If you ask folks in the rugged West End of Colorado what they think about a proposed national monument status for hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the region, you’re likely to get a consistent answer: “No thanks, not here.”
The national monument would stretch from Nucla and Naturita in the south to nearly Grand Junction in the north, encompassing approximately 390,000 acres, according to the current map on the website of Protect the Dolores, the coalition of groups that is promoting the monument.
Many residents feel that a national monument would threaten the diversity of their economies, potentially restrict access to land they love, and overpower already weak infrastructure with an influx of visitors.
“We don’t have the infrastructure here at all. That’s one of the things we’ve tried to hammer home is that this is not an economic benefit for these communities. It can’t be. And if it’s ever going to be, we need five or 10 years to get prepared for this,” said Katey Herland, a rancher and resident of the West End.
National monument status adds protections to federal land that is already managed by a federal agency; in the case of the West End that’s the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
The residents are worried about the shape proposed protections of the land might take. They also feel excluded from the planning process, fearing that, ultimately, decisions will be made bypassing their concerns.
“We’re not against protecting anything,” said Herland. “It’s the fact that none of these conversations happened with these communities. It’s the fact that all the planning that’s gone in on the proponent’s behalf didn’t consider stakeholders, didn’t consider the reality of how this would affect these communities. And that’s wrong.”
The monument’s advocates say the plan would help West End communities get ahead of visitor and infrastructure demands that are likely to occur anyway.
The Dolores River shaped this landscape, cutting deep into Western Colorado’s red rock sandstone walls to carve deep canyons. Mesas topped with piñon pine, juniper, and ponderosa trees line the two-lane highway that winds its way through the path of least resistance. Two hours south of the proposed national monument, and barely any cars can be spotted on the highway.
The red-tinged desert could be easily mistaken for the Moab area. No towns and only a few ranches and homes pepper the landscape until the town of Naturita (population 478) and its sister town of Nucla (population 590). Less than two hours from Moab to the west and Telluride to the east, it could not be farther away in spirit from these tourist destinations. The West End remains mostly free from visitors, which is just how many residents like it.
It’s a fragile landscape with soil crusts that are easily damaged and take hundreds of years to grow, and cactuses and sagebrush dotting the valleys and hillsides. Trails are rugged – or don’t exist at all, and it’s easy to get far away from a paved road.
Galit Korngold owns a business on main street in Naturita, right on Colorado Highway 141. “I love the traffic, but I don’t want them to stay here. I like living in a quiet little town. I don’t want it to turn into Moab or a place like that,” she said.
But for Protect the Dolores, a national monument designation feels vital to protect the biodiversity, Indigenous cultural sites, geologic formations, and public access for the future.
While some of the concerns voiced by the people in the West End were more rooted in emotion rather than reality, the sentiment was one of misrepresentation. People felt unheard and excluded from the conversation around the national monument.
What does it mean to protect land? Who gets to choose what that protection looks like? These are some of the questions that are at the heart of the controversy around the Dolores River.
A Tuesday morning in late May in a Coop Country Ace Hardware in Nucla felt like a potential minefield for an outside reporter asking about a contentious national monument proposal.
But people were excited to talk and share their stories and connections to their home landscape. Residents of the town were willing to share their worries about what would happen to the land if a national monument was designated.
High on the list were fears that the area would become overrun with visitors who wouldn’t take care of the land and would overwhelm roads and facilities. They were also concerned that their economy would become overly reliant on low-paying tourism jobs.
A national monument designation would allow current commercial uses to continue, with limited new uses and development. Federal land in the area currently has mining, grazing, public utilities, commercial outfitting, and oil and gas leases. The proposed Dolores Canyons National Monument would be free and open to the public to camp, hunt, fish, boat, horseback ride, hike and ride mechanized or motorized vehicles.
Later that same day, ranchers Mark Templeton and Lorraine Garvey spoke about the deep connection they feel to the home they have worked on and cared for all their lives.
Templeton’s family has been ranching in the West End for over 100 years. He worries that a national monument designation could bring in people who would not respect the landscape. Templeton and many others expressed that they feel the area is already protected by its current National Forest and Bureau of Land Management designations.
The change in management would occur through a Resource Management Plan that would cover the entire Dolores Canyons area, replacing the existing management plans, which are currently fragmented between the Forest Service and the BLM. However, the national monument would continue to be managed by the BLM and the Forest Service – not the National Park Service, according to Protect the Dolores. The process of creating a Resource Management Plan would include public input, which encourages local communities to get involved in planning.
But the initial efforts of Protect the Dolores to get the national monument established left the residents with doubts about their inclusion in later stages of the project.
Despite the potential to contribute to a future resource management plan, residents feel left out of the current conversation around the monument. Herland, who owns land that would be surrounded by the monument, said that she was never approached by anyone from the monument campaign, and to her knowledge, only one landowner was.
Makayla Gordon is the executive director of the West End Economic Development Corp. Gordon and other community leaders were involved in a September 2023 meeting with Protect the Dolores and expected to be more involved in the map creation process. Attendees of the meeting told me that they were initially excited about the prospect of being involved with protecting and managing the land they care so much about.
“We were brought into it in September with the assumption that when we were having that initial conversation, we were going to be a part of the map construction. Then my next meeting in January with them, I was handed the map and I was like ‘OK, this isn’t what we were expecting or anticipating,’” Gordon said.
Gordon and other residents were taken aback by the size of the monument, which in the current map draft protects around 600 square miles.
The Protect the Dolores website states that the current map draft is a starting point for discussion that will continue to be adjusted based on the input from stakeholders.
Aimee Tooker, a West End community leader who was also a part of those initial meetings in September, left the meeting with a “warm fuzzy feeling,” after giving the Protect the Dolores team a list of questions and concerns that she expected to be addressed. But as the winter wore on, Tooker said that their questions were still not being answered and she felt ignored.
During a community meeting in Nucla, Tooker spoke for the community. “Let us write the conservation plan and let us design the map. I know we can do it better, and more inclusive, and with truly local stakeholder input.”
“We would just like to say to the people that want a monument, just come enjoy the country. We’ll share it with you as long as you’re stewards,” Templeton said. “We don’t want you coming here and making a big mess just like you don’t want us making a big mess. But you can do anything here right now that you could do in a monument.”
Historically, the West End has been a boom-bust region. From uranium to coal, the communities have gained and lost economic traction over the years. In 2019, the coal powered Tri State Generation plant in Nucla closed three years ahead of schedule, halting the coal mining and power industry. The region has been in economic transition ever since.
The Dolores River traverses what is known as the Uravan Mineral Belt, an area full of deposits of uranium, vanadium and radium. The former company town of Uravan, now a Superfund site, supplied uranium for the Manhattan Project in World War II. In the 1980s, the town was razed, as much of it was built with or on radioactive materials.
With uranium mines in the west going into operation this year, uranium prices rising, and interest in nuclear energy growing, the potential for renewed mining in the Uravan Mineral Belt is on the minds of community members in the West End.
For Templeton, mining and ranching are a key piece of the West End, and a national monument feels like it would threaten this tradition – the opposite of protecting the land that he grew up on.
The is already working to transition away from coal and create more economic diversity. Gordon, the executive director ofWEEDC, said that the economy is currently “very small-business driven.” Outdoor recreation is a seasonal industry, with highs during hunting season and during summer holidays.
“Outdoor recreation, while it is very productive and it has a lot of sales tax generation and a lot of spending in it, it doesn’t always relate to high-wage jobs,” Gordon said. “Mining could assist with some of those higher wage jobs that don’t always equate to sales tax development.”
Scott Braden, the executive director of Colorado Wildlands Project and a member of Protect the Dolores, agrees that mining is an important industry for the West End. “That’s why it’s so important to get the boundaries [of the national monument] right, which we can do by coming to the table and having these conversations,” Braden said.
Later on that Tuesday afternoon in May, in Nucla Town Park, former mayor of Nucla, Richard Craig wandered over to join a conversation with Katey Herland. Craig wore a tie-dye shirt and switched back and forth between his family’s barbecue and the conversation with Herland.
Herland’s family bought the ranch that would be surrounded by the proposed national monument in the 1980s. Now she worries that a national monument designation could lead to being forced into selling her property.
Forcing a land owner to sell part or all of their land that is surrounded by public land is known as an inholding acquisition. It is primarily done in wilderness areas (to maintain continuity of land management), which the area surrounding Herland’s property is not.
Herland has other concerns about the national monument proposal, but “not because we’re opposed to conservation and environmentalism. We’re talking about the principles of how things like this need to be done. These movements need to be locally led.”
She would rather just have the resources to take care of the area locally. “This is a community that is very much connected to the land,” Herland said. This connection is exemplified by the way that community members showed up for firefighters on the Bucktail fire, which started on Aug. 1, 2024, northeast of Nucla. Residents, including some interviewed for this story, came together to make tacos and other meals and deliver it all to the firefighters – showing up for the land they love.
“We need to be having a different conversation about conservation and environmentalism, which is how do we better support local communities in these efforts?” Herland said. “We have probably … two dozen people that would willfully want to be involved in maintaining this area. If we need to come up with an improved management plan, we have the boots on the ground here that are willing to do that.”
“When you have people who are not connected to an area coming into an area, whether they like to recreate or not, that doesn’t mean that they have the area at heart. They don’t have an affinity for the area the way that the locals do,” Herland said.
Scott Braden lives about two hours from Nucla and Naturita in Grand Junction, the “big city” of the Western Slope of Colorado (population 68,000). Braden is the executive director of Colorado Wildlands Project, a nonprofit that works to protect and advocate for Bureau of Land Management land in Colorado.
In May, Mesa County, home of Grand Junction, passed a resolution opposing the national monument, because it “did not adequately consider local needs and input.” A survey of Montrose and Mesa county residents found that 60% did not support a national monument.
In July, Mesa and Montrose counties proposed an alternative to Dolores Canyons National Monument in the form of a National Conservation Area. The proposed NCA would be 29,806 acres, less than a 10th of the currently proposed size. Proponents of the national monument say that the NCA is not enough protection for the land around the Dolores River.
Braden and Colorado Wildlands Project is a part of Protect the Dolores, the coalition working to do just that – protect the Dolores River and the land surrounding it.
Speaking for the coalition, Braden sees a national monument as a way to protect the future of the region by getting ahead of future issues like over-visitation – which Braden sees as an inevitability whether or not the monument designation goes through.
“I really think a national monument is a way to get ahead on that and make some intelligent choices around building out infrastructure on the public land as appropriate, and just making sure that this landscape is well positioned to most resiliently face that future,” Braden said.
Dolores Canyons National Monument would border the proposed National Conservation Area if Congress passes the NCA. The Conservation Area legislation was introduced by Sen. Michael Bennett and Sen. John Hickenlooper, both Democrats, to Congress in 2023. In July, after community meetings in the West End, Sen. Bennett and Sen. Hickenlooper released a joint statement on the proposed monument that supports many of the community concerns.
For the Protect the Dolores Coalition and Braden, cohesive land management through a monument designation would protect the region from future development and protect biodiversity while supporting outdoor recreation including hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, off highway vehicles, and more.
“Monument designation is specifically intended to protect those resources,” said Teal Lehto, who advocates for land and water protection through her platform Western Water Girl. “The folks that are working toward that protection have the same goals in mind. They want to make sure that that place stays the same way that it is right now. As the current management stands, that is not necessarily always going to be the case. There is a possibility of those lands being disposed of, leased, or developed in the future.”
Members of the Protect the Dolores Coalition and community members in the West End said repeatedly they want the same thing: for the landscape around the Dolores River to remain accessible, protected, and beautiful for future generations.
Braden with Protect the Dolores said that community input would be necessary for future resource management plans for a potential monument and that no decisions have been made about future management. He wants to connect with the community and make sure that everyone’s definition of “protect” is met. “We’re really happy to talk to anybody about their concerns,” he said.
“What we need to be building on and empowering is the small, locally led, community-driven groups that want to protect and preserve this for future generations,” Herland said. “They have everything invested in this.”
