Central Colorado Wilderness Coalition: More Wilderness for Colorado

I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
--Aldo Leopold from his essay, Wilderness

Our Mission: Create More Wilderness in Colorado

By exploring and inventorying the lands in central Colorado, we are seeking to educate ourselves and the public about the wilderness values of these special places and then advocate for their effective public management.

Currently, our primary goal is to promote federal legislation to designate specific central Colorado areas as new wilderness. We are putting together a proposal that includes a detailed description of each area along with photos and maps that we will present to our Congressional representative.

Why We Want Wilderness

Congressionally-designated wilderness areas provide outstanding opportunities for recreation, challenge, solitude, inspiration, natural quiet, and contact with nature. These areas safeguard many ecological values important to all of us including watershed protection, critical habitat for wildlife, air quality, biological diversity, and overall forest health. Without wilderness, we would lose large, untouched landscapes which allow us to study and understand how natural systems operate. Preserving wilderness may be the most important contribution we can make to the health of the global environment and to future generations.

In wilderness, visitors can hike, hunt, ride horses, fish, and camp. Ranchers can continue to graze livestock in wilderness if they have existing allotments from the managing agency. Anything that is mechanized—mountain bikes and ORVs, for example—is not allowed. Logging, mining, and road construction are not allowed either.

Our First Central Colorado Wilderness Studies

We started out with a simple slide show of the Beaver Creek Wilderness Study Area back in January 2002. After getting organized with a mission and goal, we concentrated our efforts on determining the areas that we wanted to include in our proposal. We used information we obtained from inventory and mapping work that the Upper Arkansas/South Platte Project assembled. Now we are in the process of visiting each area on our Colorado "Wild Ten" list to check out the qualities that make a wilderness designation possible.