Biden Administration blocks mining on over 221,000 acres of federal land in Colorado

The Biden Administration’s America the Beautiful initiative aimed to ‘restore at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030,’ and their moves on federal land in Colorado on April 3rd inched them ever closer to that goal.

Today, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland signed Public Land Order 7939, effectively eliminating any and all mining operations on 221,898 acres of the Thompson Divide in central Colorado for a minimum of 20 years, as the US Department of Agriculture relayed in its press release. It’s a combination of over 197,000 acres of the Gunnison, White River, Uncompahgre, and Grand Mesa National Forests, over 15,000 acres of land under jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and over 8,600 acres of ‘reserved federal mineral interest under non-federal land,’ per the release.

As the Colorado Sun reports, this move was part of a promise made by President Biden back in 2022 when, on Tennessee Pass, he designated the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument. The Sun also points out a very important caveat that existing mining operations in the Thompson Divide region are not impacted by this move, meaning the Wolf Creek Storage Field will continue to be used as it has since the 1960s for storing natural gas under the direction of Black Hills Energy. Local efforts, including those by Red Lady fight for the High Country Conservation Advocates group, will surely continue to put pressure on the removal of those existing operations as well.

For those unfamiliar with the Thompson Divide, it’s an area of mostly unpopulated and pristine mountain country located south of I-70 at Glenwood Springs and directly west of Colorado Highway 133, with the Crystal River effectively forming it’s easternmost boundary at its northern section. It crosses each of Pitkin, Garfield, and Gunnison Counties, and is more or less the vast swath of land west of the towns of Crested Butte and Carbondale that isn’t already part of the West Elk Wilderness, Raggeds Wilderness, or Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. There’s a map of the area from 2022 on the BLM’s website, for reference.