Why these particular areas were chosen
Our backcountry is a landscape of national importance. It straddles an ecologically vital portion of the Upper Colorado River watershed, contains a critical stretch of a key continent-scale wildlife migration corridor, and provides core habitat for many important wildlife species, including Colorado’s recently reintroduced lynx population.
Most of the existing designated wilderness in Colorado is of the high-elevation, “rock and ice” variety. Still left unprotected are the areas targeted in the Hidden Gems Campaign, which exist at the more ecologically diverse middle elevations and provide habitat for imperiled species. When many of our existing wilderness areas were established, 15-30 years ago, the mostly mid-elevation Hidden Gems areas were omitted because at the time they were seen to be potential logging or mining areas. Since then, our region’s economic base has shifted from resource extraction to recreation and quality of life; extractive uses are now no longer an obstacle to wilderness designation for these areas.
The Hidden Gems proposal consists of more than 40 separate units, each of which has its own page in the Proposals Areas section of this website. Many of these parcels adjoin existing wilderness areas and would be added to them. Others stand alone and therefore would become new wilderness areas in their own right.
The Hidden Gems proposal is based on a decade-long inventory of potential wilderness in the White River National Forest by a coalition of conservation groups, which was first presented in the form of a “Citizens’ Wilderness Vision” in 2003. Of the WRNF’s 2.3 million acres, about 750,000 were already wilderness; the coalition inventoried 1.1 million acres of roadless lands on the WRNF and found 750,000 acres of wilderness-quality lands.
Since that time, the coalition (which became the Hidden Gems Campaign in 2007) has added several BLM parcels into the mix, shelved a number of areas ringing the Flat Tops, and added a few new ones in the Gunnison National Forest. Meanwhile, the campaign has continuously refined the package through extensive field-checking and boundary adjustments in response to requests from adjacent landowners, user groups, local governments and other stakeholders. The net result is that the proposal now stands at about 340,000 acres – less than half of the wilderness-quality acreage identified in the original inventory.
The areas that have survived this rigorous filtering process are our region’s last best unprotected places – places that are so special and so important to wildlife that they should be allowed to remain “as is.” They are a precious resource that we who live here hold in trust for a world in which wildness is in increasingly short supply.
Our existing wilderness areas are a priceless gift to us from an earlier generation of farsighted conservationists. We owe it to future generations to protect and add to this legacy.
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