NEW WEST FEATURE

Could a Name Change Put A Colorado Landmark on the National Radar?

By Bobby Magill, 11-25-10

	Wedding and Monument canyons glow in the sunset above Colorado National Monument in April. Photo by Bobby Magill.

It’s easy to miss Colorado National Monument when you’re driving Interstate 70 from Denver to the canyon country of southern Utah. Signs on the freeway point the way to the monument, but the name hardly conjures images of what’s found there.

“Visitors and locals think they’re going to a stone monument,” or a historic site — hardly a reason to inspire a detour off the freeway, monument Superintendent Joan Anzelmo says.

The geological and historical wonders there — unique hanging canyons, the 23-mile Rim Rock Drive built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, newly-discovered paleontological sites and precipitous red rock cliffs and canyons — are reasons Anzelmo, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and the local visitor’s bureau want Congress to re-designate it “Colorado Canyons National Park.”

The monument’s red sandstone cliffs and “hanging” canyons suspended atop a bench of volcanic rock form Grand Junction’s southern skyline. Supporters say the 20,000-acre monument and its sweeping scenery are of the caliber of Utah’s Canyonlands or Capitol Reef national parks, both dramatic examples of the layered and colorful geology of the Colorado Plateau.

In the early 1900s, Grand Junction iconoclast John Otto spent years living in the rugged canyons above the city and stumping for them to be declared a national park. Though the park idea had much local support, President William Howard Taft used the Antiquities Act to create Colorado National Monument in 1911, naming it in part after the Colorado River flowing beneath the cliffs. Congress has done little with it since then.

If the monument were upgraded to a national park, it would be the fourth smallest in the U.S. It would likely exclude the natural wonders of the Bureau of Land Management’s adjacent Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness, home to the sandstone arches of Rattlesnake Canyon — the highest concentration of natural arches in the world outside of Utah’s Arches National Park — and Mee Canyon, which features one of the largest canyon alcoves in the Southwest, nearly big enough to park a 747 inside.

A proposal to create a national park out of Colorado National Monument and the Black Ridge area was derailed in the 1990s over a concern about the new park potentially banning grazing and hunting. Instead, Congress created McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area, preserving those uses and protecting much of it as wilderness.

But Anzelmo said the monument’s scenery alone makes it worthy of being a national park.

MORE TOURIST TRAFFIC?

For all the monument’s natural wonder, however, boosters for national park status see more than just a name change. They’re hoping for a windfall of tourism dollars flowing in from park-hopping sightseers lured there because of two words: “national park.”

Calling the monument a “mini-Grand Canyon,” the Grand Junction Visitor and Convention Bureau manager Barbara Bowman and its board wrote members of Colorado’s congressional delegation in October urging them to support the re-designation effort mostly because of its economic potential.

“National park designation would give this region of western Colorado (and) eastern Utah the highest concentration of national parks in the U.S., creating a marketing advantage that could increase visitation, resulting in economic benefit to the region,” they wrote.

But attaching “national park” to the name of an old monument doesn’t necessarily increase the number of people who visit it, as the city of Montrose, about an hour south of Grand Junction, discovered after Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument became a national park in 1999.

National Park Service visitor use data show that Black Canyon’s visitation declined dramatically after the name change.

More than 373,000 people visited Black Canyon when visitation peaked in 1976. In 2000, the first full year after the name change, visitation had fallen to 191,000 and has exceeded that number only once since then.

The numbers are similar at southern Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes, which officially became a national park in 2004. There, visitation peaked in 1997 at nearly 310,000 visitors and had dropped to about 267,000 in 2004 — four years after the law eventually creating the park was signed by President Bill Clinton. Visitation hit 289,000 in 2009.

Two other national parks created in the last 20 years, Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley and California’s Death Valley national parks, have also seen overall declines since their names were changed.

“The name change by itself is not the draw,” said Dave Roberts, longtime management assistant at Black Canyon, where the National Park Service plans to add to the park’s tiny trail system in an attempt to get the canyon’s few visitors to stay longer.

“That doesn’t necessarily increase the (visitation) numbers, though,” he said.

Anzelmo says she believes a name change will lure more visitors to the monument because it’s so close to the freeway and borders the largest city on Colorado’s Western Slope.

So far, the national park proposal for the monument has the support of the National Parks Conservation Association and, tentatively, Mesa County.

AIR QUALITY QUESTIONS

Some conditions have to be met before Colorado Canyons National Park gets the county’s full blessing, however.

“Some locals have raised the issue that if those lands become a national park, Mesa County may have new more strict air standards to deal with,” Mesa County Commissioner Steve Acquafresca said. “The lower valley here in Mesa County is plagued by winter inversions, and we have some pretty serious air pollution during those inversion events. It’s not easy to manage. What’s the cost of that?”

Many national parks, including Arizona’s Saguaro National Park, which abuts Tucson’s urban sprawl, are EPA Class I areas, which require states and land managers to work together to reduce regional haze around national parks and wilderness areas.

But not all national parks are Class I areas, and this month Mesa County and the local chamber of commerce began studying the potential park’s implications for the region.

National park status also shouldn’t hinder locals’ current level of access to the monument and the frequency of cycling events held there, Acquafresca said.

Udall said he plans to host several public meetings about the proposal in the coming months, but no dates have been set.

“I think a case can be made that the monument qualifies for national park status,” Udall said via email. “But we need to study this issue. There may be hurdles we’re unaware of that would impact that argument.”

The monument’s friends group, the Colorado National Monument Association, has turned its website into a call for action to urge Congress to make Colorado Canyons National Park a reality.

“I think its time is now,” said Jack Neckels, a former Grand Teton National Park superintendent who lives near the monument’s east entrance. “I found it so intriguing that John Otto’s very early efforts were that it should have been a national park at the time, and just a mere 100 years have passed, and we’re once again recognizing that he was right.”

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