While the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act marks a long period of environmental management, many questions remain about how the act is preserving water and keeping the designated areas "untrammeled by man."

The Wilderness Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, protects pristine federal lands from activities like road-building, development and motorized vehicles. The original bill set aside 9.1 million acres of federally protected wilderness in national forests.

But the question of the act's success, especially in how water is managed in the wilderness areas, remains.

About 14 percent of water runoff in the contiguous United States land area comes from National Forest lands, much of it collecting as snow on some of the 106 million acres of formally designated wilderness land.

Many of these areas are situated in the headwaters of major drainages that provide water -the U.S. Forest Service estimates the water is worth about $3.7 billion annually - to downstream cities and metropolitan areas like Denver, whose residents receive water from transcontinental pipes pushing water from the wilderness-dominated Western Slope.



Water's value and who owns it

In Summit County, Forest Service hydrologist Greg Laurie has launched an ambitious stream survey project, part of implementing the revised White River forest plan. Undisturbed streams in wilderness areas provide important reference values, to measure human impacts in more developed areas, Laurie says.

Issues of water quality and quantity are those most commonly faced in the context of wilderness management, from designation of new wilderness areas to management and maintenance of existing dams and diversions on wilderness lands.

Water quantity in wilderness areas relates to the broad question of water rights and, more specifically, to local rights versus federal rights.

The 1964 Wilderness Act may have generally recognized the value of water in the wilderness, but it did not provide specific water rights for lands within the National Wilderness Preservation System. Though water may be taken for granted in wilderness, legislation has not mandated a water guarantee - in fact the Wilderness Act includes an emergency provision for presidential authority to enable wilderness area water development.

The provision has rarely - if ever - been used, says Steve Smith, a Colorado-based water expert with The Wilderness Society.

"But you never knowâ you get in your fifth, sixth year of droughtâ" Smith said before trailin off, preferring instead to focus on a collaborative method of tackling water and wilderness issues. He pointed out that intact watersheds in protected wilderness areas provide significant benefit to downstream communities.

The history of water rights is wilderness areas is one long balancing act, with the underlying premise that a reservation of land by the federal government at least implies water rights sufficient to sustain the purpose of the reservation.

But how do the water rights shake out? A proposed water development - a new mine in the high country - could degrade the quality wilderness water which was supposed to be untouched, according to the wilderness act. A proposed diversion could impact habitat for rare boreal toads.

In one recent case, the town of Gypsum, west of Vail, challenged the designation of the new Red Table Mountain Wilderness Area, fearing an impact to the municipal water supply.

Such cases have been tested in court at the very highest levels, and are subject to varying interpretations by the both the judicial and executive branches of the federal government.

Nevertheless, the Forest Service holds by the basic idea that a wilderness area should have associated water rights and be protected by upstream threats. Specific pieces of wilderness legislation generally include such provisions, but Congress does not always listen, says Steve Glasser, a top Forest Service water expert based in Washington, D.C.

"Our policy remains the same," Glasser says. "We would file for wilderness water rights through a state adjudication process if there's a threat upstream. Other than that, we rely on the Wilderness Act," he adds, explaining that the Forest Service tries to get Congress to explicitly state its intent with regard to water rights in new designations.

But Glasser says he can only think of one instance - a Nevada wilderness bill - when that was done.

Michael Francis, a top Wilderness Society leader, frames it in this way: "The water buffaloes want it, we want it to stay there. Consumptive users are pushing hard to block water rights associated with wilderness," Francis says. "The real issue is protecting the water for wildernesss. It defies logic that when the Forest Reserves were created, Congress did not intend to set aside a water right at the same time," he added. "We squandered our water resources by letting states take control."

In the end, wilderness water rights issues are often negotiated on the local level - and that may not be a bad thing, according to Smith, who has seen the collaborative process work on the ground.



Recent science

Researches are monitoring chemical changes in high mountain lakes that are part of the Boulder municipal watershed. Dr. Mark Williams of the University of Colorado is a leader in the field, documenting increasing levels of nitrogen in lakes after 20 years of monitoring.

The alpine wilderness zones are particularly sensitive to impacts, he explains, describing thin soils and relatively sparse vegetation that allows pollutants to first accumulate on the surface and washed off into streams and lakes.

"There's very little buffering capacity," Williams says, adding that snow can be thought of as a pollution bank, storing contaminants over the course of a winter and then releasing them in a short period of time, in some cases measurably changing the pH of the water during spring runoff.

It's clear from monitoring the composition and abundance of diatoms in the water that the acid rain and snow has already set into motion an ecological cascade, with as-yet unknown consequences, Williams explains.

"Wilderness Areas have a mandate to stay pristine," says Williams, himself a former Forest Service wilderness ranger. "We're altering them with air depositions."

Williams says research of lake-bottom sediments show a major switch in the algae communities in the 1950s - about the time the airborne pollution - mainly nitrogen - started to show up in measurable concentrations.

"We're starting to push the first dominoes that affect the ecosystem. We can unequivocally say it's not as pristine as before the 1950s," Williams says.

Williams calls the changes a warning flag that could signal impacts to fish populations, then even vegetation in the terra firma.

"The first to go is the aquatic system, then the tundra and then the forested systems," he says, offering plenty of food for thought as the United States considers its next 40 years of wilderness management.



Bob Berwyn can be contacted at berwyn@mountainmax.com.