An anti-wolf group created a map showing Colorado is unfit for wolves. Trouble is, it’s full of mistakes. 

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Is this map showing wolves can’t live in Colorado proof or propaganda?

A coalition working since at least 2023 to stop wolf reintroduction has a new map they say proves why Colorado is a terrible place for wolves. But an expert who’s been involved in wolf reintroduction since its inception says the map is “useless and grossly misleading.”

The Colorado Conservation Alliance released a storymap of Western Slope Wolf Habitat on Feb. 21, and a spokesperson for the group said it shows “facts” that should have been revealed prior to voters choosing whether or not to pass Proposition 114 in 2020.

Those facts are centered around Colorado’s landmass and how it “sounds like a lot of land that an introduced wolf population could thrive in,” says the map’s creator, Eric Pennal, but “there is more land that cannot be considered suitable than can.”

The Colorado Conservation Alliance is advocating for a full NEPA review of wolf reintroduction, which would involve a comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of reintroducing wolves to the state. These reviews can take years, and if one is approved, could stall Colorado’s wolf program before a self-sustaining population is established.

The map arrives during a pivotal time for Coloradans who oppose voter-mandated wolf reintroduction, which directed Colorado Parks and Wildlife to start releasing wolves in the state by the end of December 2023.

That month, CPW released 10 gray wolves captured in Oregon to Summit and Grand counties and two of those wolves later paired and had five puppies. The adults repeatedly preyed on livestock in Grand County, sparking several attempts by producers to persuade the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to halt reintroduction. Another 15 wolves were captured in British Columbia and released, all wearing tracking collars, in Eagle and Pitkin counties in January. No new confirmed reports of collared wolves killing livestock have been filed with CPW, but the agency did confirm an uncollared wolf not associated with the introduced wolves killed a calf in Jackson County in February.

The Colorado Conservation Alliance map uses layers to argue that Colorado lacks the land needed to sustain wolves.

The first layer shows the state divided by counties. It then sections off the Western Slope, where Proposition 114 dictated wolves could be released. A banner running along the side says, “That alone removes 54% from Colorado’s land that can’t be counted as suitable habitat. Still sounds like a lot, but we’re just getting started.”

On the next layer, red blotches appear, indicating Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribal lands, together totaling around 550,000 acres. More red appears over the 3.7 million-acre Brunot Agreement Area that the Southern Ute Tribe ceded to the federal government in the 1880s but where they still have rights to hunt and fish. And yet another layer shows 60-mile buffers surrounding both the Brunot area and the state boundaries of Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona.

Banners on those pages claim wolves “cannot be” on the tribal lands, they “cannot be” in the Brunot Agreement area and they “cannot be” inside those buffers.

Another two layers show habitat above 9,000 feet, which a banner says “will see occasional usage but not enough to sustain wolves” and below 9,000 — where there is good habitat. But the 60-mile buffers substantially shrink that area.

Then comes the kicker map, which shows thousands of pixilated dots indicating existing grazing permits and oil and gas wells on federal lands across Colorado which they say reduces potential wolf habitat to just 4% of landmass.

If you take the map at face value, continued reintroduction can seem like a losing cause. But reporter Tracy Ross talked to Mike Phillips, the wildlife biologist who led wolf reintroduction efforts in Yellowstone, New Mexico and later Colorado, and got an entirely different take. He went through the map “notion by notion,” and said it’s riddled with misinformation.

>> Hoof it over to The Sun next week to hear his point-by-point rebuttal

The Outsider has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Breaking Trail

Could mining along the Upper Colorado River be part of “Unleashing America’s Energy?”

Amid the flurry of proclamations and orders flying out of the White House, there’s growing concern that a recently renewed plan to restrict mining along the heavily recreated Upper Colorado River downstream of Kremmling — which was first protected in 2000 — could be reversed.

“This was not something from Biden. This has been around for nearly 25 years. Yes, there are some controversial battles wrapped up in this, but this should not be one of them,” said Hattie Johnson with American Whitewater, who is joining several outdoor and conservation groups in raising the alarm around the possibility that hard-rock mining could be permitting on more than 12,000 acres of public land along the Colorado River in Eagle County.

Four days after the U.S. Senate confirmed North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for Interior Secretary, he issued Secretarial Order 3418 — titled “Unleashing America’s Energy” — ordering all assistant secretaries to draft a report in 15 days on how best to rescind previous mineral withdrawals to expedite energy development on public lands.

The order could open up mining and drilling in Colorado’s national monuments including Camp Hale-Continental Divide, Browns Canyon, Canyons of the Ancients, Chimney Rock, Hovenweep and Dinosaur. It could reverse the Biden administration’s 2024 20-year mineral withdrawal in the 225,000-acre Thompson Divide.

Those reports were due this week but no one has seen them. Democrats in Congress have demanded that Burgum share details of the plan to suspend or revise protections for public lands. The delay in releasing the reports “suggests an attempt to evade Congressional oversight, public scrutiny and accountability, fueling concerns that the Administration is moving to undermine public land protections and sell our natural resources to the highest bidders in secret,” reads a Feb. 25 letter to Burgum from Democrats U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and California U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman.

“This directly contradicts the Secretarial Order’s own policy direction that includes ‘guaranteeing that all executive departments and agencies provide opportunity for public comment and rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific analysis,’” the letter reads.

The Upper Colorado River Special Recreation Management Area covers more than 12,000 acres around the river south of Kremmling and through Eagle County to Dotsero. Eagle County spent more than a decade investing millions in acquiring land and developing boat ramps and infrastructure to improve river access for anglers and paddlers. Today, the recreation area draws more than 135,000 visitors a year.

In October, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew 12,121 acres around the Upper Colorado River from any mining development and 940 acres of mineral estate from energy exploration for the next 20 years. The order cited the need to protect “important resource values, including riparian, ecological, cultural, paleontological, historic and elk and deer critical winter habitats.” It was a renewal of a previous 20-year mineral withdrawal that had expired in October 2020 during the previous Trump administration. The agency spent two years gathering public comment and studying the renewal of the mining withdrawal in the recreation area.

A state BLM official said he was not aware of a reversal of the mineral withdrawal in the Upper Colorado recreation area and referred additional questions to the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

President Donald Trump has nominated oil and gas industry advocate Kathleen Sgamma to run the Bureau of Land Management. In January, Sgamma cheered Trump’s Unleashing American Energy executive order, calling for expanded energy exploration and production on federal land. In a written statement in January, Sgamma supported Trump’s call to boost liquified natural gas exports and reduce the “regulatory damage” from the Biden administration’s increased regulation of oil and gas leasing on public land.

Environmental groups were ready for the call to increase extractive uses of public lands. But they were likely girding for battle around more recent designations.

“As soon as the election was decided we knew there were going to be places we needed to continue to defend,” Johnson said. “We did not see the Upper Colorado as one of those areas.”

In Their Words

In “Mirasol,” farming and a fight for water fuel a threatened way of life

From the moment Mike Bartolo says his opening line in the new documentary “Mirasol, Looking at the Sun,” by producer Kristie Nackord and director Ben Knight, you feel yourself drawing closer to the screen, wanting to hear more, caring about what he’s saying.

That’s because the third-generation farmer from Rocky Ford, who was inducted into the Colorado Agriculture Hall of Fame this month, cares so much about his subject. Bartolo meticulously bred the famous Pueblo chile pepper that’s put Hatch chile growers in New Mexico on defense for two decades. He’s also a longtime research scientist and vegetable crop specialist at Colorado State University’s Arkansas Valley Research Center working to preserve heirloom seeds, which his family sells through their company Burrell Seed Growers, the longest continuously operated seed grower in Colorado. And he’s the kind of tender-hearted guy who cries when he speaks of things close to his heart.

Farming, family and sharing the food he grows are Bartolo’s life. But increasingly over the years so is a fight to keep cities and developers from taking the water that has sustained farms and farmers in Pueblo County since the 1900s. “Mirasol, Looking at the Sun” is about him, his legacy championing agriculture and water protection in the Lower Arkansas Valley, and the fight producers there are increasingly up against amid population growth and urban spread in places like Colorado Springs and Aurora.

Reporting on these issues is out there — Colorado Sun reporters Jerd Smith and MIchael Booth do it regularly. But Nackord, who conceived of the documentary and brought in Knight to direct it, says “water issues are so entrenched in legalese and engineering that there’s a disconnect between them and the fact that behind them are these families, these communities.”

That’s one of the reasons she made “Mirasol,” which she discussed recently with The Sun.

Sun: What inspired you to make “Mirasol?”

Nackord: I wanted, with the Palmer Land Conservancy, to help tell the story of the struggle agricultural rural communities are facing. While Mirasol puts a spotlight on the Pueblo community, this is the story of every rural community grappling with the impacts of urban growth and development pressures, while trying to maintain its community, culture, and way of life.

My premise has been that if people come to know and love these places like I do, they will want to protect them too.

By 2050, Colorado stands to lose another 1,000 square miles of agricultural land through agricultural-to-municipal water transfers, a practice we call “buy and dry” to meet growth demands on the Front Range. This is the equivalent of losing the land mass of Colorado Springs five times. And this growth often has direct and devastating impacts to our rural communities. As Dr. Mike Bartolo is often quoted saying, there is no such thing as economic development — there is only economic relocation. When water and water ownership permanently leaves a community or a region, that wealth, that prosperity, and that current and future opportunity are gone forever.

Sun: What’s the most surprising thing you learned?

Nackord: When we set out to do this project, I didn’t realize the depth of culture and rich tradition in Pueblo. While Palmer has worked there for years, when the families allowed us into their hearts and lives, we got to witness this way of life we don’t get to see when we quickly pick up our corn, melons or Pueblo chiles. This film points to something more than just farms and water. It helps us remember what matters most — our connection to the land and each other. Ben Knight nailed it!

Sun: What do people not know about farmers in Colorado?

Nackord: We have something very special here. Most of our farms are still owned by families, not big out of state corporations. And many have been farming for generations.

But people assume that if ag land gets converted to housing or simply is dried up and left to weeds, and water is no longer used for growing food, the shelves will still be stocked at the local grocery store. We have a disconnect and we must help people understand that food security is a real risk — here in Colorado and nationally.

Farmers are also the real gamblers. They take risks every growing season and they put everything on the line financially at the beginning of the season with zero guarantee they will get a return. Does that make sense? Here are farming families who already only receive 7.9 cents of every food dollar sold. Their margins are so slim, and there are so many things out of their control. Yet they are expected to keep growing our food, with their cash outlay at the beginning of the year, within all of this pressure.

>> Read more of Tracy Ross’ interview with Nackord over at The Sun next week

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Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.