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Happy Anniversary Conservation Lands

Dayton Duncan

More than 200 years ago, in the midst of their epic trek across the continent, struggling against the relentless
current of the Missouri River in what is now Montana, the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition suddenly
found themselves in a geological wonderland.

White sandstone cli s rose hundreds of feet above them, lled with eerie formations carved from the soft
stone by thousands of years of erosion. Dark igneous rock outcroppings and lava dikes punctuated the
unexpected landscape. “As we passed on,” Lewis wrote, in what has become one of the expedition’s most
famous passages, “it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.”

Luckily for us all, unlike much of the land Lewis and Clark encountered, transformed by two centuries of
ceaseless change, this remote section of the Missouri remains essentially the same as the day the explorers
rst described it with such breathless wonder. You can canoe the same stretch of river and look up to see
exactly the same scenes of visionary enchantment.

The Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, along with Red Rock Canyon and Sloan Canyon
National Conservation Areas just outside Las Vegas, are now part of our National Conservation Lands,
o cially the National Landscape Conservation System, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.

These Lands are the newest permanently protected collection of public lands, joining national parks,
national wildlife refuges and national forests as another way Americans preserve their heritage by conserv-
ing at least some parts of the bounteous continent we inhabit.

The Lands can take you on the paths that created our nation – not only the route of Lewis and Clark, but the
trails pioneers followed to Oregon, or that Mormons took to Utah. They can bring you to landscapes of
breathtaking diversity: from Idaho’s Craters of the Moon (where astronauts trained for their lunar landings) to
Red Rock (200,000 pristine acres less than 20 miles from the neon frenzy of Las Vegas) and Sloan Canyon
(considered the Sistine Chapel of Native American rock art because of the size and signi cance of its great
many petroglyphs); from Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients (one of the greatest collections of Ancestral
Puebloan archeological sites) to Utah’s Grand Staircase Escalante (nearly two million acres of slickrock
canyons and red sandstone cli s). Like the much older national parks, these National Conservation Lands
also represent America at its best – an idea that a great nation preserves its most special, even sacred, places
for all people and for all time.

From November 12 through November 18, the Conservation Lands Foundation and its friends and support-
ers, followed by the Bureau of Land Management, will gather in Las Vegas to consider the future of these
Lands.

Having been set aside and designated for protection, this newest conservation system is still young and
vulnerable. The special interests that see these lands in terms of dollars to be extracted are still powerful.
The BLM itself still needs to codify and enforce policies to show it is capable of caring for the treasures
entrusted to it. And local “friends” groups such as the Friends of Red Rock Canyon - small, volunteer organiza-
tions comprised of citizens valiantly defending the places at their back door still need help in

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