Maps Show Pool Of Public Lands For Sale Would Include Big Game Ranges, Migratory Corridors

Sportsmen and other public land users can see exactly what’s at stake with a proposal in Congress for a mandatory flash sale of 2 to 3 million acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management ground.

The first thing I did when I discovered the Wilderness Society had mapped the pool of 250 million acres of land in 11 Western states eligible to meet the goals in the natural resources budget reconciliation bill from US Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) was to compare it with the range of the Methow Valley mule deer herd, which I hunted for over 20 years.

I found that a helluva lot of their summer range, winter range and crucial spring stopover points – not to mention, long-frequented public hunting grounds – overlapped Okanogan National Forest land outside the outdoor recreation gateway communities of Mazama, Winthrop, Twisp, Carlton and Methow and which would potentially be available for sale or auction to nebulous “interested parties” should somebody nominate them for “disposal.” And believe me, they will.

Those ranges and stopovers were mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey as part of a wider study of big game migration corridors across the West.

You can use the society’s map and other USGS maps (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5) to see how similar habitat for Chelan County mule deer herds would also be in the for-sale zone, as well as that of deer, elk, moose and pronghorns elsewhere in Washington and across the West.

Splicing and dicing habitat and migratory corridors via roads, fences, housing and other developments, etc., is the single strongest factor in the widespread decline of Western mule deer, and doing more of it is sure as hell to hurt our public-lands herds even more.

Senator Lee, long a public land opponent, has refined his proposal since last week’s startling though not unexpected reveal, but his supposed pressing need to “support local housing needs … or any associated infrastructure to support local housing needs” is still very much open to interpretation. A supportive Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum claimed it means “barren land next to highways with existing billboards that have no recreational value.”

But I don’t trust that, or the proposal’s purported safeguards, especially with a program that’s built for quick deals and to financially benefit certain entities.

Lee’s “process for selling off lands runs at breakneck speed, demanding the nomination of tracts within 30 days, then every 60 days until the arbitrary multi-million-acre goal is met, all without hearings, debate or public input,” according to the Wilderness Society.

You can bet your bottom dollar that passing this as part of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill would open the door to more big ugly fire sales down the road. Selling from .5 to .75 percent of eligible USFS and BLM lands will supposedly raise $10 billion for the US Treasury – to pay for billionaire taxbreaks, according to some opponents – but what will the percentages and rationales be for the next iteration of the federal budget?

And what will they be the time after that? And then the next one? What happens when the other party is back in charge in DC and now it’s become de rigueur to sell public lands to fund this or that?

I’ll tell you what, pretty soon you’ve got a bunch of McMansions dotting what once was the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and that’s not even the worst of it.

I THINK ABOUT DEER CAMP IN THE OKANOGAN, how it sits on a nice flat spot in the hills just off a decent road and is only occupied by humans for a few weeks in fall, and then I think about it bulldozed and with a brand-new house built on it, some outbuildings out back, maybe a basketball or tennis court off to the side, the forest chopped down to create a defensible perimeter against wildfire.

I see new fencing that goes up to keep the horses in the basin and the deer out of the garden, a well that goes in to water those plants and run the washing machine and in doing so drops the water table, emptying the little pocket ponds ducks sometimes gather on down the way.

I see a similar property on the bluff just to the west, one on the flat above camp, maybe another up in the saddle lording over the area where I killed five mule deer bucks over the years. Great view, that spot.

Come October, I see hunters like my dad and our old work buddies turned away from our traditional hunting grounds, told to beat it and go higher up the mountain past still more new No Trespassing signs.

Senator Lee, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, claimed in a video that sportsmen “will not lose access to the lands you love,” but what he may not understand is that it’s not just about the land that we have deep connections to, but its ability to sustain the animals we love and their migrations, their seasonal rounds.

You cannot have hunting if you don’t have animals to hunt in the first place.

I worry about stopover points – places of early spring greenup that deer hit on their migration back to the high country – not being used by Methow mule deer because of disturbance from Lee’s “housing” and “associated infrastructure,” does having to use less productive areas to forage before and during fawning, fawns that are weaker and more susceptible to predators, weather, disease, what have you, and a herd that grows weaker by the generation.

I worry about more constricted winter range, more dogs chasing deer, more housing bringing more traffic and more roadkill to local highways.

The chopping up of migratory corridors and summer and winter range and loss of that connectivity for development and roads, along with dryer, hotter climatic conditions, invasive plants and more, is like a vampire slowly sucking the life out of our herds. 

That’s the entire point of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fantastic Migration Matters: The migratory journeys of mule deer in Oregon.

Drawing on language in Senator Lee’s proposal that exempts wilderness areas and certain other USFS and BLM lands but apparently puts livestock grazing leases into the pot too, the Wilderness Society says that there are 21.7 million acres of public land in Oregon that would be eligible to help meet the initial sales goal of 2 to 3 million acres.

The same amount of land is available in Idaho’s pool; in Washington, where there’s far less BLM land but lots of USFS ground, 5.3 million acres would be.

AS A HUNTER, CONSERVATIONIST, RECREATIONALIST, PUBLIC-LANDS ADVOCATE and Westerner, this really is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen. There already is a rationale process for disposing of public lands where it makes sense and with public buy-in. I’m not opposed to that, as I understand it.

Public land, wildlife and conservation is a pretty purple issue. It’s not owned by one party or the other, and it’s nice to see both sides opposing this.

But to be clear, while my two US Senators are pretty much locks against it, it’s those Republicans in other Western states and beyond who will need convincing to keep this from passing the Senate.

It can be beaten. A similar though smaller proposal from House Republicans was killed by fellow Republicans, including Representative Ryan Zinke (R-Montana), who called public lands his “San Juan Hill.” Same, same.

And there’s still time to defeat it. The “deadline” to pass this proposal as part of the BBB has apparently been pushed back from July 4 to August.

So, if you’re a hunter or public lands user in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington or Wyoming, or head there from any other state or just value public land and leaving what’s left as whole as possible for critters, take a look at the Wilderness Society’s map, take a look at the USGS’s big game migration maps and ask yourself, do you one day want to see a house plopped down on your deer or elk camp? In your herd’s stopover points or migration corridors?

If the answer is no to any of those, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Wilderness Society are making it easy to tell your Congressman that.

Thank you.