WELCOME TO THE JULY 2026 KEEP ROUTT WILD NEWSLETTER!

Hello, Keep Routt Wild followers!

In this month’s newsletter we’re bringing you the latest updates on four conservation topics of interest in Routt County.

First, we give an update on the proposed oil and gas leases in Routt National Forest, and our partnering with EcoFlight to view the parcels from the air.

Second, we are reporting on a recent grant proposal to suppress noxious weeds on the greater Emerald Mountain, Mad Creek, and Yampa River riparian areas.

Third, we are reporting on the latest news regarding Stagecoach Mountain Ranch.

Fourth, we are reminding residents to observe bear-aware practices this summer.

Read about these three news items below, along with our standard section of “What We’ve been Reading and Watching”, summarizing conservation news from the region.

For those who are unfamiliar with Keep Routt Wild, we are a community organization dedicated to the preservation of wildlife and wild places in Routt County. We do this through education, engagement, and practicing conservation through informed science, To find out more about Keep Routt Wild, go to our website, or follow our nearly daily postings on Facebook. If you were forwarded this email and want to sign up for our monthly newsletter, you may sign up here.

We are a 501(c)3 non-profit, and we humbly ask you to consider a donation to Keep Routt Wild here. Thank you.

Image above shows passengers before taking off from Steamboat’s Bob Adam’s Field to view the landscape where the proposed oil and gas leases are sited. The pilot, Chris Benson, is on the left, and the narrator Mark Easter is two places to the right. Passenegers on this flight represented Steamboat Radio, the Colorado Sun, and representatives from the office of Rep. Neguse and Sen. Bennet.

We reported last month that the Forest Service is considering giving its consent to lease “10 parcels of Routt National Forest to the BLM for a potential future oil and gas lease sale and subsequent exploration and development.” The parcels total 13,850 acres, and the project details and public comment can be found here. We noted that there were 355 comments in the Reading Room, with a vast majority being opposed to the project.

While giving consent to the BLM may seem circuitous, this is an artifact that the Forest Service manages the surface lands but BLM owns the subsurface mineral rights, including oil and gas. There’s a myriad of complications to this proposal, including whether the Forest Service could even enforce its stipulations to protect these lands once leased pursuant to BLM’s freer reign under HR-1 and new BLM rules.

The parcels are in some of the most beautiful and biodiverse areas of Routt National Forest. This past Friday we decided to show off what special locations these are by partnering with EcoFlight to deliver narrated tours of the area for the media and our federal delegation. Representatives from The Steamboat Pilot, Steamboat Radio, and the Colorado Sun joined us on these breathtaking tours, joined by staff from Representative Neguse's and Senator Bennet's office. Barbara Vasquez, a board member of Great Old Broads for Wilderness, also joined us. Josh Schroeder, Manager of Steamboat Springs Airport/Bob Adams Field gave a brief overview of the airport and activities, including the on-going fire fighting operations before the passengers headed out to the Cessna 210 that awaited them.

Routt National Forest did not disappoint. It was a beautiful clear day to show off pristine areas that are home to sage grouse, sharp-tailed grouse, sandhill cranes, and the birthing areas for the Bears Ears Elk Herd – the second largest elk herd in the world.

The views were simply stunning. All passengers were given a map of the flight path to take on board, with the proposed lease parcels highlighted. A second map showed a close-up of the same parcels overlayed with Colorado Roadless Area designations and CPW-indicated elk calving areas. We have posted that map below. We recruited Mark Easter as the narrator, describing key attributes of the landscape below during all three flights, while the pilot Chris Benson brought us up close and personal with the specified areas. We believe the parcels supporting these outstanding intact habitat values ought not be advanced for leasing and that the Forest Service, as the land management agency and steward of these public lands, should withhold its consent. We’ll be developing a video from the flight, but you can see two short videos taken during flight at our Facebook post here.

We’ve received some questions of whether the Forest Service could, or would, enforce stipulations to protect these areas if leasing goes ahead. We’re skeptical. Last year the BLM released a new rule removing “existing Bureau of Land Management (BLM) regulations pertaining to stipulations and mitigation measures to effectuate changes required by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA, also known as HR-1) enacted on July 4, 2025.”

The text of that new rule states:

"Section 50101(d) of the OBBB amended the MLA by removing the existing language in section 226(a) and replacing it with new language that requires the Secretary to make lands in an expression of interest (EOI) available for leasing within 18 months of receipt of an EOI, subject to enumerated conditions. It adds a new subparagraph requiring any leases issued under the MLA to be subject to the terms and conditions of an approved resource management plan (RMP) and prohibits the Secretary from including any stipulations or mitigation in a lease, unless such stipulations or mitigation are included in an approved RMP." Emphasis ours.

The RMP in this case is the woefully out-of-date Routt National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan, approved in 1998. A lot has occurred since 1998, including the approval of the Colorado Roadless Rule in 2012 that prohibits road building and delivers other protections for much of the proposed area to be leased. Furthermore, the OBBBA statutorily mandates the BLM to hold a minimum total of 28 oil and gas lease sales every year across nine states (Alaska, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming). This statute puts immense pressure on the BLM to lease sites once the Forest Service approves the leasing and requires the BLM to offer for sale any parcel of land nominated by the industry for leasing within 18 months of that nomination.

We were disappointed to learn at a recent Routt County Commissioners meeting that the Forest Service initiated its draft EA (Environmental Assessment) without even so much as a “heads up” to the Routt County Commissioners, as has been their practice with previous EAs, choosing instead to place an obscure notice in the legal section of the Steamboat Pilot without any other public notice. Supposedly, the Commissioners learned of the proposal from members of the public. They have subsequently submitted a formal letter opposing the proposal.

We have no doubt the BLM will proceed with the leases if the Forest Service approves. Therefore, the gating function of whether the oil and gas leases go forward rests at the doorstep of the Forest Service. The decision maker is identified as District Ranger Michael Woodbridge. We respectfully ask that he deny the proposed leases.

Below is an image, courtesy of Rocky Mountain Wild, that overlays the proposed leasing sites with designated Colorado Roadless Areas (dark green) and elk production (calving) areas (pink). The entire area is in CPW-indicated elk summer range.

Keep Routt Wild is fighting for wildlife and wild places in Routt County (and also in Moffat County when our fates are tied together). This proposal to lease these special areas for speculative oil and gas leasing needs to be denied, and we're on the case.

Noxious Weeds: A New Threat and Opportunity

As we reported earlier, noxious weeds are a growing threat to wildlife habitat and working lands in Routt County. These non-native weeds and grasses out-compete native vegetation wherever they take hold. Worse yet, they deliver little or no nutritional value, leading to habitat loss wherever they take hold.

Now there is a proposal to eliminate all noxious weeds on the greater Emerald Mountain including Howelsen Hill and the rodeo grounds. That is the grant request being proposed from the Routt Recreation and Conservation Roundtable to CPW (Colorado Parks and Wildlife). It’s an audacious undertaking of at least three years of mechanical and chemical treatments. It is coupled with a similar project to suppress invasive organisms within or next to the Yampa River. Since that time, the Forest Service has joined the project by including trails in the Mad Creek area. This makes a lot of sense, as many recreationists use the greater Emerald Mountain trails and the Mad Creek trails, enabling cross contamination of both areas. The RRCR has now officially submitted the grant proposal to CPW. We’ll know later this year if we receive the grant. If so, treatment will begin next year.

This is a proposal in process, and there is no guarantee we will even get the grant. But it is encouraging to see now five key public agencies plus the Routt Recreation and Conservation Roundtable supporting this bold and daring initiative. If we do get the grant, KRW will be reaching out to recruit volunteers to help identify noxious weeds in the targeted areas.

There has been little public news about SMR (Stagecoach Mountain Ranch) as the developers submit their final plans. As a reminder, KRW has not taken a position on the development, but has been laser-focused on the wildlife and habitat impacts and compliance with the new County UDC (Unified Development Code). We invite you to view our SMR informational web page here. We particularly invite you to read our submitted comments, and our presentation from the SMR Community Forum, which can be found on the web page.

That said, Colorado Parks and Wildlife submitted recent comments regarding wildlife issues to the County portal, and you can read them here. We recommend reading them as they are a good summary of the issues and are very readable for the general public, organized in sections stating the SMR position and CPW responses.

We’ve noted a significant disparity between the number of impacted acres of High-Priority Habitat (HPH) we calculated using GIS analysis, and the number being used by SMR to define the amount of mitigation it must provide, which was significantly lower. We seek to understand the differences. Therefore, we found this statement from CPW in their comments particularly relevant:

“The calculated indirect impacts appear to stop at the project's property lines. Indirect project impacts, based on the identified buffers, will extend beyond property lines. Although impacts outside of property lines cannot be controlled, indirect impacts resulting from the project and extending beyond the property lines need to be accounted for in the impacted lands calculation. We agree that these indirect impacts should include only areas that overlap with CPW-mapped high-priority habitats, as defined by the buffers applied per species and habitat type.”

If SMR-calculated impacts stopped at their boundaries, this may explain a large portion of the differences between KRW’s calculation and SMR’s calculation. We believe we calculated the impacted number of acres precisely as described in the CPW paragraph above, leading to a result of 1976 impacted acres of CPW-mapped high-priority habitats.

Below is the summary slide from our presentation:

Image of a captured bear courtesy of Colorado Parks and Wildlife - Steamboat Springs.

We are blessed in Routt County to live in black bear habitat.  However, bears are not equally blessed to live near us. Every year local bears are euthanized as they become habituated to humans and inhabit human surroundings.

You can help! Please observe bear-aware practices by removing food sources that may attract bears. This includes securing your trash, removing bird feeders and outdoor pet food sources, and locking your car doors when you leave your car.

For a more complete list what to do when living in bear country, please visit our Bear Aware page.

Let’s keep our bears wild and alive, and our residents safe.

What we’ve been reading and watching

(Click on any title to read the article.)

Supercharged bubbles are threatening Lake Powell’s dam. Federal officials are battling to sustain water levels.

“At low water levels, more air from the reservoir’s surface can be mixed into the water, ideal conditions for bubbles to implode with destructive force as the water travels through tubes and turbines. And this year, the reservoir’s water level is extremely low. Federal reports show that the dam might have to stop hydropower generation before the end of the year to avoid catastrophic damage caused, in part, by the small-but-mighty bubbles.”

Millionaire Lake Tahoe homeowners deploy risky new strategy against escalating bear crisis

“As wealthy homeowners around the lake battle increasingly brazen bears breaking into houses, the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) has been relying on two highly trained Karelian bear dogs, Badger and Banjo, to send the unwelcome visitors running. The shaggy canines work alongside state biologists to chase bears out of neighborhoods, flush them from crawl spaces and urban dens, track injured animals and help return them to the wild, all while teaching the predators that humans are bad news.”

Water restrictions are in place in Steamboat Springs

“You can only water your lawn two days a week in Steamboat Springs. It starts immediately because of the drought conditions and extreme heat, and also because of low stream flows on the Yampa River.”

Voluntary fishing closure in effect for Elk River following mountain whitefish fish kill

“The announcement follows the discovery of a significant fish kill on Sunday, July 19. Local CPW staff investigated the report, discovering more than 300 dead mountain whitefish in the lower stretch of the Elk River, with additional dead fish observed downstream.”

Uncollared wolf dies in northwest Colorado, marking fifth death this year

“This year, the mortalities have included the death of a female gray wolf in January, for which the cause is still under investigation, the June death of an uncollared wolf, which was killed after it was tied to attacks on at least 22 sheep, as well as the deaths of both breeding adults from the King Mountain Pack in Routt and Eagle counties. The patriarch died during routine collaring operations conducted by Parks and Wildlife, and the matriarch was reportedly shot by a ranch hand while attacking a cow. …

The wolf population has also grown since Parks and Wildlife released its annual report. The state wildlife agency announced last week that four of its packs — including a new one, dubbed the Piney Ridge Pack, established this spring in Eagle County — had pups this year. The One Ear Pack in Jackson County, the Copper Creek Pack in Pitkin County and the Three Creeks Pack in Rio Blanco County also had pups this spring. Parks and Wildlife has not reported how many were born, but an average wolf litter is between four and six pups.”

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