Unprecedented: How a Small Community in Western Colorado Saved a Quarter Million Acres of Public Lands

There was a time when the Thompson Divide didn’t have a name. The 225,000-acre expanse of public land overlays four counties, two national forests, four Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Field Offices, and 12 watersheds. The area spans the mid-elevation wildlands south from Glenwood Springs over McClure Pass and into the Ragged Mountains, and runs west from Carbondale through Coal Basin, spilling into the headwaters of Divide Creek (which flows into the Colorado River) and Clear Creek (a tributary to the North Fork of the Gunnison River).

Early on, Wilderness Workshop staff recognized the ecological importance of the area through detailed ecological inventories. The area serves as critical habitat for the endangered lynx, and is home to moose, elk, deer, bear, and mountain lions. The Divide connects important habitat near Grand Junction to the spine of the Rocky Mountains in the Elk Mountains. The area also boasts one of Colorado’s largest aspen groves, a vast network of roadless areas, essential grazing allotments for nearby ranches, and some of the most desirable hunting units in the western United States.

In the early 2000s, many community members had a stake in the area but most were focused on their small piece–which might be set away from neighbors by 10,000 foot ridges, mountain passes, or vast swaths of forestland.

The area was special–on that everyone agreed. But this land was under threat.

In the early 2000s, a post-9/11 Bush Administration sold more than 80 oil and gas leases across 100,000 acres in the area. The leases were sold cheap–many for the legal minimum of $2/acre and, as Wilderness Workshop would later discover, without complying with laws requiring public input and environmental analysis.

The threat of development didn’t sit well with the community. Bucolic lands and wildlife habitat just west of the Divide rapidly lost their pastoral charm and transformed into a spiderweb of roads, pipelines, pumping stations and fracked wells. Divide Creek, which flows out of Thompson Divide, made center stage when local residents were featured lighting their tap water on fire in Gasland–the documentary exposing the impacts of fracking on communities across the nation.

The imminent threat to the area’s unique ecological and community values brought strange bedfellows and distant neighbors together, and unified them in a desire to protect the Thompson Divide.

“We got a coalition of diverse stakeholders together, pulled out the maps, and asked everyone to draw a boundary around the area they thought needed protection for whatever their interest–whether it was grazing, wildlife habitat, mountain biking, climbing, snowmobiling, camping, watersheds, hunting, or roadless areas,” says Peter Hart, Legal Director at Wilderness Workshop, who has worked on the Thompson Divide for 15 years. “We then took all the maps, overlaid them, and that was the original boundary.”

The name “Thompson Divide” was an amalgam of Thompson Creek and Divide Creek, two of the most prominent drainages in the area.

Two Strategies Emerge

The campaign to protect the Thompson Divide formally began about 2008 on kitchen tables and in coffee shops around Carbondale. In 2009, the Thompson Divide Coalition (TDC) was formally established and the “odd bedfellows” started to get attention. The papers described the coalition as composed of “numerous owners of ranches or other property in the area; recreationalists; hunting and fishing groups; and several conservation groups.” If you live in western Colorado, you can appreciate the rarity of these nontraditional allies putting aside their differences to keep a piece of the wild intact.

The community got to work immediately, attending town halls, educating the public, building political support, gathering signatures and giving presentations to anyone willing to lend an ear.

Two main strategies emerged as a result of community engagement: first, something had to be done about the 80-some existing leases to ensure the area wasn’t drilled and industrialized. Second, permanent protections were needed to prevent future leasing and development.

The “Colorado Concept”

By 2009, there were more than 80 leases in the Thompson Divide. It was a shock and wake up call to the community and, in particular, the ranching community who had run cows and stewarded the meadows and forests of the Thompson Divide for generations.

Shortly after formation of TDC in 2009, the coalition decided to make a good-faith effort to buy out the existing leases in the Divide. Wilderness Workshop supported this work by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and gathering as much information as possible on each of the leases. We found that the oil and gas companies, or leaseholders, had paid about $2.5 million to acquire and maintain all of the leases in the Divide. TDC used the intel to inform an offer to buy out the existing leaseholders and reimburse them for all of their expenses.

The offer had support from towns and counties in the region. As an article in The Denver Post explained, “The core of the Colorado concept — endorsed by Garfield, Pitkin and Gunnison county commissioners — is that the economic value of pristine mountain land outweighs the value of oil and gas that could be extracted.”

Despite this market-based approach, the leaseholders did not bite on the offer. Instead, around the same time, they began filing drilling proposals on the leases. Suddenly, the threat of drilling seemed very real.

But one thing wasn’t clear: if the Thompson Divide leaseholders actually wanted to develop their leases, why did they wait so long to propose drilling? Federal oil and gas leases are issued for 10-year primary terms. Many of the leases in the Divide were nearing expiration.

As Wilderness Workshop worked to review the leaseholder proposals, the intent became clear. The proposals included a small number of drilling applications combined with ‘unitization’ and ‘suspension’ requests. The unit proposals grouped many leases together as one, relieving leaseholders from legal obligations to drill each lease before the end of its term. Then the suspensions were intended to put everything on pause while leaseholders pursued various approvals necessary for development–approvals that they’d failed to even apply for until the leases were set to expire.

Basically, leaseholders intended to use loopholes in BLM’s oil and gas regulations to prevent their leases from expiring without actually drilling. Fortunately, Wilderness Workshop’s deep dive into the lease records had exposed a host of other problems with the Thompson Divide leases. This is when the fight really began.

“Leaseholders weren’t biting on the offer and they were threatening to develop the leases,” says Will Roush, Executive Director of Wilderness Workshop. “There were fundamental legal problems with the leases, so we turned our advocacy towards the BLM. That’s when ‘void the leases!’ became a popular slogan and everyone asking BLM to do the right thing and cancel the leases.”

Extraordinary and Broad Support

Alongside our work to get the leases canceled, the second priority of Wilderness Workshop and our partners in the Thompson Divide Coalition was to secure permanent legislative protection for the Divide. “Absent other protections, public lands are generally available for all sorts of development, including oil and gas drilling,” says Roush. “Unless Congress passes a bill that says this area is ‘withdrawn’ or off limits to oil and gas leasing the threat of development will always remain.”

In order to get legislators and politicians on board, the community needed to show extraordinary and broad support. TDC and the Workshop didn’t have lobbyists in D.C., but we did have the support of a unified local community, including local ranchers–and their tractors.

In what would be the first of many such moments, on a sunny fall afternoon in 2011, hundreds of residents gathered outside the Third Street Center, where many took to the stage and waxed poetic about their love of the Divide. Then every local farmer brought their tractor and caravanned down Main Street leading a parade of supporters—many clad in costumes and carrying signs. As the front-page of The Sopris Sun read, “Nearly 300 people showed up for a rally at the park behind the Third Street Center that featured petitions to the federal government, a variety of speakers, music and a strong message of support for the work of the Thompson Divide Coalition.” It was a show of unanimity and highlighted uncommon allies unified by a common cause. The odd bedfellows speaking with one voice began to make front page news, and the issue of the Thompson Divide became a regular highlight in news roundups circulated to elected officials from Denver to D.C.

In 2013, this community support inspired U.S. Senator Michael Bennet to introduce the Thompson Divide Withdrawal and Protection Act. The legislation would have banned future oil and gas leasing in the Divide, and provided a mechanism for current leases to be donated, exchanged, or relinquished. As reported in The Crested Butte News, “According to the senator’s office, the bill was drafted at the request of local governments acting on feedback from leaseholders, elected officials, and community leaders.”

“There are places in the state, in this country, where it makes sense to drill, and there are other places where it doesn’t make sense to drill,” Bennet told a cheering crowd in downtown Carbondale after the bill’s introduction. “I admire very much the spirit of collaboration that you guys have demonstrated and modeled for the rest of the state.”

The strategy worked. Lawmakers took notice. Our community had a champion in Congress.