JoseCuervo
New member
From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the Bureau of Land Management was pursuing a policy of converting the high desert woodland of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument near Cortez into grass-filled pastures for grazing cows.
They called it "site conversion," an experiment that was doomed to failure - a failure the bureau is today trying to rectify by restoring the "converted" areas to their former natural state.
Thirty-plus years ago, the bureau used a simple, but effective, technique called "chaining" to transform the dry, red-soiled landscape of the monument from piñon pines, juniper and sagebrush to pastures. Chaining involved two bulldozers and a length of anchor chain, sometimes with large chunks of iron welded onto the enormous links. The dozer operators would stretch the anchor chain between them and drag it across the ground, ripping out everything in their path.
"Often they would turn around and drag the reverse way," said Leslie Stewart, an ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service who works on the monument. "It's not pretty at all."
The chained piñons and junipers were bulldozed into windrows and burned, creating a fire so intense it sterilized the soil, Stewart said. Then the bureau would seed the ground with non-native grasses, mostly crested wheatgrass.
About 9 percent of the 164,000-acre monument was chained, according to Monument Land Use Planner Steve Kandell, amounting to some 15,000 acres.
"Those days in the BLM the name of the game was more production," Stewart said. "If you had piñons and junipers out there, knock them down and plant grass."
Stewart said chaining was done on BLM land throughout the West. Thousands of acres of piñon and juniper country were chained in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Oregon and New Mexico, in addition to Colorado.
In the harsh environment of Canyons of the Ancients, the crested wheatgrass and other non-native grasses never established themselves. The pastures never materialized, and instead, today's monument is left with acres of bare earth populated only by the piñons and juniper that have grown back. The native grasses, forbs and shrubs that would normally provide cover, and prevent erosion, are gone.
"You cannot do that to nature, it will always backfire on you," said Stewart.
“There’s almost nothing living out here in the chained areas.”
LouAnn Jacobson, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument manager
When the native plants were removed from the chained areas, the wildlife went with them.
"There's almost nothing living out here in the chained areas," said LouAnn Jacobson, the manager of Canyons of the Ancients.
Jacobson said that without the habitat, and food, provided by native plants, even the rabbits had all but disappeared from the chained areas.
Preserving artifacts a priority
Jacobson and several of her colleagues, including Stewart, Kandell and BLM Range Management Specialist Mike Jensen, took several members of the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument Advisory Committee on a field trip recently. They showed the chaining problem, and other problems, firsthand, and gave an update on planning for the monument's future.
The advisory committee includes representatives from the ranching and environmental communities, local government officials, tribal members, and the public, to give a wide range of constituencies a voice in the management of the monument.
Canyons of the Ancients has the most intense concentration of archaeological sites known in the United States, with more than 6,000 recorded. In some areas of the monument, there are up to 100 archaeological sites per square mile from ancestral Puebloan and other American Indian cultures.
There was an interest in preserving the area as early as 1894, when the Salt Lake Times ran a story about the remarkable archaeological characteristics of the region. More than 100 years later, in May 2000, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt recommended to President Clinton that he protect the area. Clinton signed a proclamation on June 9, 2000, creating Canyons of the Ancients out of 164,000 acres of BLM land.
The BLM manages the monument, which means grazing, firewood collecting, oil and gas drilling and other activities are allowed on the land. But the agency's top priority is the preservation of the monument's rich inventory of artifacts.
"Our main purpose out there is to allow all those other uses while protecting the cultural resources," Stewart said. "The main thrust of the proclamation was to protect the cultural resources."
Stewart points out that chaining affected this mandate as well, since the erosion it causes can expose artifacts to the weather, and illegal collection.
"It basically brings up all of the pottery," Stewart said. "You don't want things to be visible. When you have a healthy plant community, you preserve the stability of the soil."
A diverse landscape
The first stop for the citizens' advisory committee was Goodman Point, a unit of Hovenweep National Monument located near the Anasazi Heritage Center. Canyons of the Ancients includes four units of Hovenweep, covering about 400 acres within its boundaries, which continue to be managed by the National Park Service.
Stewart chose Goodman Point because it was the handiest spot to show the committee what the chained areas of Canyons would look like if they hadn't been ripped up - and in fact what large portions of the monument that were never chained do look like, she said.
While piñons and junipers are succumbing to the drought and the ips beetle at Goodman Point just as trees across Colorado are, the landscape on the plot of some 140 acres is diverse, with scented sagebrush growing beneath the trees, and perennial grasses, such as Indian ricegrass, muttongrass and bottlebrush squirreltail, growing beneath the sagebrush.
"This is what we'd like to manage for," Stewart said. "Then we can try to raise other areas to be like this."
One of those areas desperately in need of being raised is Burro Point, the next to the last stop on the tour. Burro Point was chained. Today, it remains a desolate landscape of piñons and junipers, some dead or dying, others green, and barren soil.
"This is disgusting from a cowman's viewpoint," said committee member Chris Majors, whose family has a BLM grazing permit for 30,452 acres of the monument at Cross Canyon.
Range Specialist Jensen said Burro Point represents a thorny problem that even a ban on the cows that still graze the area for whatever scraps they can find wouldn't quickly solve.
"It's degraded so much that even with a rest period from cows, we won't see much improvement," Jensen said. "It's too far gone."
Stewart called it "unrealistic" not to acknowledge the negative impact grazing has had on the monument, but that with proper management, that impact could be lessened - a view Jensen shares, with some reservations.
"We can lay down rotations and grazing systems on paper all we want, but the operator has to buy into it," Jensen said.
He said it costs ranchers more to have riders out there "pushing the cows around" to make sure they don't overgraze the land, which can be problematic in the tough economic times many ranchers are facing.
Firewood cutting a problem
Firewood cutting presents another problem for Burro Point and the monument. Jacobson said initially all chained areas were open to cutting, which reduces the threat of fire; but that the areas were so "chock-full" of archaeological sites the decision was made to limit the activity to Burro Point.
"It's one of the issues we're grappling with," Jacobson said. "Fuel wood cutting is good, but people start driving off into the trees, farther and farther, and we end up with multiple impacts. People also drive off and cut live trees."
Kandell is looking at a range of alternatives for firewood cutting - from banning it altogether to allowing it across the entire landscape of the monument. Monument managers, and the committee, are grappling with exactly what direction to take on a variety of fronts, but they appear to be in agreement when it comes to the landscape left behind by chaining.
"If our management caused this, we need to do something about it," Stewart said. "We need to get this back in natural balance. There are reasons it looks like this, and it's because of us."
