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The O. Zone: Battle for public lands just now heating up, much like our atmosphere
Holy Cross Wilderness photo by John Fielder.
Twice a year I have a story appear in the Vail Daily after it’s been out for a while in the pages of their glossy Vail Valley Magazine. The Internet, like Red Bull, gives the story new wings.
This spring I wrote about admired former White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams calling it quits as part of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) downsizing that some are calling the “chainsawing” of federal government. The updated article on Fitzwilliams appeared on the Vail Daily website on July 5.
The story was trending for quite a few days on the VD website, so it must have struck a chord at a time federal workers are under full-on assault from an administration that’s not so interested in governing. The idea, clearly, is to underfund and undercut civil service so badly that we never trust civil servants again.
The U.S. Supreme Court continues to overrule lower court judges who have found the executive branch is overreaching by holding back congressionally mandated spending and undermining congressionally created federal agencies. The judicial branch is tipping the scales of power and the power of the purse away from Congress and toward a rogue executive.
As federal workers from the Forest Service to FBI sweat Trump’s partisan axe falling – the one he infamously wrestled away from former DOGE chief and the world’s richest man Elon Musk – the legal battles are far from over. And the debate over the deadly consequences of ousting critical scientists, engineers, researchers and medical professionals from jobs that pay much less in the public sector is just getting started.
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently claimed in a press release that as of today the Forest Service has hired 99% of its 11,300-firefighter hiring target, the most visited forest in the nation – the White River – is down to just a few dozen employees. And many of the agency’s most experienced personnel, such as Fitzwilliams, have been shown the door.
All of this as the fire danger in and around Vail and throughout Colorado has been deemed “extreme” and our atmosphere continues to superheat with greenhouse gases that are causing a dramatic increases in extreme weather events.
For now, aided by strong objections from conservatives, the full-on sale to private developers of the public lands we all own has been stripped out of legislation Trump jammed through Congress cutting Medicaid benefits in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. But the sale of public lands spearheaded by Utah U.S. Sen. Mike Lee is ingrained in the grifter orthodoxy of Project 2025, so it will continue to keep coming back.
Right before my story on Fitzwilliams appeared in the Vail Daily, the Eagle County commissioners debated more restrictive zoning changes to the more than 80% of the county that is federally controlled – in other words, owned and therefore accessible to taxpayers like you and me. That would make it much tougher to actually build homes, mine, drill or otherwise industrialize our national legacy, and that is commendably forward-thinking on their part.
Now here’s a repost of the story on Fitzwilliams that ran first in Vail Valley Magazine and then on the Vail Daily website:
Out as forest chief, Fitzwilliams vows to battle for unique American legacy
Scott Fitzwilliams didn’t expect to last 16 years as supervisor of the White River National Forest that surrounds Vail and stretches all the way to Aspen and beyond. Such posts in the U.S. Forest Service that manages an area the size of Texas nationwide typically last just four or five years.
But Fitzwilliams stayed on in the 2.3-million-acre White River, the most visited national forest in the nation, because of his family in Glenwood Springs and the community connections he helped foster in mountain towns surrounded by the publicly owned forest from Silverthorne to Meeker.
Then came the government-downsizing administration of President Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with its deferred resignation program and an offer he could not refuse of early retirement at the age of 60. Fitzwilliams packed up his belongings and left his office on March 14 and will be paid through Sept. 30.
“I just think the public land system in America is what makes us a strong nation. It’s so American, as far as an ideal, and no one else is really doing it this way. To have hundreds of millions of acres in public trust for everyone? That’s a pretty cool job,” Fitzwilliams said in April. “So it’s certainly bittersweet leaving.”
Fitzwilliams is worried about the future of the more than 600 million acres of federally owned lands across the country but primarily in the West. With early retirements and staffing cuts in agencies such as the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife, he is concerned that services will suffer and the public will notice. This summer that might mean far less pumping of campground toilets, trails left uncleared, wildfire fuel reduction projects grinding to a halt, and forest roads falling into disrepair. Ultimately, that may change the way people feel about publicly owned and managed lands, he says.
“If we continue down the path we’ve been on the last two months, as far as the liquidation of the employees and the staffing and budgets, we’re not going to be able to do what Americans want for the public lands, and we’re not going to be able to maintain public lands the way they need to be maintained,” Fitzwilliams said in April. “And then down the road, do people say, ‘Well, if you can’t do it, maybe the states need to do it, or we need to divest some of them?’”
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has described America’s public lands as “assets on the nation’s balance sheets,”while proposals for liquidating those assets have ranged from selling them outright under Project 2025 to selling some tracts near towns that rely on national parks in order to house workers as part of budget reconciliation and tax-cut proposals.
“The fallout from a proposal like that would be extreme from all sides of the aisle,” Fitzwilliams said. “People love their public lands for whatever they do, and I don’t think they’re willing to give them up. Do I get concerned when I hear the secretary of interior calling them part of our real estate assets? That concerns me. I don’t see the next step being auctions, but through neglect or levels of management, could the conversation begin down another path? Sure.”
Utah U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican, tried four different times to include some form of forced sell-off of millions of acres of public lands in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill budget reconciliation act. But Democrats in Colorado and a few Republicans in other western states rallied to defeat those proposals before the bill passed the Senate on July 1 and headed back to the House. Lee has vowed to keep trying to divest public lands to industry and developers.
Doubling of visitation
Fitzwilliams grew up in Germantown, Wisconsin, the son of a police officer father and a mother who policed a household of a half dozen kids.
“When you have six kids on a cop’s salary, we didn’t go to Disneyland,” Fitzwilliams said. “We went camping and that was vacation, and so we were always outside, camping, fishing, hunting, all those things, and that stayed with me.”
After earning a graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin, Fitzwilliams in the early 90s landed a scholarship to study environmental planning and policy at the University of Colorado Denver, where he envisioned pursuing an open space planning position in local government. Instead, he “stumbled into an internship with the Forest Service” and “began a never-ending migration around the country” working for the federal agency.
He worked on the Shoshone National Forest in Cody, Wyoming, for about a year, then went to Jackson Hole for six years to work in the Bridger Teton National Forest, followed by “a real shock to the system” with a three-year stint as district ranger on the National Grasslands in North Dakota. From there he went further north for five years on the Tongass National Forest in Sitka, Alaska. Heading south again, Fitzwilliams served as deputy forest supervisor on the Willamette National Forest in Eugene, Oregon, before finally making his way back to Colorado in 2009.
In his time as supervisor of the White River National Forest, Fitzwilliams oversaw a massive surge in visitation from around 9 million people a year in 2009 to nearly 18 million in 2024. The White River is home to 11 ski resorts (including Vail and Beaver Creek), 10 peaks above 14,000 feet in elevation (including 14,009-foot Mount of the Holy Cross in Eagle County) and eight wilderness areas (including Holy Cross, Eagles Nest and Flat Tops surrounding Eagle County). Now the White River is being headed up by Brian Glaspell, who was named to the post in June.
Fitzwilliams answers quickly when asked for his favorite place to escape in the White River.
“I like to get away from folks, so I love the Flat Tops. I think they’re so special — the birthplace of wilderness,” Fitzwilliams said. “When Arthur Carhart was sent out there to lay out roads and cabins and came back after three months and said, ‘I got a better idea, just leave it,’ that’s where the whole ideal came from — the cradle of wilderness. What if we just managed lands for the way they are? It took 40 years after he suggested it for the Wilderness Act to get passed.”
Carhart (no relation to the clothing company) was a Forest Service employee sent to survey the area around Trappers Lake in 1919. A semi-retired freelance writer in the 1960s, his ideas that led to development plans for the Flat Tops being scrapped resurfaced during the lead-up to debate over the Wilderness Act that codified in Congress the concept of public lands left largely untrammeled by man, with no logging, grazing, mining, drilling or motorized vehicles.
The act passed in 1964, built in large part on the ideas of Forest Service worker Aldo Leopold, who cofounded the Wilderness Society and did the work that led to the nation’s first wilderness area, the Gila in New Mexico. Leopold was perhaps more of a purist than Carhart, according to some analysts, differing on the degree to which wilderness tracts might be exploited by outdoor recreation. And that’s a debate that’s increasingly relevant in today’s selfie-stick, GoPro push to access and memorialize even the most remote areas of the nation’s public lands.
Growth in deep backcountry visitation has been the steepest in recent years, Fitzwilliams says, as resorts areas become more and more crowded and people look to escape deeper into the woods.
Studies credit the White River National Forest with $1.6 billion of annual economic impact in Colorado, supporting more than 22,000 jobs, but that boom in use has brought damage to trails and trailheads, overflowing parking lots and a move toward fees and reservations to better regulate the crowds.
“It’s a really hard thing,” Fitzwilliams said on his last official day on the job in March. “Or we could make the choice that we don’t need those other values [solitude, wildlife habitat, watershed protection], and that’s OK. We can build more parking lots, build more trails, but you will give up things for that. That is an unarguable fact.”
It’s seems Republican President Teddy Roosevelt knew what he was talking about in the early 1900s when he wrote: “It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States, we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals — not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening.”
The so-called “Conservation President” who created the Forest Service, established more than 230 million acres of public lands between 1901 and 1909, enabled the 1906 Antiquities Act to create national monuments, and shot six bears on a hunting trip to western Eagle County in 1905 while simultaneously inventing the teddy bear for his daughter, Roosevelt knew we would eventually overrun (and overdevelop) our forests and rivers if left unchecked.
Not your father’s public lands
“It’s really clear that the federal lands that we grew up with are different,” Eagle County Commissioner Jeanne McQueeney said. “I could just go and I could camp. Now I have to make a reservation, and even in some dispersed camping areas you still need a reservation. And so it’s just changed. Scott did a great job of explaining why and being responsive to that.”
McQueeney is worried about staffing and funding cuts and what it will mean to lose so much institutional knowledge in terms of managing the public lands that make up more than 80% of Eagle County and are absolutely vital to the local outdoor recreation and tourism economy.
“I feel really badly that he’s taken early retirement, which is his option, but two years from now, it would’ve been just a different story,” McQueeney said. “There would’ve been a bow around Sweetwater. It would’ve been the celebration of the end of a career.”
The partnership between the Forest Service and the state of Colorado at Sweetwater Lake has been a multi-year battle that’s still far from resolved but appears to be making progress. Over the years, McQueeney credits Fitzwilliams with a spirit of collaboration on a whole host of thorny issues.
“He was just a really straight shooter, and you knew where he was coming from,” McQueeney said. “He explained it as best he could, what the situation was, and he was really collaborative. There was never any like, ‘Oh, that’s a surprise, we didn’t know that was going to happen.’ He always had us in the loop and was giving us as much information as he could share.”
For his part, Fitzwilliams said he hopes he’s leaving a legacy of partnering with the towns and counties that rely on the forest being managed properly.
“I’ve just loved working with the communities to solve problems, and that’s what I’ll miss most,” Fitzwilliams said. “That’s a rarity in a lot of other places I worked where if there’s something broken or there’s a trailhead that’s a mess and massively crowded and people can’t park, people would say, ‘What are you going to do to fix that Forest Service?’ Around here we created a sense of partnership.”
Vail Resorts, which leases Forest Service land for its ski trails and lifts at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone, confirmed the shared value of that collaboration:
“We are grateful for our deep partnership and collaboration with leaders at the U.S. Forest Service,” a Vail Resorts spokesperson said in an email, citing the National Forest Foundation’s Ski Conservation Fund. “In the past year alone, we dedicated $1 million to initiatives aimed at local trail restoration, infrastructure improvements, and conservation projects, all of which strengthen our communities and preserve the White River National Forest for future generations.”
Fitzwilliams is not sure what he’ll do next in his career, but he is certain there’s one line of work he won’t be pursuing: “I know one thing is I will be fighting, making sure that public lands stay public for the rest of my life. So whatever that might be, I’m going to make sure that that’s part of it, because they’re too important to all of us. They provide Americans with such wealth as far as quality of life and clean water and places for exploring and discovery. I don’t know what exactly it’ll be, but it won’t be selling insurance, that’s for sure.”
Colorado lawmakers, meanwhile, will be keeping a close eye on staffing and funding levels for the public lands that make up more than 40% of the state.
“Something that should concern every Coloradan, whether you’re supportive of the current administration or not, is the practical impact of DOGE cutting the federal government without any sort of consideration for the practical impacts of preventing and mitigating wildfire,” said state Sen. Dylan Roberts, who grew up in Steamboat, lived for a time in Avon and now lives in Summit County. “Managing our forests is a huge task of the federal government, and these cuts have put all of that work at risk and could have some pretty dire consequences for our part of the state, especially this summer. I’m hoping for the best, but expecting the worst based on things that have happened in D.C.”
At an April event in Eagle to listen to the concerns of local officials and emergency responders, Colorado U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a former Colorado governor and mayor of Denver, was asked about the push in Washington to privatize public lands.
“Over my dead body,” Hickenlooper said flatly. “Some things just shouldn’t be for sale. And selling our public lands, which is one of the greatest assets we have as a country, is unthinkable. Selling broad tracts of BLM land or national forests, that’s unconscionable. I’ll do everything humanly possible to block that. And I’ve talked to enough Republican senators that I can’t imagine that’s ever going to happen.”
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
David O. Williams
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