Sean Pond was around a small town of his native western Colorado when he spotted a man in a blue ball cap. Above the bill were the words at the center of an ongoing controversy: “PROTECT THE DOLORES.”
Pond approached the man.
“He said someone at REI just gave it to him and he liked it,” Pond recalls, “but he had no idea what it meant.”
Composed of several local and national conservation groups, the Protect the Dolores Coalition is pushing for nearly 400,000 acres of public land spanning Mesa and Montrose counties to be Colorado’s next national monument. The proposed Dolores Canyons National Monument would bring new protections and management to the red rock landscape beyond the legendary river corridor.
Conservationists for decades have eyed that remote, embattled corridor as worthy of a wild and scenic river designation and, more recently, as a national conservation area.
“The values extend also to the surrounding canyon and mesa country,” said Scott Braden, the Grand Junction-based director of Colorado Wildlands Project, a leading proponent of the national monument.