Categories: environment, Edward Abbey, Ellen Meloy, Terry Tempest Williams

It may have seemed at first like a publicity stunt or a gift from above, but last year Coloradans at Vail and Beaver Creek mountains saw pink snow.

“When you skied a run, you turned and your tracks were pink,” Melissa Macdonald, executive director of the Eagle River Watershed, told the Vail Daily. It wasn’t to be confused with the ever-popular watermelon snow which is colored by algae and even tastes like the fruit; the pink in this snow came from red dust on the Colorado Plateau and blew in from southwestern Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

The dust kicks up when the soil in the plateau is disturbed. Once on the snow, it absorbs sunlight and causes the snow to melt sooner than it normally would. Chris Landry, executive director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, says the melt can be as many as 50 days early. This, of course, is not good for the ski industry. If snow melts too fast, it also threatens the water supply of the towns it rushes by.

“Who’s to blame for all of this dust?” Landry wants to know. “”Is it oil and gas? Is it grazing? (Open ranges for cattle, sheep and goats abound in the area.) Motorized recreation?.” The center is investigating.

The Obama Administration has so far left in place the destructive Bush/Cheney No New Wilderness policy of opening wilderness-quality lands to mining, drilling and off-road vehicles. No one expects these activities to be terminated, only regulated, but now any place is vulnerable.

Sad to say, if the commissioners of San Juan County, Utah, have their way, the snow in Colorado is going to get a lot pinker. In an attempt to pass legislation before the recently defeated Republican Senator Bob Bennett leaves Washington, county commissioners are rushing to cook up a “preservation” bill that would give off-road vehicles (the aforementioned motorized recreation mode) wide access to fragile back country which contains some of the world’s most spectacular rock art and Puebloan ruins not to mention natural formations like Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge and the Goosenecks of the San Juan River.

San Juan County is larger than Connecticut. People have lived there for thousands of years, but today the population is sparse—about two people per square mile. If , like me, you’ve spent most of your adult life in cities, it’s easy to be blown away by the enormity of the spaces, the dramatic rock formations, and the spectacular colors created by the play of light on the red rocks.

Not only do off-road vehicles disturb the thin desert crust and the desert “varnish” created by microorganisms, there’s the noise that disturbs listening humans and stresses wildlife. Off-road vehicles often bring riders who yield to the temptation to add their own marks to those created by ancient people. Last summer San Juan County’s largest town, Blanding, was full of federal agents who conducted arrests of prominent local citizens who trafficked illegally in Puebloan artifacts.

There has always been tension between preservationists and the politically conservative population of these states, especially in Utah. Many people feel that public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management rightfully belong in private hands. To some, any restrictions are an attempt to deny them a good time and the opportunity to profit from abundant mineral resources. San Juan County is not only home to the Valley of the Gods, a smaller, quieter version of Monument Valley, it has the nation’s only uranium processing plant and numerous oil fields.

“All politics are local,” once Speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was fond of saying. Sometimes, though, local politics have resonance across the nation, and the preservation of Utah’s Red Rock country is one of those. No fewer than 165 Representatives and 22 Senators have signed on to designate as wilderness this vast spectacular parcel of land, which includes much of San Juan County. Not surprisingly, perhaps, none of the sponsors are from Utah, although former Governor John Huntsman had supported it and it had looked as though environmentalists might be making headway with Bennett before his defeat.

It’s also worth noting that representatives of a broad spectrum of religious groups have urged the Utah legislature to advocate for the state’s wild lands as “places of profound spiritual importance to people of many faith traditions.” The group included Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, United Church of Christ members and, perhaps most significantly, Latter-day Saints (Mormons.)

The national bill, America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, deserves a fair and measured hearing, not a hastily drawn up license for exploitation. Conservationists still rue the day that the Corps of Engineers managed to dam the spectacular Glen Canyon, part of which is in San Juan County. There again, the argument was made that the newly created Lake Powell would be a source of recreation, water and electricity that outweighed the destruction of great natural beauty and the remains of long-ago settlements.

More information can be found on the website of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and I urge you to write to Nancy Sutley, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, 722 Jackson Place, NW, Washington, DC 20510 or email her at chair@ceq.eop.gov Please urge her to put a stop to this madness.

Now that Congress has balked at bailing out the Big Three automakers, their CEOs have all gone back to Detroit, not in a Ford Expedition or a Chevy Suburban or in a Lincoln Navigator, one of which would hold them all, but on their individual jets. Even President-elect Obama expressed surprise that they came only with their hands out and without a plan. He said he hoped they’d work something up before they come back.

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For the past several years, my partner, Michael, and I have been drawn to Southeast Utah, one of the Four Corners of the Southwest. (Northeast Arizona, Northwest New Mexico and Southwest Colorado form the others.)

To someone who grew up on the East coast, Southeast Utah seems almost empty, but to the Navajo, naturalists and geologists, it’s anything but. Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams and Ellen Meloy have written compellingly about this land. On my most recent trip, I carried Abbey’s still fresh 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a bunch of environmentalists who hope to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam, built in the sixties across the Colorado River just over the Utah-Arizona border. The dam created Lake Powell and rendered inaccessible miles of spectacular redrock canyon where people lived for thousands of years. Sentiment for the dam’s demise is still alive, as expressed by the slogan on a cap worn by a man I met in the Comb Ridge Coffee Shop: Just drain it!

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