Public Lands Threatened

Sunset in the Potrillo Mountains, part of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico.

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In late February, Ellen and I hiked into Aravaipa Canyon in the heart of Arizona’s Aravaipa Wilderness (BLM). A clear stream, unusual in the desert, flowed beneath cottonwood trees, leafed out to gather early-season Arizona sunshine. We disturbed a coati in one of them—it crept slowly to the ground and disappeared surprisingly quickly and a little comically into riparian vegetation. After a fun day of walking and exploring, we set up our tent under volcanic cliffs beside the stream and enjoyed miso soup, freeze-dried dinners, shortbread cookies, and a warm quiet evening under bright stars.

Volcanic cliffs above a side canyon in the Aravaipa Wilderness photographed during a February backpacking trip.

In mid-February, we car-camped with friends on the rim of the Kilbourne Hole, a volcanic maar crater in a remote part of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. We’d spent the day finding petroglyphs and evidence of Pleistocene mammals near a volcanic cone. Our campsite commanded a view across the crater to the Riley Peaks, three high points in the Potrillo Mountains, one of several desert ranges in the Monument. The site had clearly been enjoyed by ORV users, and we spoke with two friendly guys from El Paso in a side-by-side when they stopped to enjoy the view. They were originally from Quebec, and it was surprising to hear French so close to the Mexican border.

Ellen with our friends Steve and Beth Buskirk on the rim of the Kilbourne Hole in the Organ Peaks-Desert Mountains National Monument. February 2025.

Earlier in February, we camped with our Laramie friend, Ed Sherline, in the Uva Mountains near the end of his bikepacking trip around the Desert Peaks. He'd covered sixty miles a day for five days circumnavigating much of the Monument and was feeling (and looking) a little grizzled when we met him on his last night. It was cold at night, but sunrise behind the Organs merited an early wake-up to enjoy layers of mountains and haze in the morning light. 

The Organ Mountains at sunrise taken from a camp in the Uva Mountains.

Those are just three of many experiences I had on public lands in February. My life and the lives of many of my friends have been enriched by these lands for well over a half century. Going back further, my father's family loved the West, and tales of their trips from Dearborn, Michigan to the Tetons in the 1940s drew me to them starting in the late-1970s, changing the course of my life. How many American family histories have been influenced by our federal lands? How many of our lives have been changed?

My father, Ed, and his mother, Nelle, on a trip west from Michigan in the 1940s to visit Grand Teton National Park, at that time less than twenty years old. The photo was probably taken by my grandfather, Ken.

In the U.S. today, few issues are nonpartisan, but protection of public lands unites people from across the political spectrum. The freedom to vacation in National Parks, explore National Monuments, hunt and fish in National Forests, birdwatch in Wildlife Refuges, or wander through remote BLM lands is fundamental to our way of life, yet we win public land battles, never the war. Who are the legislators braying loudly for the sale or transfer of federal (our) lands even while their constituents (we) object?

Ultimately, they are driven by special interests that benefit from reduced regulations so that they can more easily exploit our lands for their profit, meaning that it’s worth their while to contribute campaign funds and pay lobbyists. Oil and gas, mining, timber, and large corporate agricultural interests profit while the rest of us stand to lose our heritage, our primary means of recreation, and our avenue for enjoying the open spaces about which Westerners, including many of those trying to take them away, wax poetic with stories of free-roaming cowboys and Big Sky Country. 

In 2024, Utah filed a lawsuit at the U.S. Supreme Court that would have required the federal government to sell or “dispose of” more than 18 million acres of our public lands in Utah despite Utah’s agreement upon being granted statehood to “forever disclaim all right and title” to federal public lands. Twelve states supported this attempt even in the face of broad opposition by the public, but many did not. Martin Heinrich, a U.S. Senator from New Mexico, where I live now, stood against this, declaring, "We must stand united against this un-American land grab to ensure that our public lands remain accessible and protected for future generations. Our public lands are not for sale. Full stop." Thankfully, early this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, a battle won while the war continues.

Ellen and our friend, Bay, admiring pictographs in the Bears' Ears National Monument established by Obama, shrunk by Trump, re-grown by Biden, and now vulnerable again. Of course, before Europeans, all lands in N. America were public. Cultural resources like these pictographs deserve to remain protected.

The Wyoming legislature was one of the supporters of Utah’s suit. I lived in Wyoming for nearly 45 years and spent countless weeks in its spectacular public lands along with many of my fellow Wyomingites of all political stripes. Recently, Wyoming legislators tried to pass a resolution transferring much of the federal land in Wyoming to the State. Fortunately, this resolution was defeated even in one of the reddest states in the U.S. underlining bipartisan support for protection of public land. Other efforts in Wyoming this year attempted to limit the right of private landowners to transfer land or land rights to the federal government. Many supporters of these measures in the Wyoming House are members of the Freedom Caucus. WTF?

Sunrise in the Honeycomb Buttes--BLM land in Wyoming's Red Desert. 2013.

Public lands continue to be threatened. NPS, BLM, USFS, and U.S. FWS employees are being fired, National Monument boundaries are in jeopardy, and special interests advocate for sale or transfer of our land. Many across our political spectrum are fighting these threats, but many others are complicit, and the war is never won. We can help by writing letters, attending rallies, donating funds, volunteering, and voting. Don’t let the few take away or degrade lands that belong to us all.

Gated and posted private ranchland adjacent to the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Private landowners have the right to keep people off of their land, but we don't want our public lands to become private and locked away from us.

Livin' in a Hot Place

 

An ocotillo in the hot New Mexico sun.

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In southern New Mexico and Arizona, the heat arrives in early June when the jet stream drifts poleward and high pressure creeps in from Mexico chasing the cooler air north. For at least a month until the monsoon begins, the sun drills down from cloudless skies and heat rises from the parched ground. With almost no humidity, the sun hits like a hammer.  

When we were in Kashgar, China in 2006 during the oppressive heat of the Central Asian summer, locals carried beds into their yards to sleep. In the warm evening after the sun relented, Uyghur men gathered around outdoor television sets smoking and talking in the light of flickering screens while outdoor food markets came alive with families socializing and eating fat-tailed sheep cooked on spits over smoky fires and sprinkled with spices. 

 

My mother died in May on a hot day in Cedar Park, Texas where she’d lived since leaving the humid swelter of the mid-Atlantic. She spent most of her 90 years in hot places, growing up in Enterprise, Alabama before air conditioning was the norm. Her father helped build the Pan American Highway, toiling in the tropical heat of Central America, a cigar clamped in his teeth. Later, he owned a furniture store where as kids we’d leave the coolness of the showroom to explore the hot dusty warehouse, shared with a feed store where a pet monkey swung from the rafters. On the street, men sold soggy bags of boiled green peanuts in the heat.

 

Extremes at both ends of the thermometer breed story tellers and songwriters. In wintry places, they huddle around fires, entertaining each other, their backs to the cold. Where it’s hot, they languish on porches, facing outwards from the shade into the bright sun, making up new stories and retelling old ones, glad they aren’t out in that infernal heat.

 

Heat in literature and movies is at least as evocative as location, enveloping us in its pall. Characters sweat and chafe, and passions run high. A writer (unnamed at the link below) observed that: 

 

“Humanity ferments in the heat. People become visceral, bodies betray minds with their baseness. Morals loosen along with muscles. Secrets spill out of open windows, buttons come undone. And while in reality we might groan more with perspiration then passion, fictional characters can be far more comfortable getting hot under the collar without so much as a desk fan for relief.” (Penguin Books)

 

Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett wrote the iconic The Front Porch Song watching East Texas pass by during a hot summer in College Station while trying to avoid being Texas A&M students. “This old porch is just a weathered, gray-hair seventy years of Texas,” Keen wrote. He mixes humor and nostalgia during live performances, pausing mid-song to describe his landlord dragging him off of the porch into the heat to help with chores:

 

“…our conversations were only interrupted by my landlord, Jack Boyett, who was 70 years old at the time. He’d roll up in the heat of the day and roll down the window on his pickup truck just enough to be heard and not enough to let any of the air conditioning escape, saying, ‘Robert Keen, Robert Keen. Can you come help me for a minute? I’d spend the rest of the day mowin’ lawns, movin’ furniture, diggin’ skinny cows out of the mud out there at his old ranch.”

 

Heat rounds off the edges and stretches out the vowels. The Southern Drawl. The Texas Twang. Slide guitar. Fatty food. It’s too hot for crisp transitions.

 

Landscapes that invited exploration in the cool of winter become barren hellscapes in triple-digit heat. Soap tree yuccas shimmer. Sand burns bare feet. Dust devils spin across white hot playas. Snakes come out. We go into the mountains looking for cool mornings and places to swim, hoping not to be squeezed off the tops of them by the warming climate, lucky if we have the means to migrate. 

 

But the heat is part of living in a desert, and just as we embraced the Wyoming cold, we will learn to tolerate New Mexico heat, getting up earlier to walk, napping, trimming the cat’s fur, drinking ice water. A little heat is a small price to pay for a long mild winter, and even in the worst of it, the evenings are perfect if you stay far enough back from the bbq grill.

Uyghur men in Kashgar after the sun has left.

A Uyghur boy pushes fat-tailed sheep on a market day in Kashgar.

My mother, Barbara McCall, on her porch in Enterprise, Alabama with pets. She lived in hot places (with pets) her whole life, and even kept her apartment in Texas at 80 degrees when she could turn the heat up that high.

My grandfather, Oscar Lee McCall, at his desk in his furniture store in Enterprise.

The view into Mexico from the Outer Mountain Loop in Big Bend National Park. Big Bend was so hot when we were there in February 2022 that we started hiking well before dawn. Later in the year, people routinely succumb to the heat.

A porch in West Texas.

Rollin' Smoke BBQ in Anthony, Texas.