New threat to
Dinosaur Monument

By Kurt Kunkle

When I first visited Dino-saur National Mon-u-ment in northwest Colorado in May, I didnÕt know a lot about it. I knew there were some dinosaur bones there. I knew that fifty years ago, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed to put a dam in the monument that would have inundated the beautiful Echo Park and the Green and Yampa river canyons. I knew that conservationist David Brower, with allies including author Wallace Stegner, had won the fight in Congress to keep the monumentÑmanaged by the National Park ServiceÑdam-free. Thank goodness there are still beautiful free-flowing rivers there!

What I didnÕt know was that IÕd fall in love with Dinosaur at first sight. The Yampa River Canyon is jaw-dropping beautiful as it snakes through millions of years of orange-yellow sandstone. The vistas of the river and surrounding mountains are spectacular. This is some of the best America has to offer.

And seeing the rugged beauty of the place only made me more saddened about the reason IÕd come: to respond to a threat as big as the Echo Park Dam. That threat is posed by an obscure Civil WarÐera right-of-way law called R.S. 2477.

Under the 1800s law, states and counties were granted rights of way where they constructed highways across public lands not set aside for other uses (such as national parks or national forests). By the 1970s Congress realized the West was settled and repealed the law in 1976, but counties still could claim rights-of-way built before then and get a form of legal title to AmericaÕs public land. In the case of Dinosaur, this means that someone can claim highways built before 1938, when President Franklin Roosevelt protected most of the monumentÕs 200,000 acres, are rights of way under the repealed law.

IÕd come out here to look at the threat the old law posed to Dinosaur.

In January, the Moffat County commissioners claimed that 240 miles of Òconstructed highwaysÓ laced the monument, although the Park Service found almost the entire monument roadless in 1978. Moffat County is seeking legal title to more than 2,000 miles of rights of way in special places like Browns Park Wildlife Refuge, Dinosaur National Monument, and several proposed wilderness areas. Using maps provided by the county, I hiked, studied the ground, and scanned the horizon searching for these highways that are so important that Moffat County is spending taxpayer dollars to claim them. I didnÕt find much: a few fading jeep tracks; some impossible-to-follow cow trails; some footpath ÒhighwaysÓ that the county claimed were constructed by Native Americans before European settlement. The county also claimed a twenty-mile stretch of the sheer-walled Yampa River Canyon, which was clearly constructed by tens of millions of years of floods, not by the hand of man.

The absurdity of calling these fading tracks and footpaths Òconstructed highwaysÓ might not stop them from being bulldozed into real highways.

Governor Bill Owens is now pushing the Interior Department to use standards that would give Moffat County the right to claim cattle tracks as constructed highways and the right to turn them into two-lanes without environmental permitting.

The need for new roads is also questionable. Moffat County has an extensive road system including a county roads system and public land road system. You can drive just about anywhere you want in the county. The few places that roads donÕt go should remain road-free to protect wildlife habitat and quiet places for people to enjoy.

As I stood on the rim of the Yampa River Canyon, overlooking a huge gooseneck carved into stone, I thought about the long odds Brower, Stegner, and their many friends beat in making this incredible view something I could still enjoy. I could only hope that their work would not be undone by shortsighted politicians five decades later, and that a new generation of conservation leaders would drive a stake through the heart of a century-old lawÑa law that has come back to life to haunt the serenity of this magnificent place. P

Kurt Kunkle roams ColoradoÕs back country

inventorying wilderness lands for the

Colorado Environmental Coalition.