Black Canyon Gets Gold-Star Treatment

Colorado is getting its first national park since the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915.

Saturday’s ceremony marking the conversion of Black Canyon of the Gunnison from a national monument to a national park is hailed by backers as a triumph of cooperation. More than a dozen years in the making, it involved environmentalists, residents, federal agencies, natural resources interests and both parties in Congress.

Legislation creating the national park in west-central Colorado sailed out of Congress without a hitch. President Clinton signed the bill Thursday.

“We’re just so happy this has happened after all these years,” said Marge Keehfus, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Montrose, Colo. “We’re still a fairly remote area. America will now be aware of what we have in our backyard.”

The going has not been as easy for a proposal to create a wilderness area in the Spanish Peaks, two towering volcanic mountains in the San Isabel National Forest near La Veta in south-central Colorado.

The road for wilderness designation for the peaks has been as steep and rocky as the road to an abandoned gold and silver mine that is the primary source of dispute for the plan. The Forest Service has been studying the area for possible wilderness designation for two decades, but a bill to do so first advanced in Congress this year.

Environmentalists and the U.S. Forest Service oppose the current Spanish Peaks wilderness bill because it exempts the 1.5-mile road to the old Bullseye Mine--meaning the road could be upgraded to serve the mountainside mining claim, which is still in private hands.

The proposal for an 18,000-acre wilderness area has passed the House and is pending in the Senate.

Opposition from the Clinton administration makes Senate passage of the Spanish Peaks bill unlikely, said Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.).

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“As long as the administration opposes it, it’s pretty much dead in the water,” Campbell said.

The GOP-led Congress and the Clinton administration have been effectively deadlocked for years over proposals to create new wilderness or national parks in the West.

That deadlock is thawing, however, with Western Republicans sponsoring new protection measures such as the Black Canyon and Spanish Peaks bills, as well as plans for more than 1 million acres of wilderness in Utah.

Colorado Republican Rep. Scott McInnis, whose sprawling district includes both the Spanish Peaks and the Black Canyon, sponsored both protection plans in the House.

McInnis said the key to the two proposals is their strong support from residents.

“That’s the way they ought to be--at the local level, instead of heavy-handed outside legislation telling local people what ought to be done,” McInnis said.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison River became a national monument in 1933 and gets about 230,000 visitors a year. Up to 2,900 feet deep and only 40 feet wide at its narrowest point, it is called the Black Canyon because sunlight reaches the canyon floor for only about an hour a day, Campbell said.

The canyon is also renowned for excellent trout fishing.

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“I never saw a canyon like that canyon,” said McInnis, who became captivated with Black Canyon on a fishing trip with his brother in college. “I remember thinking, I’m going to go down this cliff to get a measly trout dinner?”

Local residents hope the national park will bring more tourist dollars to hotels, restaurants, outfitters and souvenir shops.

“A monument, in most people’s eyes, is a statue or a building, just one structure,” said Kenneth Gale, interim director of the Montrose Economic Development Council and a main force behind the park designation. “People will plan vacations around a national park, but very few of them [plan a trip] around a national monument.”

Proposals for declaring the Spanish Peaks a wilderness have been around for at least two decades. The mountains--12,683-foot East Peak and 13,626-foot West Peak--are the easternmost mountains in the Rockies.

The wilderness designation would ban all mining and logging and prohibit the use of motorized vehicles and the construction of any new structures. As with Black Canyon, residents agree the Spanish Peaks area is a wilderness gem that needs to be preserved, McInnis said.

Wilderness designation “is a tool that should be used least often because it’s so inflexible. It’s locked in,” McInnis said. “This is something that’s worthy of wilderness.”

Another common player in Black Canyon and Spanish Peaks is real estate developer Tom Chapman, who has engineered land trades or buyouts in the past by announcing plans to build on private lands within national parks or forests.

In the mid-1980s, the National Park Service bought land Chapman owned near the Black Canyon after he rolled out bulldozers to start building homes.

Chapman’s company, TDX, owns three other 40-acre parcels near the Black Canyon’s rim. Two have been advertised as luxury home sites at $4,700 per acre. Several members of Colorado’s congressional delegation have criticized Chapman, and McInnis likened Chapman’s actions to “highway robbery.”

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TDX attorney Aaron Clay, Chapman’s spokesman, did not return telephone messages seeking comment.

The National Park Service has commissioned an appraisal of the property, said Sheridan Steele, the National Park Service superintendent at Black Canyon.

When the appraisal is complete, “we will make an offer and then see what happens after that,” Steele said.

Chapman and his business partners also own the Bullseye Mine property.