» take action: write a letter to Senator Salazar asking him to protect this special place

Arid landscape along the Roubideau canyon bottom photo © Jeff Widen

Roubideau Canyons are a secret treasure in the public lands in Montrose County, Colorado. Expansive vistas, perennial streams and diverse ecosystems offer outstanding opportunities for solitude, primitive and unconfined recreation, and educational and scientific study.  

Congress recognized the outstanding wild values of the Forest Service portion of Roubideau Canyon in 1993 by placing the Roubideau Area off limits to development and motorized vehicles. The Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) inventory in 1988 had already set aside the lower portion of Roubideau as a Wilderness Study Area (WSA) to allow Congress time to consider permanent Wilderness protection. Because the proposed expanded Roubideau Area spans life zones from upper Sonoran desert at 5,000 feet to sub-alpine at 9,500 feet, it provides a rare opportunity to preserve an ecologically diverse canyon that would greatly enrich the National Wilderness Preservation System.

The Roubideau Canyons offer grand sweeping vistas of winding canyons, rarely visited mesatops, the Grand Mesa, the San Juan and West Elk Mountains, but what makes them precious are little surprises: an outcropping riddled with holes like swiss cheese; footprints with five tiny toes by the stream; the crackling of mini-rockfalls as bighorn sheep scamper up a hillside; a rock with indentations where some ancient family ground its grain centuries ago; the pungent smell of sage after a thunderstorm; the refreshing ease of grass in the cottonwood shade by the water; your own personal art-gallery amphitheater -- intimate, though twenty-five miles long and a thousand feet deep.

Currently, part of the BLM section (consisting of the lower altitude lands) has temporary protection in the Camelback Wilderness Study Area; the rest of the BLM portion is protected only by an administrative road closure. The entire wild portion of this magnificent canyon system deserves to be preserved as a single unit, and expanding the non-motorized Roubideau Area would keep it wild now and for future generations.

» take action: write a letter to Senator Salazar asking him to protect this special place

» learn more: read more about the Roubideau Canyons area