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Gnawing The Bone

The HD Mountains, oil and gas, and cashing in our children's children

By Ken Wright

"The little things? They aren't little."

- John Zabat-Zinn

I'll admit it: Even after living in and wandering around Colorado for more than 25 years, I hadn't been there before. And even after some recent visits, I have to say that I haven't been deep into the heart of it, or even seen much of it.

But my point is: I don't need to.

The HD Mountains fall away from the southwestern corner of the San Juans like a dangling foot. Low and rumpled, never rising anywhere near treeline, they stand like choppy water between the Piedra River on the east and the flat plain of Florida Mesa on the west, finally pinching out on the south on the shores of Navajo Reservoir, the sunken middle trunk of the San Juan River.

On the north, looming over and dwarfing the HDs, rise the massive ramparts of the greater San Juan Mountains - a landscape of ragged, jagged, snow-field-patched peaks and green, stream-laced alpine valleys. Dramatic and charismatic, the San Juans are given their due by being largely protected in perpetuity under the shield of the Wilderness Preservation Act, as the Weminuche and South San Juan Wilderness Areas.

As a relatively little landscape - only about 40,000 acres - the HDs remain little-known, little-appreciated and little-visited. Few people outside of southwestern Colorado are aware of their existence, and even those who do live here mostly know them as the area of rolling hills south of the highway when driving U.S. Hwy. 160 between Bayfield and Pagosa Springs.

Little known, maybe; but they are also, remarkably, and importantly, little developed. In fact, RARE II, a government study in the late 1970s that inventoried the remaining roadless areas around the country larger than 5,000 acres, found 23,000 acres of the HDs qualifying as official Roadless Area designation. Other surveys claim as much as 40,000 acres - all but the outer foothills of the HDs - as de facto roadless area. Still, despite the RARE II findings, the Forest Service chose to not nominate the HD Mountains for protection when they had a chance under the Wilderness Act of 1980.

But lack of designation does not mean lack of value. Even though it is, by Colorado standards, a small range of mini-mountains, the HDs are vital to wildlife in southwestern Colorado because of their mostly undeveloped and largely roadless nature and its unique mix of climates. The mountains, reaching only about 9,000 feet at their highest, are home to blue spruce, Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, as well as pinion-juniper, scrub oak and sagebrush. As such, the region provides healthy low-elevation wildlife habitat - a rarity, as this type of terrain is also prime real estate in a booming market. As a roadless area, the mountains serve as an undisturbed migration corridor linking the wild high country to the north with wintering grounds in the high desert to the south. The Forest Service even closes public roads in the area during the winter to create protected, quiet space for wildlife during this critical, sensitive time.

Recognizing these values, the 6,000-plus-acre Ignacio Creek drainage - the roadless heart of the roadless HDs - has been proposed as a Research Natural Area because of its pristine condition. Ignacio Creek flows south, onto Ute land, so the general public has not had access to the area. If they did, though, they'd find a valley harboring a legacy: stands of ponderosa that have never seen ax or chain saw (the vast majority of ponderosa pine in southwestern Colorado were logged and shipped away in the 19th century), including one stand of more than a square mile of several-hundred-year-old trees. Also, since the area hasn't been pierced by a road, the drainage is free of noxious weeds and non-native plants, and is home to two threatened species: the Mexican spotted owl and the Southwest willow flycatcher.

The area also contains at least 100 pre-Puebloan sites - which earned it a spot on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1983. Even the Southern Ute tribal council - no shy wallflower when it comes resource exploitation - voted to not allow development on its portion of the HDs, recognizing the area as a sacred site.

A little place with big values.

Being "little" in so many ways, though, also means the HDs - unlike their more majestic and popular cousins to the north - are little protected. And so, in May, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management opened the HD Mountains and its roadless area to oil and gas development.

The decision is the long-awaited outcome of the "Northern San Juan Coal Bed Methane Project." The project began after a 2001 proposal by six energy companies to drill 162 new wells and 107 miles of roads and pipelines in the northern San Juan Basin - an area of about 125,000 acres that includes the HD Mountains and Roadless Area, bordered by a northward-curving line running from southeast of Durango to Pagosa Springs and down to the boundary of the Southern Ute Reservation. (Included in this proposal was a road up Ignacio Creek for 24 wells and two compressor stations in the drainage.)

After five years of study, meetings and public input - 70,000 comments were filed on the draft Environmental Impact Statement alone, and five local governments passed resolutions favoring protecting the HD Mountains Roadless Area - the Final EIS was released in August 2006. Some of the issues cited in the EIS included property values, noise, visual impacts, tax revenues, water depletions, surface and groundwater impacts, gas seepage into domestic water wells, dying vegetation from seeping gas, harm to wildlife, the loss of roadless areas in the HDs, archaeological resources and air quality.

All good, valid, tangible, rational concerns.

All ruled not worthy of stopping oil and gas development, even in the HD Mountains, even in the HD Mountains Roadless Area.

All, therefore, missing the big point about this little area.

Presently, the area studied in the Northern San Juan Coal Bed Methane Project has around 300 coal-bed methane wells and 200 miles of access roads and pipelines. The HD Mountains themselves are mostly undeveloped, but have some 20 gas wells and 15 miles of access roads and pipelines, generally on the western and eastern edges of the range.

May's official Record of Decision is the final word on the issue. (For the time being, at least, as appeals have yet to be addressed - in May, a group including homeowners, a farmer, an outfitter, an archaeologist, conservation groups and Archuleta County, represented by Earthjustice, filed an administrative appeal to the decision. The appeal must be addressed by July 5.) The final decision approved 127 new pads and 93 miles of new roads and pipelines in the northern San Juan Basin. (In addition, there are proposed another 100 well pads and 30 miles of road construction on private land, outside of the decision's jurisdiction.) The decision also approves 22 pads and nine miles of roads and pipelines in the HD Mountains Roadless Area (which the Forest Service now lists as 20,111 acres, despite a recent "citizen's survey" that still claims 39,000 contiguous roadless acres - an area slated for 30 wells under the decision).

Although this ruling is down from the 79 wells in the roadless area that was approved in the draft EIS, and rejects wells and roads in Ignacio Creek (until, at least, the industry improves its methods of drilling on steep and unstable slopes), the decision nonetheless opens 25 percent of the HD Mountains Roadless Area to the oil and gas industry, and leaves the door open for more wells and road building in the future.

The oil and gas industry's coveting of the HD Mountains is not new. As part of the oil-and-gas-rich San Juan Basin, they are hard to avoid - although they're also hard to access, which is why the HDs remain mostly undeveloped and largely roadless this late in the oil-and-gas game.

The San Juan Basin is an area along the northwestern New Mexico/southwestern Colorado border approximately 100 miles long by 90 miles wide. The large bedrock bowl provides a natural catchment for clean and versatile natural gas - and not-so-clean-and-versatile coal. This coal, though - found mostly in the swamp-turned-to-stone bedrock layer called the Fruitland Formation - is also itself a source of a particular form of natural gas called coal-bed methane.

Traditional natural gas is free gas held in place by impermeable bedrock layers, but coal-bed methane is chemically bound to coal. Because of its large internal surface area, coal stores up to seven times more gas per volume than a traditional gas pool. But while tapping traditional natural gas means essentially putting in a well and letting the gas rise, coal-bed methane production involves pumping massive amounts of groundwater from coal seams to release the gas, which leads to some unique challenges. Large amounts of groundwater, which is usually saline, must first be pumped from the coal seam to free the gas. Once freed, though, methane gas can then migrate upward, following either bedrock fractures or the well's borehole itself, into homes or other aquifers. Also, once this dirty water - called "mud" - is pumped to the surface, it needs to be stored and disposed of, requiring additional facilities, activities and impact areas, and sometimes leading to more areas harmed by accidents and contamination.

Today, the average American household burns 50,000 cubic feet of natural gas each year. Looking to meet this demand - and backed by a tax break for developing "unconventional" energy sources - there has been a boom in coal-bed methane as a source of natural gas since the mid-1980s. Coal-bed methane now accounts for nearly 10 percent of the country's natural gas production; by 2000, the San Juan Basin already accounted for some 4 percent of the country's natural gas production and had become California's single largest supplier of natural gas. More than 25,000 wells were drilled in the San Juan Basin between 1921 and 1995; today there are more than 20,000 active wells in the Basin, and another 15,000 are planned.

The HDs themselves stand near the Fruitland Outcrop - where the Fruitland Formation reaches the earth's surface on the rim of the big bowl of the San Juan Basin - which means that here the gas held captive in the coal seam sits at a relatively shallow depth. For this reason, in the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey first identified the HDs as having potential for oil and gas development. In response, the Department of the Interior opened the mountains for leasing from 1974 to 1984. Most of those leases, though, were never developed because of the rugged, steep terrain and the remote locations. Those that were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in the Saul's Creek drainage, east of Bayfield, and in the low foothills surrounding the mountains, were often met with protests and civil disobedience from a coalition of farmers, ranchers, hunters, backpackers and wilderness advocates.

The main reason the oil and gas industry has thus far avoided the HDs, though, is because they are small in another way: They sit on top of just a little bit of natural gas. The HD Mountains are estimated to hold 87 to 118 billion cubic feet of extractable gas - less than the U.S. consumes in two days.

But now the oil and gas industry wants at the HDs because, when it comes to oil and gas, we're down to the little things. It's down to gnawing the bones.

Although production and development will continue for 30 or 40 years, most of the rest of the San Juan Basin has been tapped. According to the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission, between 2003 and 2005 the average take per well in the region declined 10 percent and total production fell 3.5 percent. Red Willow Productions, the Southern Ute Tribe's gas leaser and developer, first reported evidence of a decline to the Tribal Council in 1989.

I put these facts up there not for any sort of sign of coming cataclysm or indicator of any dramatic trend - but to point out the obvious: Oil and gas, like any "reservoir," any limited resource, is there, gets used, then is done.

Just like wild country. Like roadless country. Like the HDs.

The other obvious part, therefore, is: We're going to have to adapt to the end of natural gas at some point - and we will, because we're smart, resourceful, creative people. So the question then is: Where do we draw our lines? Where do we say, Enough - the inevitable is coming, so we stop here, we change now?

I say: How about we stop at the edge of wild country? At roadless country? At the HDs? (And Hermosa Creek Roadless Area, and Mamm Peak Roadless Area, and all the other remnants.)

Look, I understand about law and management plans and the EIS process. But this isn't about due process or legality or economics or rights or even energy demand. This is about this: We are now gnawing the bones - the bones of our ancestral landscapes, and the bones of our unborn children. Now this is about something else. Now this has to be about something else.

Now the question is: Just how desperate are we?

Now the question is, not is it legal, not is it economic, not even is it feasible - now the question is, What are we leaving? What are we not doing?

And to do that, we need a consideration - even for a little-known, little-visited, little-appreciated little place like the HD Mountains - that goes beyond law, plans, economics and technology. We need a reason to draw a line around the bones that are left: I argue, we need to break the trance of our own present time and forge a re-enchantment with our children's children.

And for that, more than the glamorous, dramatic, well-known and well-protected landscapes, the bones matter. For the future, the little intact places that form the support skeleton of the world matter most. They're all we have left.

And for that - for them, those who will come after us, after the gas is gone and the world has been remade - we need to be willing to say, Enough. We will make the changes we will need to make someday anyway right now.

We need to be willing to say, Enough. There are some things we will not gnaw to death just for ourselves.

I realize this perspective lies outside the letter of the law, the math of profiteering, and the ability of technology to breach, but it seems to me that the HDs are the the living bones that keep our countryside structurally sound, healthy, alive. Just ask the elk, the deer, the bear, the Mexican Spotted Owl, the Southwestern willow flycatcher. Ask the last of the grandfather ponderosa trees, hiding in the steep, deep valleysides of Ignacio Creek.

Ask our grandchildren's grandchildren.

To carve roads and puncture wells into the HD Mountains - whether or not we ourselves ever set foot in or drive our ATVs or trucks through those unglamorous hills - is like the crack addict raiding his kid's piggy bank for one more toke. It is not "like" - it actually is - us hydrocarbon drunkards raiding the family savings for one night at the bar.

It's gnawing the bones of our children.

Or, it's the place to say we have the courage, will power, forethought, wisdom, vision and respect to say, Enough. For them. For those besides us.

I have never been deep into the HDs. But I don't need to.

That is exactly why they're valuable.

Ken Wright is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest magazine and the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home and Why I'm Against It All.