Becoming the White River National Forest







white river sign

The White River Plateau Timber Land Reserve, the second federal forest reserve to be created, came into existence in 1891 and has evolved into the White River National Forest we know today as the most visited national forest in the country. Its management purview reflects two centuries of tension between exploitation and preservation for the greater good. 




Editor’s note: This story is the second of a three-part series from the independent nonprofit news organization Aspen Journalism examining the notion of public lands, both in the United States and in our region. Part I looked at the earliest expressions of the commons in territories that would become the United States. Parts II and III look at the history and legacy of what is now the White River National Forest. 

The evolution of the White River National Forest in just over a century mirrors the settlement of the American West — from an unregulated, free-for-all wilderness to strategically managed industrial tourism and sustainable, extractive industries. As the WRNF formed, it refined its management purview over user groups as they expanded from traditional timber and ranching to the ski areas, recreation sites and wilderness terrain that define the forest today.

Beginning with its original designation as a forest reserve in 1891, forest management was besieged by militant factions that argued against any management at all. This was an era when user groups included homestead farmers, fiercely independent ranchers and opportunistic loggers. Shrill denunciations and blatant noncompliance often occurred with these original land claimants who argued that public lands should be designated for those who came first and that its uses should be for what was best for them alone. Only as the forest adapted to changing times and needs did the multiuse mandate create opportunities and protections for all.

A prime example was Fred Light, a traditional rancher in the Roaring Fork Valley from the 1880s who at first resented the overlay of federal control over lands where he and other ranchers had grazed their cattle with no oversight and no fees. Light later came to appreciate the forest as it protected his interests from other users who threatened to overrun grazing lands, usurp water from the range or, in other ways, impinge on grazing entitlements. Light’s shift in temperament and his eventual willingness to follow forest regulations reflected a growing, if reluctant, acceptance that management principles are essential for all forest users to ensure equal access to the public commons.







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Light’s transformation spread to other users as complexities arose around the need for sustainability. As a result, the forest mission grew into the broader interpretation of what is the best and highest use for all. This egalitarian approach required a deep and pragmatic exploration of values and resources that led to accommodating conflicting interests.

In the early days of the WRNF, however, forestry officials were immersed in countless disputes and occasional violent conflicts. Rangers were harassed, beaten and fired upon as they performed their duties according to the evolving directives of forest administrators. Juggling over the ensuing decades the utilitarian and esoteric aspects of this remarkably diverse topography of mountains, valleys, meadows, forests and rock-and-ice alpine splendor has required scientifically based and diplomatically advanced regulations to avoid the impacts of overgrazing, timber clear-cutting, mining, overcrowded recreation and other issues yet to surface.

Through it all, the WRNF remains public land — 2.3 million acres (3,593.75 square miles) of the most visited national forest in the United States, stewarded by rangers trained with the necessary skills of backwoodsmen, diplomats, defenders, peacemakers, resource managers and ecologists.

The story of the WRNF is therefore a weave of time and place, and of a people for whom the forest is both an economic lifeblood and a battleground for conservation and preservation. For many, the forest is a place of sacred, cherished, iconic and legacy landscapes in which any and all visitors may experience and celebrate the power and splendor of pristine nature.

Public lands with no protection

In a foreword to Justine Irwin’s unpublished manuscript “White River National Forest: A Centennial History,” Thomas Hoots, the WRNF supervisor in 1990, led off with a crucial observation: “Before the turn of the century, the public lands were without a protector.” The national commons was being plundered and exploited by whoever got there first. Such was the opportunism that was rampant during the fever of westward expansion marked by Manifest Destiny and a willful disregard to impose limits on human agency.

This land hunger was described the following way by Gifford Pinchot, chief of the U.S. Forest Service from 1898 to 1910 and one of America’s original wise use conservationists: “There is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of land.”

Pinchot led a growing advocacy for conservation of national resources against great odds as they lobbied for protection of federal lands from the unbridled influences of capitalistic greed.







snowmass lake historic foto

A U.S. Forest Service photo dated between 1910 and 1930 shows a man with a fishing pole near a tent at Snowmass Lake, with Snowmass Peak in the distance covered with snow. Recreation grew in popularity throughout the early 20th century, creating new priorities for the Forest Service. 




Richard A. Ballinger, secretary of the interior from 1909-11, clearly defined a prevailing view: “You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong. In my opinion, the proper course to take with regard to [the public domain] is to divide it up among the big corporations and the people who know how to make money out of it.”

Thanks to those with clearer vision for a public lands legacy for America, the world and for future generations, Ballinger’s idea did not come to fruition. And yet such has been the message from the transactional Trump administration as the monetization of public lands offers yet again the potential for financial gain.

Thirty-five years ago, Hoots described a different ethic: “The nation’s leadership recognized this dilemma and so began the long climb towards public land and resource management as we know it today. Nowhere has the strength and vitality of America been better reflected in the last 100 years than in the evolution of the National Forest System.”

The WRNF is an integral part of that system. It is also a stellar example of a forest that has withstood numerous threats and, despite many compromises toward achieving the multiple-use mandate, has retained the conservation principles that has made it one of the most successful stories of land management in the United States. “The strength of our nation,” concluded Hoots on the centennial of the WRNF, “demands nothing less of the stewards of these public resources.”

Federal forest management dates to 1876 when Congress created the office of special agent in the U.S. Department of Agriculture to assess the quality and conditions of forests in the United States. In 1881, the department expanded the office into the Division of Forestry. A decade later, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, authorizing the president to designate public lands in the West into what were then called “forest reserves.”

Enter what would become the White River National Forest, the preliminary boundaries of which were drawn on federal maps under the direction of administrators in Washington, D.C. These long-distance planners for a realm of national treasures gazed over mountainous regions whose value they could only speculate, but which they reasoned were valuable in ways other than extractive, fast-buck profits measured only in capital gains for the few.

Responsibility for these reserves fell under the Department of the Interior until 1905 when President Theodore Roosevelt transferred their care to the Department of Agriculture’s new division: the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot led this agency as its first chief, charged with caring for the newly renamed public commons.







snowmass mountain

Snowmass Mountain is shown in a historic U.S. Forest Service photo. The architecture of the White River National Forest was determined by vast and nearly incomprehensible geologic forces that shaped the mountain landscapes we see today. 




The WRNF was created as the White River Plateau Timber Land Reserve on Oct. 16, 1891, by President Benjamin Harrison. This reserve was the second oldest in the newly conceived forest system, after a reserve established east of Yellowstone National Park, which two decades earlier became the country’s first national park. The WRNF would become the largest forest in Colorado when, in 1945, it absorbed the Holy Cross National Forest, created as a reserve in 1905. This newly defined national forest was a priority because it was being exploited with unsustainable resource extraction. It soon earned a place of immeasurable importance in the mosaic of public lands designated across the rugged western United States.

Nature laid the foundation

The architecture of the WRNF was determined by vast and nearly incomprehensible geologic forces that shaped the mountain landscapes we see today. Precambrian granite is the bedrock that was heaved up, twisted, broken, eroded and later covered with beds of sandstone and, later still, covered with an inland seaway that stretched from Mexico to Canada.

That seaway propagated plant and marine life-forms that speak to a far-different climate and ecology than today and that would eventually, under enormous pressure, form into huge coal deposits. This Cretaceous Seaway then gave rise to new landscapes as several major uplifts shed the accumulated water into major river systems and began building the mountain peaks rising from the bedrock floor. The uplifting, some from magma upwelling, brought metals and minerals to the surface where they were dissolved in super-heated groundwater and conveyed in solution into bedrock faults and fissures where they precipitated out at concentration. This formed the veins that gold and silver miners would later extract through labyrinthine tunnels and shafts.

Glaciation sculpted the finishing touches on the landscape by paring mountains into ragged escarpments and precipitous arêtes, and gouging deep U-shaped valleys where glacial runoff cut deeper still in the V-shaped drainages that we see today. Nature’s work is never complete, and so the mountains and valleys continue to be formed by erosion and an almost immeasurable continued uplifting from energies emanating from Earth’s depths.







gifford pinchot

Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service from 1898 to 1910, believed in protecting public lands for utilitarian purposes. 




Then biology stepped in and established an overlay of life, the flora and fauna that we see today inhabiting the niches where they are genetically suited to proliferate and thrive. These are the desert scrublands, grassy meadows, mixed forests and lichen-covered alpine terrain comprising a half-dozen life zones and multiple ecosystems that give the WRNF the diversity that characterizes a healthy and vibrant ecology.

The forest is home to one of the largest mule deer herds  and one of the largest elk herds in the nation, as well as bighorn sheep, mountain goats, black bears, mountain lions, snowshoe hare, marmot, porcupine, badger, marten, ground squirrels and chipmunks, hundreds of bird types and thousands of plant species in a veritable Garden of Eden of biodiversity.

But the human stories are what capture our imaginations, as noted in Irwin’s WRNF Centennial History; the people of the forest have differed greatly in their relationship to it: “Some have loved her, some have abused her, some have hated her, but all have made her what she is today.”







historic holy cross

An undated historic photo shows the U.S. Forest Service ranger near the Mount of the Holy Cross. Before the turn of the 20th century, public lands lacked formal protection. “Nowhere has the strength and vitality of America been better reflected in the last 100 years than in the evolution of the National Forest System,” a forest official wrote in 1990. 




The first Europeans

The first Europeans to visit the region of the WRNF and enter the traditional homelands of the native Utes were Spanish Franciscan friars Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez. The two explorers and their party left Santa Fe on an ambitious exploratory mission to find an overland route to the Roman Catholic mission in Monterey, in what later became California. They ventured into the Western wilderness in July 1776, the same year the American colonies declared independence from British rule.

After traversing what is now northern New Mexico and southwest Colorado, the party traveled north, eventually passing through the Paonia area and Muddy Creek. They met the Colorado River near Divide and Mamm creeks along the Grand Hogback, a diagonal sawtooth range near Silt and New Castle. With Ute guides, they crossed the White and Green rivers, making it as far as what is now known as Utah Lake along the Wasatch Front, where they encountered a thriving indigenous community. With winter approaching, the party turned back toward Santa Fe and faced starvation as they struggled to cross the Colorado River at a location now flooded by Lake Powell, but all made it back alive.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened the door to more exploration, this from the east where a few adventuresome parties reached Colorado’s Front Range. The towering Rockies were considered too severe an obstacle to pass through, except for freelancing traders and trappers who knew no bounds and no limits in their pursuit of trade and beaver pelts.

A French trapper, Antoine Robidoux, was perhaps the first Anglo to trap in the White River in 1825, harvesting beaver pelts from Trappers Lake on the north side of the Flat Tops. The Yampa Valley, to the north, became widely visited by mountain men such as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith.







escalante's route

A map shows the route of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition, led by two Spanish priests trying to find a way from Santa Fe to California. They reached Utah Lake before turning back, becoming the first Europeans to explore a vast portion of what would later become Colorado and Utah. 




The seizing of Texas from Mexico in 1836 by Sam Houston stretched the promising Western U.S. boundaries, inviting more visitation as manifest destiny became a divine entitlement for Western settlement and provided a God-given mandate to force out native peoples and exploit the land and its many resources.

In 1845, John Fremont, guided by Carson, crossed Tennessee Pass from the Arkansas Valley and along the White River to Utah. With the announcement that gold had been discovered in California, streams of fortune-seekers flowed west through Colorado, many of whom recognized the grazing potential of verdant mountain valleys well-watered by rolling streams and rivers. After striking out on California gold, some returned to what would, in 1876, become Colorado to farm and raise cattle. The discovery of gold along Cherry Creek, near today’s Denver, made Colorado a hot new prospect in 1859, popularizing this mostly unmapped territory.

The next year, 1860, Capt. Richard Sopris, for whom Mount Sopris is named, prospected the Roaring Fork Valley with a party of 14. In journals, it was mentioned that they stopped to take in the soothing waters of Yampa Hot Springs at today’s Glenwood Springs. The Homestead Act was passed by Congress in 1862, encouraging more western migration and providing a relief valve for growing national tensions during the Civil War.

Official U.S. survey teams were sent west to report on resources and tribal relations. Foremost among them was John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran who had lost his right arm in the Battle of Shiloh, but it didn’t impede him from exploring the Green, Yampa, White and Colorado rivers. By the early 1870s, cattlemen began grazing their herds in Brown’s Park and the Meeker area in what would become northern Colorado.

As permanent settlements became established, some officials in the federal government became aware that Western lands had no protective management. They garnered congressional funding for a particularly seasoned survey team under the leadership of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, who would later win acclaim for surveying Yellowstone. Hayden’s 1873-74 visits to the Gunnison Country, the Roaring Fork Valley and the White River produced maps that would later draw hordes of mining prospectors into Ute lands in the late 1870s.







john fremont

John Fremont, an Army officer and explorer, took part in an 1845 journey that crossed Tennessee Pass from the Arkansas River basin and then followed the White River into Utah. 




Hayden and his “Rover Boys,” including renowned photographer and artist William Henry Jackson and geographer Henry Gannett, for whom the highest peak in Wyoming is named, summited, triangulated, mapped and named most of the major peaks that we know and climb today. The scientific acumen that this team provided was monumental in their understanding of geology, flora and fauna. Hayden correctly referred to the Elk Mountains as an example of an “eruptive range” and a “geologic jumble” for the upheavals he recognized. Described as “tall, slender, with soft brown hair and blue eyes,” Hayden, a consummate geologist, was given a nickname by the Utes that translated to “crazy man who runs around picking up rocks.”

A letter from Rover Boy J.T. Gardner to his daughter in New York state characterized what must have been a crowning moment in history to witness a pure wilderness: “We are in full tide of successful career camping almost every night at 11,000 or 12,000 feet and climbing peaks 14,000 feet and over, their tops overlooking crested ridges and grand rock-walled amphitheaters where old glaciers were born, I cannot tell you how I am enjoying this wonderful region. … What a sweet sight. … The terrible grandeur around me here where life is represented by the grim bears crawling along the edges of perpetual snow fields or the mountain sheep scaling the shattered crags.”

In a later letter, Gardner described the party’s discovery of Mount of the Holy Cross where a horizontal ridge and vertical couloir form a snow-filled cross. “We are undoubtedly the first who have ever reached this peak. I do not feel in the least over-fatigued and am very well and strong.” Enduring an early-winter storm, Gardner wrote: “On this climb I wore four heavy shirts and a thick buckskin coat. The snow blew so that I had to wear spectacles to protect the eyes.”

Hayden spent 20 days nursing a sick member of the party at the base of Mount Sopris while his party explored the Crystal River Valley, with Jackson photographing it all. Unfortunately for history, Jackson’s load-bearing mule stumbled and fell into the Crystal River, breaking the glass plate negatives. All photographic documentation from that portion of the survey was lost.

Nonetheless, Hayden’s Atlas of Colorado was published by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1877, featuring six finely drawn resource maps identifying forests, pastures, croplands, and regions of coal, gold and silver. These geologic maps became a spur for treasure-seekers eager to flood into Ute lands. And there lay the age-old conflict between European trespass on the Western Slope of Colorado still controlled by the Utes under treaties, later broken, that were doomed at keeping the peace.

Part III of this series, which runs Monday, looks at the early days of the federally managed forest reserve that became the White River National Forest, and how land management perspectives have changed over time. 

This story, and Aspen Journalism’s ongoing coverage of challenges facing local public lands, is supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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