La Plata County, Colorado

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Some locals feel that we're running our national forests like hot dog stands.

The majority of the drilling, however, is being done not on private but on national forest and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands that abut, and "patch" between, private parcels. This is the problem faced by the Fitzgerald family.

Jim Fitzgerald, his wife, Terry, and their two daughters live on a 360-acre spread a few miles east of Bayfield, hard against a spur range of the San Juans called the HD Mountains. In addition to raising and working Belgian draft horses, Jim is a professor at Fort Lewis College. The Fitzgerald home, built by a logger in 1914, has no telephone and no electricity. They like it that way. For 19 years it has been a rustic paradise. Now all of that is changing.

"The HD Mountains of southeastern La Plata County," Jim explains, "include about 45,000 acres of national forestlands, most of them wooded with ponderosa and pinon pine, blue spruce, aspen and Gambel oak. In those woods live deer, elk, bears, mountain lions, wild turkeys, coyotes and a great many species of smaller mammals and birds. Hundreds of unexcavated archaeological sites from the Anasazi culture of a thousand years ago dot the landscape.

"Our land sits at the foot of the HDs, and their beauty enchants us. Yesterday, my daughter Gretchen voiced what my wife and I have been thinking for some time now. `Imagine,' she said, `what this land will look like with gas wells and roads all over it.' Indeed, imagine: drilling rigs, pipelines, wastewater injection wells, new roads with trucks rumbling by all day long. And each new road will spawn five new trails for off-road vehicles and looters of archeological sites. One more quiet and beautiful place will have been lost to the uncaring forces of the marketplace.

"Amoco Production Company has already drilled 21 wells in the HDs; their goal is 140. Under public pressure, the Forest Service is conducting an environmental impact study, but its outcome, given that outfit's miserable track record, can be predicted to condone continued drilling.

"What is happening here in the HDs—to the land, to the wildlife, to the people, to the historical integrity of the area—is symptomatic of what's happening everywhere. The economic system that has led to America's national forests being run like a hot dog stand has been around for a long time. We need to create a new system, a system that will allow us to live in and with nature without destroying it. There's no reason why places where humans live can't also be places of beauty and enchantment."

Another major growth-versus-preservation question getting bounced around a lot these days in La Plata County (as well as in D.C.) is the Animas—La Plata Project. A-LP is a reservoir proposed to be constructed above the Animas River just south of Durango. According to the plan, a pumping station would suck huge quantities of water from the Animas River and muscle it up and over the bordering hills to the reservoir site. Should this on-again, off-again project go through, it is predicted to inject as much as $400 million into the local economy over the several years it will take to complete.

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