By Birdbrain
This Hidden Gems wilderness proposal is starting to look like a critter put together by a committee. Sorry to hear they dropped the Thompson Creek part – it’s pretty wild.
Now I consider myself a pretty good woodsman, in spite of what some people might say about getting “cliffed out” or being told, “It’s just around the next bend,” several hours after dark. But Thompson Creek is one of the few places where I must admit I was lost. Up the head of Middle Thompson if you drop over the ridge in the right place and you pick the right elk trail, you can find Lost Lake. Now, after a few hours of fishing you decide to leave and there is a very easy way off to the left. And you figure you can just circle around and take the old Jeep trail back to the ridge. Well, pretty soon you find yourself in bogs and thick lodge pole with no view and no drainages. That great elk trail disappeared in the last bog and it’s cloudy with no sun. Go try it. It isn’t wilderness. Take your mountain bike.
It’s all about recreation. Instead of working to stay in shape, folks sit on their asses all week looking at screens and then demand areas on the weekend where they can exercise and look at scenes. So we have all these different groups arguing about how they get to use up another piece of land for their feet, their bikes, their dogs, their horses, their cows, their motorbikes, their ATVs, their gas wells and their roads. All with a hand full of “gimmie” and a mouth full of “much obliged.”
Then the Division of Wildlife is trying to stick up for the ones that were here first “the critters.” Them old game wardens got a lot of power if you don’t have a fishing license, but when it comes to land use they only got opinions.
I got an opinion about this land swap. I’m probably one of 100 people that have ever been on that piece of BLM that Pitkin County thinks is so important to keep. I been into that hilly, dry, oak brush, spider infested sorry country twice. I trespassed both times. First time, as a kid, me and one of them Chaney boys snuck in there to get to some of old Charlie Thomas’ fish in St. John’s reservoir. We wandered on up the hill looking for elk that we had seen from the lake. The second time, I snuck in behind a house on Potato Bill Creek, and walked up the bottom to the south ridge and on into that mess of oak brush.
Now, that country is good for elk and deer and both times I went I saw bighorn sheep. They like to graze on the grass and browse where they have an easy escape into Potato Bill. I understand Pitkin County wants to open up this piece of land so the public can use it. So far, I don’t think much of the way the “public” uses a piece of land. What’s wrong with leaving it as it is? Let the critters “use it.”  Now I understand that nobody wants to give a rich guy a piece of land. Mr. Wexner says he will put it into a conservation trust. When you look around the rich guys have been pretty good to Carbondale. Ms. Rodgers, John Martin, Bill Fales, Marj Perry and the Nieslaniks have all placed land into conservation easements.
In this one I think that land will serve a better purpose under Mr. Wexner’s care than the ever-expanding Pitkin County Trails Company. The last thing this piece of land needs is a bunch of weekend hikers tramping around on it. It’s not like there isn’t lots of public federal land in Pitkin Co.