By Zoë Rom
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The coalition-building started a dozen years ago: conservationists, ranchers and outdoor recreationists, from hunters and snowmobilers to bikers and hikers. They all had different preferences for public lands in Colorado, but they thought they could work together to preserve more of it from extraction.
If they could hammer out a plan, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet told them, he’d introduce it as a bill. In September, he and Colorado’s other U.S. senator, John Hickenlooper, did just that.
The Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act, or GORP is one of the biggest public lands bills to come out of the state in over a decade. As the name hints, outdoor recreation is at the core of the ambitious protections the legislation proposes, a sign of how supporters think adventure sports could be key to winning votes for new public land protections in a “drill, baby, drill” environment.
If the bill comes up for a vote after Jan. 20, it would need buy-in from a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump. But people across the political spectrum hunt, fish, hike, bike and camp.
“In Colorado, outdoor recreation is a core part of our culture and critical for local economies,” Bennet said in an email. “The broad support from public lands user groups—including from summer and winter motorized recreation, conservation, mountain bikers, whitewater recreation, ranchers, water users, rock climbers, and hunters and anglers—underscores that importance.”
The GORP Act is aimed at conservation and management practices in over 730,000 acres of public lands in and around Gunnison County, which is south of Aspen. The bill would protect huge parcels of Colorado’s high country from mining and drilling while preserving access for all existing recreation, like boating, mountain biking and off-roading. It would preserve land for planned future trails.
Environmental measures in the legislation direct the federal government to monitor sensitive ecosystems and wildlife habitats and safeguard them from overdevelopment and climate change. And the bill would transfer Pinecrest Ranch, owned by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, into a trust that would give the tribal nation greater autonomy in its management.
Community support, including from outdoor lovers, convinced the Biden administration in April to remove more than 220,000 acres in Colorado’s Thompson Divide—near the land the GORP Act would protect—from areas permitted for new mining, mineral and geothermal leases. Two other public-lands bills proposed by Bennet in recent years, the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Act and legislation to establish the Dolores River National Conservation Area, grew out of similar coalitions.
Neither bill has made it into law yet. But the cooperative efforts that went into them give conservationists hope.
“A common thread among all of these bills is that various public lands users were able to come together and find common ground in the idea of protecting these places for future generations,” said Jim Ramey, a representative of The Wilderness Society who worked with the Gunnison Public Lands Initiative, the coalition whose plan led to the GORP Act. “That’s a beautiful thing.”
Can GORP Navigate the New Political Landscape?
The GORP Act likely faces an uphill battle.
Many key Republicans in Congress want more resource extraction on public lands, not less. Some, such as Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who could become chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, oppose federal management of public lands altogether.
Trump recently nominated North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, an oil booster, to run the agency overseeing these lands, the U.S. Department of the Interior. And the first Trump administration prioritized drilling there, rolling back protections.
“If we aren’t able to connect individuals to outdoor experiences, there’s not going to be that political support for the environment.”
— Ian Billick, Crested Butte mayor
All of that means that environmental regulations could be relaxed for mining, drilling and timber harvests in ways that hinder both recreation and conservation. But Bennet said he hopes the GORP Act will resonate with his fellow legislators.
“The basis of this bill is strong bipartisan collaboration, and I am hopeful that we can continue to work across the aisle in Congress for the sake of America’s public land,” he said. “This bill was written on the hoods of cars, and on kitchen tables in Colorado, not in Washington, D.C. I’ll keep doing everything I can to get this done.”
Public lands make up most of Gunnison County, the focus of the GORP Act. Ian Billick, mayor of Crested Butte, a recreation-oriented town there, is optimistic about the proposal’s fate.
“The political support for the outdoors and the environment comes from people that are outdoors and in the environment,” said Billick, who is also executive director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. “If we aren’t able to connect individuals to outdoor experiences, there’s not going to be that political support for the environment. I think the lesson from the creation of the GORP Act is that there is a way that you can sit at the table with the different stakeholder groups and get to a ‘hell yes!’”
Colorado’s Sizable Outdoor Recreation Economy
Outdoor recreation is an economic driver in Colorado. It supported roughly one in every eight jobs in the state last year, according to a September study by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Southwick Associates in partnership with Colorado State University. Outdoor activities also contributed $11.2 billion in local, state and federal tax revenue in 2023, the study showed.
While the money from outdoor recreation is a welcome boon for many communities, growth has put an increased strain on recreation infrastructure and sensitive areas.
This backdrop played into the negotiations that led to the GORP Act, which would update the Colorado Wilderness Act of 1993. The legislation would designate “special management areas” for public lands in and near Gunnison County that specify how each can be used.
Among the changes: three new wilderness areas and six additions to existing wilderness for a total of 122,902 additional acres of federally protected wilderness. But all recreation currently allowed on Gunnison-area public lands would be permitted to continue.
For example, the Beckwiths special management area, which would include parts of the popular Kebler and Schofield passes, preserves the right to mechanized and motorized recreation there. The coalition that put the plan together made a commitment to protect existing uses, and the groups thought it was better to keep that impact concentrated than to push riders and drivers to areas less able to handle it.
“We recognize that the population in this state is booming, outdoor recreation is booming. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” said Tim Kugler, executive director of Gunnison Trails, a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable trail use in the county. “Change happens really fast. And this is just trying to look really far ahead and say, what are the values that we really want to try and protect and preserve?”
Added Billick: “Outdoor recreation is a big part of our economy. We had to figure out how to keep all of these uses in balance. Mining is an extractive industry, and if we’re not careful, recreation could become an extractive industry.”
Conservationists see in the GORP Act a bill that would equip land managers with better ways to take care of popular recreation sites. That reflects outdoor recreation groups’ role in the negotiations.
“The influence of recreation in public land policies has grown,” said Will Rousch, executive director of Wilderness Workshop, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting public lands in western Colorado. That’s involved both advocating for increased protections, and “for their own interests. And there’s a delicate balance that we need to all get right.”
David Ochs, executive director of the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association, has been involved in GORP Act discussions since the beginning. Outdoor recreation and wildlife protection can get pitted against each other, he said, but this process shows it doesn’t have to go that way.
“I believe recreation and wildlife interests can very much work collaboratively to find common and middle ground,” Ochs said.
Kugler, with Gunnison Trails, was glad to be part of those conversations. “Ultimately, we all want the same thing, and we need to recognize each user group as equals at the table,” he said.
Outdoor Sports Increasingly Inform Public Lands Policy
Outdoor recreation contributed more than $1 trillion to America’s economy in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and grew faster that year than the overall economy. Public lands are an important part of that.
Most money generated on public lands comes from resource extraction, not recreation. But land managers have recently been given more leeway to weigh potential uses. In April, the Bureau of Land Management announced updates to the Public Lands Rule, which includes a specific directive to “Provide for healthy lands and waters that support sustainable outdoor recreation experiences for current and future generations.” The rule acknowledges outdoor recreation as a reason to protect landscapes, elevating it to equal consideration with other land uses.
That comes after years of advocacy by outdoor-focused businesses and enthusiasts, rippling through public-lands policy.
Last year, the Biden administration implemented a 20-year moratorium on new mineral and geothermal leasing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota. Local businesses, the outdoor recreation industry and tourism operators were among those advocating for its protection by highlighting the ongoing value of recreation opportunities versus shorter-term economic benefits from mining or logging.
The Obama administration designated the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah after advocacy by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition for federal protections to preserve their ancestral lands. After Trump shrunk the monument, tribes were not alone in pushing back. The outdoor industry, including prominent brands like Patagonia, REI and The North Face, launched campaigns and rallied outdoor recreators, particularly climbers. Biden restored the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument in 2021.
In 2014, Obama designated the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles as a national monument, following years of advocacy from Indigenous groups, conservationists, urban residents and outdoor recreators. Advocates, particularly from the Latino community, organized hikes and outreach events to draw attention to the issue of equitable access to outdoor recreation opportunities that the monument designation would help achieve. Kayakers, hikers, campers and mountain bikers came together with conservation organizations to emphasize the health benefits of that access.
“From a community and a moral standpoint, thinking about the equity issues in conservation and recreation, it needs to happen more,” Wilderness Workshop’s Rousch said.
While the future of the GORP Act is uncertain, the coalition work that created it offers a lesson for people trying to influence public land policy: build a big tent.
“You have to figure out how to get along because that’s really the only way we’re going to get something like this passed in this day and age, in this climate,” said Gunnison Trails’ Kugler. “These large-scale land preservation, land conservation bills … wouldn’t happen without everyone coming to the table and really working together.”
