Tag Archive for: fossil ridge wilderness

Exploring the wilderness you love through maps

October 18, 2024-

In July we shared with you about our work to create a first of its kind GIS-based national inventory of private properties in and around wilderness. This tool has already been valuable in our work for how it allows us to explore the wild places we work in in a different way. We’re excited to share with you some free mapping tools that are available to the public to help you explore the wild places you love as well.

For many of us, some of our most memorable wilderness adventures began with pouring over a map: planning routes, interpreting how the topo lines would translate to the landscape under our feet. Maps help us to understand the vastness and connectedness of these wild places beyond what we can see from any valley or peak. While folding out a paper map on the trail will always be a quintessential wilderness experience, a new generation of mapping tools is helping us to understand wilderness in new ways.

The Find Wilderness tool from The Wilderness Society is an interactive map that asks where the wildest places are. With it you can visualize the wildest 30% of lands in the US, in each state, and in each county. You can scroll through the story map or click ‘explore data’ in the right hand corner to toggle between layers and zoom in on your home or favorite wilderness.

The Climate Atlas is a collaboration from several conservation groups to map six ecological indicators as well as composite models showing a location’s overall conservation value, importance in climate change mitigation, and importance in maintaining biodiversity. You can explore by zooming in on a specific landscape and switching between the composite models and individual indicators in the menu.

Probably the most complex of the three, The Resilient Lands Mapping Tool from The Nature Conservancy also maps composite models for resilience, connectivity & climate flow, and biodiversity. It also maps different component data for those models, including things like elevation, slope steepness, and bedrock and soil. You can also use more technical layers like soil carbon, vegetation and land cover, and different categories of conservation protection. This tool also allows you to draw a polygon on a specific property or area and have it analyzed for resiliency, connectivity, and climate flow.

Exploring the landscapes you care about, whether they are your own backyard or the wilderness areas you return to year after year, through maps can help deepen your understanding of and appreciation for them. After all, many of the things we value wilderness for most, like its clean air and water, thriving ecosystems, and balance of natural systems go beyond what our own eye can see. It is also essential to understanding what we are working to protect and what strategies have the most impact. We hope you enjoy nerding out on these maps as much as we do!

 

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Fossil Ridge Wilderness grows with Trust’s 5th Colorado transfer this year

October 4, 2024-

This week the Trust completed the transfer of our 183-acre Cross Mountain project in Colorado’s Fossil Ridge Wilderness to public ownership. The transfer comes on the heels of two other successful projects in Gunnison National Forest this year: the 10-acre Straeder Lode just outside the Raggeds Wilderness, and 10-acre Copper Glance Lode in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.

This most recent transfer will permanently protect the property, which straddles the wilderness boundary and has nearby road access leaving it vulnerable to development and uses incompatible with the surrounding wilderness.

“This acquisition protects wild and undeveloped viewsheds and consolidates private ownership within National Forest System lands, eliminating the need for special use authorizations. Acquisition of these parcels will help strengthen and preserve Congressionally Designated Wilderness Areas.”

– Dayle Funka, Gunnison District Ranger

The Trust’s process for protecting wild places like Cross Mountain has two phases: first we purchase the property from the private landowner, then we hold the property until it can transfer to public ownership. We typically aim to be acquiring and transferring roughly the same total value of projects each year to keep our Wilderness Opportunity Fund (WOF), which funds the majority of our acquisitions, at a healthy level.

Striking this balance isn’t always possible though. As our work gains momentum in new areas and sometimes decades-long relationships with landowners and partners grow, more and more acquisition opportunities are becoming available. This is, of course, something to celebrate. But each project moves at its own pace, with the time between the purchase and transfer of a property typically taking 2-4 years. In some regions we’ve seen this timeline stretching longer and longer as our agency partners do their best with limited capacity. When this happens, these factors can converge resulting in a backlog of transfers, meaning more of our WOF is tied up in projects than is available to take advantage of new conservation opportunities as they arise.

There are two meaningful solutions to this challenge: First, our lands staff and partners have been hard at work this year to clear this backlog of transfers, both to see projects completed and successfully protected, and to make more Wilderness Opportunity Funds available for new acquisitions. Cross Mountain is the fifth such project in Colorado transferred this year, marking significant progress toward this goal. Thanks to it, we already we have another five Colorado projects in development in the Holy Cross, Uncompahgre, and Weminuche Wilderness Areas and Red Cloud Wilderness Study Area.

The second way we are working to address this challenge is growing our Wilderness Opportunity Fund. You can join us in supporting the WOF with a revolving donation that will be reinvested in new acquisitions over and over, deepening the impact of your gift. Revolving funds can be named in honor or memory of an individual or foundation, and can be included in estate planning. Low or no interest loans can also be made to the WOF to acquire a specific property, multiple projects in a specific region or state, or as needed across our entire lands portfolio. Learn more about joining our Wilderness Opportunity Fund or contact brad@wildernesslandtrust.org.

 

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