Charging to the End of Paradise

We are in the canyon lands a few miles from nowhere, and we are being stalked. Two people tailing us in their SUV want money. They are bandits with badges. They are government workers. They are land developers.

Pardner, welcome to the death of the West, again, and this time maybe for good.

Freedom? The wild? A campfire under the stars? A chance to get away from things and show the kids what remains of our greatest myth?

Times are changing and not for the good on our public lands. Another important revolution in the history of the wide-open West is unfolding across tens of thousands of acres controlled by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Signs are going up. Fee boxes are going in. Rangers and their sidekicks, those once-kindly volunteer campsite docents, have been given a new mission. Make way for the bulldozers and cement mixers and construction workers.

“They are asking for fees I don’t want to pay to build things that I don’t want to see,” groans my guide, David Petersen, as we bounce down a four-wheel-drive road across a bone-dry mesa of slickrock and juniper in some of the toughest and least-traveled country in the Southwest. “They are charging us to Disneyfy our public lands.”

For a while now, a few farsighted people have been sounding the alarm about the federal government’s six-year-old experiment to impose fees on public land users. They warned that development and concessions and ruination of peace and quiet would follow. They were correct, of course, and a grass-roots uprising is fast gaining steam in states from Utah to Oregon, from Montana to Arizona.

This is not one of your effete fights between Sierra Club backpackers and everyone else. This is a showdown that will define public lands for all stripes of users, from hunters and bird-watchers to mountain bikers and old-boy pickup-truck campers like Petersen and me.

“They’re really bringing bureaucracy to the people with this one,” says Petersen. “I’m not sure that grass-roots is organic enough to describe what’s going on.”

June 15 has been set for a national protest against this commercialization of our public trust lands, specifically against Bush administration plans to make permanent this development, or “recreation,” fee program. Petersen, a mountain man, a canyon man and a writer with one of the West’s most distinctive voices on behalf of wildness, has brought me to Cedar Mesa to peek into the future. There are no rivers here, no lakes, no towering trees, just rutted jeep trails and a few hundred miles of hard-angled Southwest rock scenery. This is one of those places where people come when they are serious about getting away, to command one’s own horizon for a day or two.

But no more. Sturdy new “Fee Area” signs are posted every few miles--signs that beckon people to come, signs that foreshadow paved roads and asphalt campgrounds and maybe a curio shop. Who knows what the traffic will bear?

All across this region and elsewhere in the West, the rough is being scraped away from what is left of our public lands. Not far from here is Sand Island, the storied put-in for rafters on the San Juan River. What do rafters need? A place to blow up their boats and camp one night before beginning their float. What is the government providing them? Thanks to fees, they now have an absurd concrete launch ramp.

Welcome to adventure. Don’t worry about getting your feet muddy. And please enjoy the new showpiece visitor center and maintenance building and ranger station and the field of solar panels to keep the cash registers running.

This magical place of cottonwoods and sweet memories for a generation of outdoor lovers now resembles nothing so much as a strip mall.

Didn’t we do this already to our national parks, and to our lasting regret?

Like army ants, federal land managers cannot leave the land to manage itself for the pleasure of us to enjoy. If there are no more trees to cut, no petroleum to drill for, no cattle to graze, then there must be buildings, turnarounds, fences, entrepreneurial opportunities and, of course, deputies to maintain a show of force. Bureaucrats are turning what remains of the land into another kind of jobs program for themselves.

Behind us this day, the BLM rangers eat our dust for miles in case we venture across the invisible boundary into their “fee area,” perhaps taking a day hike down one of the labyrinth canyons. We disappoint them. But they have made their point: The wide-open spaces are being closed, and fast.

On June 15, I’ll be joining the protesters. Take those road crews and fix our crumbling freeways. Send the construction workers to rebuild city schools. Let a couple of guys in a pickup truck park under the stars without mercury-vapor lights to lead the way to a brand-new hot-water shower and Laundromat strip-mall facility. Sign in and deposit money here.