Center (in Baker), also managed by the BLM.
Black
Rock Desert, Nevada
The Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada is
one of the largest and ¾attest alkaline playas on earth. Having
gained recent fame as the site of the annual Burning Man festival,
this remnant of ancient Lake Lahontan—25 miles long and 15
miles wide—is actually underlain by silt more than a mile
deep. Its seemingly endless, mirage-covered surface was a sometimes-fatal
endurance test for 19th-century wagon parties, which targeted
an enormous black rock midway across as a landmark. Today it's
a place where you can hike or ride or wind sail for hours without
turning, though this is most safely done in summer—when the
lake bed gets wet, it becomes impassable. Fragile dunes and hot
springs dot the playa's perimeter; High Rock Canyon, a four-wheel-drive
corridor once navigated by Kit Carson and John C. Frémont, is
to the northwest. On the recreational spectrum, you can play a
game of desert golf or join the Labor Day creative frenzy that
is Burning Man.
Red
Rock Canyon, Nevada
Nevada is the capital of the public domain in at
least one sense: Seventy percent of the state consists of BLM
land. No other place condenses the scenery, opportunity, or irony
of that status better than Red Rock Canyon National Conservation
Area, which lies only 17 miles west of Las Vegas. Here at the
foot of the Spring Mountains, the Keystone Thrust Fault has, over
the last 65 million years, created the spectacular Wilson Cliffs,
an assortment of red and cream colored sandstone that stands out
like a necklace of rubies on a brown limestone body. Well known
as a rock climber's paradise, the area also offers a 13-mile scenic
drive, not to mention 30 miles of hiking trails that wind up and
away from the neon lights of Las Vegas below.
Grand
Staircase/ Escalante, Utah
The multicolored cliffs, canyons, buttes, and pinnacles
of southern Utah are so remote that this was the last place in
the contiguous United States to be mapped. In 1996, 1.7 million
acres of it was preserved by presidential decree as the Grand
Staircase/Escalante National Monument-the first such designation
entrusted to the BLM. It's still one of the nation's least developed
areas, offering primitive camping, hunting, fishing, biking, and
four-wheel-drive access to well-prepared visitors. Outside the
monument's borders (and those of the state's national parks),
Utah's 22 million-acre public domain is open to mineral exploration
and off-road vehicle use, making it the most hotly contested public
land in the West. Much of the BLM empire in Utah remains the most
eye-popping public land in the world.
Snake
River Birds of Prey, Idaho
Thirty miles southwest of Boise, the Snake River
cuts through a 700-foot-deep canyon. The lava cliffs along the
river, with thermal updrafts rising past innumerable nooks, crannies,
and caves, are an ideal home for avian raptors, or birds of prey.
As it has happened over millennia, strong winds have also deposited
a deep layer of fine sand on the plateau above the river, creating
an excellent habitat for squirrels and rabbits—a raptor's
favorite food source. The result is the nation's, and perhaps
the world's, densest concentration of raptors: the Snake River
Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, home to some 600 nesting
pairs of hawks, bald eagles, falcons, owls, and hundreds more
migrating through in spring. There is a network of hiking, biking,
and horseback riding trails throughout the 485,000-acre area;
and boaters and anglers can also navigate 81 miles of river. Few
places provide such a direct illumination of the relationship
between geology and biology.
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Photos by Steve Bly, Dennis Flaherty, and Larry Ulrich
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This article was first published in March 2000. Some facts
may have aged gracelessly. Please call ahead to verify information.
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