The Future and the Past of the South San Juan Wilderness

The main mass of the San Juan Mountains dominates Southwest Colorado with its fourteen-thousand-foot peaks and steep gorges. These mountains feed their snowmelt into the Colorado River basin, a vast desert that spreads from the Rocky Mountains to the south and west. An arm of the San Juan Mountains reaches down into New Mexico and feeds its water into the Rio Grande. These South San Juan Mountains hold legends of the last grizzly bears in the Southwest and, the hope by some, that they still live there, deep in the cold wilds of the South San Juan Wilderness area.

Ideally, we might imagine grizzly could be restored to these mountains. But large predators need an ecosystem that actually functions. Visiting these mountains, like most mountains in Colorado, we are struck by the widespread tree death all around us. The Engleman spruce and corkbark fir are mostly dead over large areas. Once green forests are gray and still.

The Conejos River canyon has to be one of the most remote areas of Colorado. Far from any city, the river cuts down through the volcanic rocks ejected by the San Juan Volcanic field roughly 30 million years ago. The old lava flows and ash deposits (tuff) are covered with spruce and pine and snow in the winters. The 160,000-acre South San Juan Wilderness Area covers the upper reaches of these mountains north of the New Mexico border. This is wild country and except for cattle that destroy vegetation and foul the streams, there is little evidence of humanity here. No wonder grizzlies lived here until the 1970s.

In New Mexico, the last grizzly was killed in 1938. Some say the last was killed in the Pecos Canyon in that year while others claim that the last died in the Jemez Mountains. In either case, the bears were hunted relentlessly by the livestock industry with the help of the federal government, just as wolves were removed on behalf of the beef producers. Amazing then to imagine these beautiful animals hiding in the southern Colorado high country, evading the cowboys who come in every fall to search for their cattle among the trees and streams of this designated wilderness area.

We hiked up Elk Creek into the South San Juan and found beautiful meadows with snow in the shadows of the cliffs. Lakes hunched against bigger snowbanks and mountain sides riotous with the sound of water falling among rocks from the former heights of winter. Cattle had not been turned loose yet so the land was free of their stench and the plants in the wetlands had a few more weeks before the clear pools among a diversity of plants was churned to mud by these empty minded beasts.

Most people seem to accept that cattle are part of the wilderness experience. Congress allowed this industrial activity to continue in wilderness areas when the Wilderness Act was passed in 1964. Legend has it that without cattle grazing continuing, the Act would have been blocked by the all-powerful cowboy lobby.

I wish I could regain the innocence I had as a kid when I used to happily chaise cattle in the Pecos Wilderness, and throw rocks at them with my brother. I didn’t care. Now I delight in places that are cattle-free and despair when I find these destructive animals in places that desperately need to be without them so wildlife can thrive and rare plants can reproduce again in true wilderness. Fortunately, there are organizations that are working to get cattle out of wilderness areas. For example, the Western Watersheds Project and Wilderness Watch both work on this issue while more mainstream environmental groups seem afraid of the problem.

Trees

The dead spruce and fir prevalent in the South San Juan and across most of Colorado is yet another reminder that the human relationship with the natural world is not working. Easy enough to blame the bark beetles for the death of billions of trees across the West. These are native bugs, not exotics brought in from some foreign land. They have been feeding on forest trees for thousands of years, usually killing individuals or patches of trees. Yet now they are rampant and killing trees on an unprecedented scale. Why?

Scientists know that the Southwest is engulfed by “mega-drought”. For the last 22 years the region has been getting warmer and drier. Cyclic droughts have been happening for thousands of years as tree ring research shows. But rapid climate warming is new. Temperatures are climbing steeply year after year caused by human carbon pollution filling the atmosphere worldwide.

Climate heating increases evaporation. Soils dry out faster than in the past. Heat pulls moisture out of trees by evapotranspiration. The column of water in the cambium of trees can’t hold up under rapid evaporation from the tree’s needles and gaps in the cambium water column appear. Once the column is broken, the tree dies. (This fact was discovered by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.)

Bark beetles attack trees stressed by global heating. The beetles enter the bark and begin to eat the cambium layer. A healthy tree will push the beetles out with sap and seal the beetle entry holes. A climate stressed tree can’t muster the sap to defend itself and the beetles along with other stresses kill the trees… by the billions.

Tree death is a vicious circle. Those trees converted CO2 into oxygen. Dead trees sequester carbon, but they don’t cleanse the air. Thus, human generated CO2 finds fewer filters and builds up further in the atmosphere, setting the stage for more tree death.

Knowing all this, I worry for our fragile planet. Sometimes I wish I were ignorant of all of this, like the fishermen we met on the trail from Texas who told us they hadn’t noticed that most of the trees around them were dead. How nice to be oblivious like a child and imagine the wilderness is as it always was and should be, an escape from the humid cities of Texas.

Standing by Rock Lake we watched a group of mergansers hiding under the overhang of snow on the north side. Their white plumage helped them blend with the snow. I listened to the wind, straining to hear the sound of a grizzly crashing through the forest. But there was only the sound of gray jays and the wind.