San Juan National Forest revision plan

Urgent Call Goes Out to Hold the Line in Hermosa Creek

By Ken Wright, 6-10-06

We have a lot of landscape treasures here in the San Juan country, but among the richest is the Hermosa Creek Valley.

I’m not giving away any secrets here. Jeep tours, four-wheel drives, campers, mountain bikers, motorcyclists, hikers, fishermen, hunters, outfitters, horse packers, and livestock all find something alluring here. The upper section of the 35-mile-or-so long drainage has a road and was once mined and logged, The lower section and many of its steep, remote side drainages are accessible by well-maintained multiple-use trails.

Despite this heavy use, this valley is magic. Here is still found most every critter native to this region except grizzly and bison. Isolated populations of cutthroat trout with, as near and can be told, untainted gene pools hide out here. Stands of fat, ponderous old-growth Ponderosa pine, like the ones that used to be common to this area, still stand here. For elk and deer, the drainage offers a huge block of habitat and a major migration corridor linking the Animas Valley with the high country.

A remarkable place. An area big enough to absorb visitors while remaining a living remnant of what this area once was. It is also how many of the people who love this place want it to stay.

But change may be a’coming. And those lovers may have only a few days to speak their mind about what happens to the Hermosa area.

For the last year and a half, the San Juan National Forest has been working on its legally mandated management plan update for the 2.5 million acres of public land the agency manages. Once completed, the new plan will be in place for at least 15 years.

Last month, the agency launched public hearings on the major proposed actions and alternatives forged from the process so far. Among the alternatives are proposals to greatly increase the motorized access in the Hermosa Creek drainage – options that could disrupt the fine balance of both shared use and wilderness qualities that make the Hermosa area so unique, and a so uniquely successful story.

That story goes back to 1972, when an ad hoc committee of various users recommended the Hermosa Creek drainage be protected. Since then, working for a fine and rare balance, the Forest Service has maintained the valley’s wild nature while maintaining the area’s multiple uses. Some 80,00 acres of the area was, and still is, suitable for the strict, legal definition of Wilderness. But in order to maintain the uses that would be excluded by Wilderness designation – in particular, all mechanized travel including mountain bikes – and in order to avoid the hordes that would come following the formal designation, the area has received special management but not legal protection.

Hence, in the new forest plan, encroachment threatens.

Among those public lands Paul Reveres is local outfitter Peter Turner, owner of Colorado Mountain Expeditions.

“During the winter of 2005, the public was invited to comment on the various uses within the Hermosa Roadless area,” says Turner. “Out of these 59 comments, only three identified more opportunities for motorized use.”

Yet in at least one of the proposed alternatives, large tracts of the Hermosa area is redesignated as suited to motorized use.

“The motorized use group are strongly advocating for more motorized use in the Hermosa Roadless Area,” says Turner. “The natural resources of the East Side of the Hermosa as well as the West side should be managed to perpetuate semi-primitive to pristine conditions. The Hermosa area is a very important area to protect as critical elk habitat since Durango and La Plata County continue to have an exponential growth rate of human population. This is one of the closest pristine elk habitats that adjoin the Durango area.”

Also, Turner adds, “It is important to preserve the solitude and quiet nature of the Hermosa Roadless area.”

And it’s a chance to keep what’s really unique about Hermosa Creek in the modern West: the sharing of this public space. It’s a chance to show what can be kept, and how it can be shared.

Comments on the plans must be received by June 15. Comments can be submitted online through the San Juan Public Lands Center.

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