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President Joe Biden will be in Colorado today for the first time since he surveyed the damage from the Marshall Fire in January — and thankfully, it will be under much less somber (though not universally beloved) circumstances.
The president is expected to invoke the Antiquities Act to designate nearly 54,000 of high country near Leadville and Vail as the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument. The designation aims to protect and preserve the training ground for the legendary 10th Mountain Division in World War II. Those troops both helped turn the tide of the war and returned to launch Colorado’s ski industry.
The designation, which includes the Tenmile Range, also cites the area’s significance to the Ute Tribes. The U.S. government forced those people to relinquish the area and much of their ancestral homeland in the mid-1800s, according to the White House. It still houses burial sites thousands of years old and remains culturally and spiritually significant to the people.
The White House also cites the area’s ecological diversity and natural habitat in the designation.
The designation will protect existing uses for the area while prohibiting new development there. It will be the first completely new national monument designated by Biden. The U.S. Forest Service will manage the new national monument. It will be tasked with developing resources to educate visitors on the area’s significance and history of the Ute people and the 10th Mountain Division.
“This is great news for Coloradans and military veterans, who called on President Biden to protect this important historical site and the landscape surrounding it,” Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala said in a statement after reports of the president’s plan published. “It’s a welcome sign that the president is listening to Westerners who want to see public lands and landmarks protected for future generations.”
In addition to the national monument designation, Biden will also announce a two-year prohibition on new mining and federal mineral leases on nearly 225,000 acres in the Thompson Divide area. The area has been closed to oil and gas leasing for several years, according to the White House. Pre-existing leases will not be affected. The prohibition will be the start of a Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service-led process looking at a 20-year prohibition in the area.
In a statement ahead of Biden’s arrival, Bennet said he could think of “no better choice” for Biden’s first national monument than Camp Hale-Continental Divide. He touted the Thompson Divide protections as having broad support from Coloradans and local leaders.
“With every passing year, there are fewer World War II veterans who trained at Camp Hale left to tell their story, which is why it is so important that we protect this site now,” Bennet said. “… I am grateful to President Biden for answering Colorado’s call to honor our veterans, safeguard our wildlife and public lands, and strengthen our outdoor recreation economy.”
The declarations follow years of efforts by Democrats to pass the Colorado Outdoor Recreation & Economy Act, or CORE Act. The bill has been championed by U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse.
The CORE Act has passed the U.S. House of Representatives multiple times but hasn’t garnered the necessary Republican support in the deadlocked Senate to move forward in that chamber. The CORE Act is a combination of four bills to add protections to more than 400,000 acres of public land in Colorado. Biden’s declarations don’t encompass the entire scope of the legislation, though the Thompson Divide and national monument designations were both key parts of it.
Not all Coloradans are on board. The state’s Republican Congressional delegation, along with other GOP members, released a letter in September condemning the effort as imposing “severe land-use restrictions on the people of Colorado and across the American West.”
Biden’s planned designation comes about two months after Bennet convened a roundtable of supporters to meet with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to urge action on the site. Vilsack promised to take their message back to Biden. The dwindling number of World War II veterans put a special emphasis on it, Vilsack said then.
The designation also comes as Bennet is locked in a re-election fight with Denver businessman Joe O’Dea, and just days before ballots for that election start hitting Coloradans’ mailboxes. After news broke of the president’s planned designation, O’Dea panned it as an election year stunt, though he called Camp Hale an “amazing place.”
“Biden and Bennet are moving the country badly in the wrong direction, and no amount of photo-ops in a place we all love will change this fact: accountability from the voters is coming soon,” O’Dea said in the statement last week.
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