As conservation groups scramble to motivate advocates in support of public lands, one item in the Trump administration’s budget is the quiet redirection of $387 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund that Trump “permanently” funded at $900 million with his Great American Outdoors Act in 2020.
Slashing the Land and Water Conservation Fund, or LWCF, funding threatens three high-profile and long-planned projects in Colorado, all ranking among the most high priority national conservation efforts listed by LWCF for the coming year.
One of the largest LWCF conservation projects ever considered in Colorado includes a $34 million plan for 2025 to protect the 650-acre Snowmass Falls Ranch outside Snowmass Village.
The Wilderness Land Trust and Pitkin County in 2024 partnered to purchase the 650-acre Snowmass Falls Ranch outside Snowmass Village. The property — a gateway to the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness — was acquired for $34 million by the Pitkin County Open Space Program. The plan calls for transferring the acreage over to the White River National Forest using funds from the LWCF.
The deal marked years of work to protect 614 acres of the 650-acre ranch as wilderness and protect public access across the property to reach one of the state’s most trafficked wilderness areas.
“We had encouragement from the White River National Forest to buy it and we kind of pulled out all of the stops for this,” said Dale Will, the head of Pitkin County’s open space program, noting that the county borrowed $10 million from Great Outdoors Colorado to fund the acquisition. “All of this was encouraged by the Great American Outdoors Act.”
Snowmass Falls Ranch ranked high on the LWCF fund’s annual list and support looked likely until the Trump administration’s “big, beautiful bill” proposal to redirect LWCF money toward maintenance of existing public lands.
Mount Daly towers over the valley where the 650-acre Snowmass Falls Ranch is located outside of Snowmass Village, Colorado, on Oct. 9, 2022. (David Krause, The Colorado Sun)Another project threatened by cuts to the LWCF is an acquisition of 855 acres around Cliff Lake and the Conejos River in the Rio Grande National Forest southwest of Monte Vista. The Rio Grande National Forest has spent several years vying for LWCF funding to acquire the acreage around Cliff Lake in partnership with the Western Rivers Conservancy, which purchased the property in January. Protecting the scenic Cliff Lake, which feeds the Alamosa River, complements the conservation work to protect the nearby 45,952-acre La Jara Basin property.
A third project threatened by cuts to the LWCF is the $6.3 million purchase of Lizard Head Mesa, where the landowner and the Conservation Fund are working on a deal to transfer ownership of a 313-acre inholding to the San Juan National Forest.
The Conservation Fund has been working with the landowner near Lizard Head Pass for two years and they have a contract for a sale. They have yet to close the deal.
“But we want to know if there’s a likelihood of funding from the Forest Service to buy the property,” said Justin Spring with the Conservation Fund. “I look at Lizard Head Mesa and these other projects as sort of what Colorado is all about. Acquiring this land would open up new access for camping, hunting and other recreation in Dolores County.”
The Conservation Fund in 2020 acquired the 488-acre Sweetwater Lake with a plan to transfer the Garfield County lake to the White River National Forest with $8.5 million from the LWCF. The Sweetwater Lake deal was the largest LWCF allocation in Colorado, where the LWCF has spent more than $280 million on conservation and recreation projects in the last half-century.
Spring shepherded the Sweetwater project for The Conservation Fund, which opened the floodgate for larger, landscape-scale conservation projects funded by the LWCF.
“I can’t think of a time in the last 20 years when three Colorado projects made the top 10 on the Forest Service list for the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” he said. “This is an amazing opportunity for the Land and Water Conservation Fund to have a huge impact on western Colorado and the entire state’s outdoor recreation economy.”
Amy Lindholm, a spokeswoman for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition, said the Colorado projects are representative of the conservation fund’s work to patch together disconnected public lands and improve access. These additions to forests and parks are about easing land management challenges by “filling in missing pieces of public lands,” Lindholm said.
These properties in Colorado could easily be sold to developers to create luxury mansions that would cut off critical access to areas on the other side of the properties, Lindholm said.
“The Land and Water Conservation Fund solves land use problems and it opens up more access where people want it and need it,” said Lindholm, adding that the budget was undermining public lands by “stealing money” authorized in the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act. “This proposal is a reversal of the legislation the president asked for and signed into law.”
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