Colorado’s public lands are poised to face a vastly different political environment in the coming year. 

With Donald Trump back in the White House and Republicans in full control of Congress, prospects of passing sweeping conservation bills could fade and federal agencies may push to extract more resources from public lands. 

While Colorado’s Western Slope — which saw the creation of President Joe Biden’s first national monument and actions by his administration to shield hundreds of thousands of acres from mining and drilling — could be affected, it may not be on the frontlines of such changes. 

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“What we are likely to see is a general move to more oil and gas development on public lands … and deprioritizing conservation and species protection,” said Michael Pappas, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Colorado will be carried with that current, so to speak. But the degree to which it’s going to impact Colorado specifically is possibly less than other states.”

A booming outdoor sports economy is likely to keep the core of Colorado’s public lands focused on recreation rather than energy extraction like drilling, mining or logging, Pappas said. And recent federal protections for the state haven’t faced the same degree of political blowback as in other states, like neighboring Utah, where actions from the new administration are more likely to be focused. 

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Still, conservationists are bracing for broader policy changes that could impact public lands across the Western United States, including in Colorado. 

Groups like the Denver-based Center for Western Priorities have already criticized Trump’s intentions for the Interior Department, which has been given direction to make good on his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.” They also point to Project 2025, a conservative agenda that makes recommendations for the next Republican administration, for signs of what could be in store for some of Colorado’s most fought-over areas.

The 922-page document calls for expanded oil and gas extraction, downgrading national monuments and remanding much of the president’s ability to protect public lands to Congress. 

A section written by conservative lawyer William Perry Pendley, who served as head of the Bureau of Land Management under Trump in 2020, proposes revoking the protections given by Biden to the Thompson Divide, which withdrew nearly 222,000 acres of Western Slope land from future mining, oil and gas drilling for the next two decades. 

Project 2025 also lambasts Biden’s use of the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Eagle and Summit counties in 2022 — with Pendly writing that Biden and past Democratic presidents have “abused” the authority and that the Antiquities Act should be “repealed.” 

Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 — the brainchild of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — while on the campaign trail. Since his election, however, Trump has tapped several of its authors to serve in his administration. 

“It’s unclear how much of (Project 2025) the administration is really going to embrace or not, but it certainly seems to be consistent with the administration’s picks so far,” Pappas said. 

Conservationists, local officials prepare for rollback of Biden-era decisions 

Environmental advocates are preparing to defend a wave of recent conservation victories in Colorado — and they’re hoping public opinion is on their side. 

In a Colorado College survey of 436 Coloradans released earlier this year, 69% said they prefer that leaders place more emphasis on protecting water, air, wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities over maximizing the amount of land available for drilling and mining. 

The poll also found 84% were in favor of creating new national parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges, and tribal protected areas.

“There’s such huge support, I believe, across the country, but especially in Colorado for the protection of public lands,” said Kathy Chandler-Henry, an outgoing elected official in Eagle County, where the bulk of Biden’s Camp Hale National Monument is located. 

The designation, which protects more than 53,000 acres that has been home to tribal nations and was used by the 10th Mountain Division during World War II, is steeped in decades of community support that Chandler-Henry believes would be difficult to overturn. It’s also an embodiment of one of Colorado’s core economic outputs — recreation. 

“There’s always a lot of talk from other counties in the West that have a strong timber industry and strong oil and gas that are frustrated with the conservation side of things because they feel it could hamper their economies,” said Chandler-Henry, who serves on the public lands committee for the National Association of Counties. “But I’m trying to push this idea that outdoor recreation is also a strong economic driver. And it’s also extractive.” 

One of Colorado’s more endangered areas could be the nearly quarter-million acres of the Thompson Divide that were removed from new oil and mining development earlier this year, said Will Roush, executive director for the Carbondale-based conservation group Wilderness Workshop.

Roush’s group was a key leader in the 20-year battle to protect the “quintessential, Colorado backcountry” area, which spans the White River and Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison national forests. 

Roush said rescinding protections for the Thompson Divide could allow for new leases to pop up in places where previous agreements had expired or were no longer allowed. “So I think the threat is certainly there,” he said.

Pappas, the environmental lawyer, said while it’s possible Trump will work to bring back leasing on the Thompson Divide, most of the land that is desirable for mining and drilling has already been leased. 

“There is certainly demand for (leasing on public lands) politically. What is to be seen is if there is demand for this economically,” Pappas said. 

He looks to Alaska as an example. 

During the first Trump administration, the state’s long-protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was opened to oil drilling but received limited interest from oil and gas companies. According to reporting by NPR, the move attracted only three bidders, including the state of Alaska itself, while half of the offered leases drew no bids at all.

“In the end, the decision of whether or not to develop that land is in private control — we have many leased lands that aren’t actually developed,” Pappas said. “In some instances, this is just signaling, this is just a political message.”

Still, Roush said it’s not just the Thompson Divide that could see a push for new development. A wide swath of the state’s Western Slope could eventually fall under land management policies that shift federal priorities back to energy extraction. 

Rule changes could open more lands to drilling, mining 

Such far-reaching impacts will likely be driven by rule changes from within Trump’s Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management. 

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas interests across nine states, said she expects the next Trump administration will work to undo some Biden-era policies that have curtailed leases for drilling and mining on federal lands. 

Sgamma’s group is currently litigating Biden’s changes to Bureau of Land Management rules that created new conservation opportunities for public lands that have been managed for multiple uses, such as ranching and agriculture, drilling and recreation. 

Nearly 40% of Colorado’s public lands — 8.3 million acres — is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, most of which is on the Western Slope. The rest is largely owned by the U.S. Forest Service. 

The new rules treat Bureau of Land Management areas “as if they are not multiple-use but are preservation-only lands, and so it just doesn’t conform to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which is (the bureau’s) basic statute,” Sgamma said. “I think we’ll see a return to leasing in Colorado and see policies that potentially overturn some of the overreaching rules from the Biden administration.”

Pappas said Congress’ land policy act doesn’t give clear instruction as to what should be prioritized in a multiple-use area, whether it’s energy extraction or conservation, meaning federal agencies — and the White House — have wide latitude for how to wield that authority. 

Such rule changes are also likely to take years to implement amid a bureaucratic process involving notices, impact studies, collection of public comment and layers of review. 

“Those processes are unlikely to be fast,” Pappas said. “That’s not day-one stuff.”

On whether Trump follows through on recommendations in Project 2025 to revoke Biden’s Thompson Divide protections or shrink monuments under the Antiquities Act, Sgamma, who helped write the conservative playbook’s energy policies as it relates to public lands, expects that his administration will need to pick and choose what it pursues. 

Sgamma said reducing Biden’s 10-mile buffer around Chaco Cultural Historic National Park in New Mexico will likely be a higher priority than the Thompson Divide. Any fight over national monuments is almost sure to be centered in Utah, where lawmakers have been pushing for years to take more control of the state’s public lands from the federal government. 

During his first presidency, Trump shrunk the size of two Utah national monuments — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — in what amounted to the largest reduction of a national monument in U.S. history, a move that was challenged in federal court. Biden later restored both area’s boundaries in 2021. 

“Perhaps President Trump wants to push the boundaries and continue litigation on whether he has the power to reduce (national) monument boundaries,” Sgamma said. “That has not been tested in court. Perhaps President Trump wants to test that in court.”

Public lands bills may face a greater uphill battle 

In Congress, the chances of passing various land protection bills introduced by Colorado lawmakers could be slim after Republicans won a majority in both chambers. 

Bills like the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act and the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experiences Act have found support in the House under both Democratic and Republican control. But neither has advanced in the Senate, where, despite Democrats’ razor-thin majority, Republicans remain largely opposed. 

The CORE Act — versions of which have passed the House five times since 2019 — would expand protections to 420,000 acres of central mountain land, including the creation of new wilderness and recreation management areas as well as making the 20-year hiatus on future mining and drilling on the Thompson Divide permanent. Some provisions of the bill were folded into Biden’s Camp Hale designation. 

Republican Rep.-elect Jeff Hurd, who won election in Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District, which covers much of the Western Slope, said he hasn’t made a decision on how he would vote on those public lands bills should the legislation come up in the next Congress. 

Hurd said he wants to focus on multiple-use policies that keep public lands open for a range of practices, including agriculture, energy and outdoor recreation. 

“I have heard some concerns about some of the economic impacts that these designations would have and that’s something we’ll have to look at carefully,” Hurd said. “If we’re taking public land use off the table in a way that would prevent true multiple-use, that’s something that would certainly get scrutiny from me as a legislator.”

In Congress’ upper chamber, Sen. Michael Bennet is hoping to see action during the lame-duck period and is “actively trying to pass Colorado public lands bills in an end-of-year package,” said Larkin Parker, a spokesperson for Bennet’s office. 

This fall, Bennet unveiled legislation to safeguard more than 700,000 acres of public land in and around Gunnison County by placing different types of federal land designations to enhance protections for undeveloped and wildlife areas, manage recreation use and spur more research and education. 

Known as the Gunnison Outdoor Resource Protection Act, it would also withdraw more than 74,000 acres of lands in Delta County’s North Fork Valley from new oil and gas development.

Bennet, during a September news conference introducing his bill, acknowledged that despite support from local community leaders, it may be a struggle to secure the GORP Act’s passage under a Republican-controlled Senate next year. 

“There are people in Washington who have a bias against public lands,” Bennet said. “There are people who are ideologically opposed to adding one more acre of public lands.” 

Roush, the conservation group leader, said while he expects those efforts to face even greater headwinds in the next Congress, he’s hopeful the bills still have a path. The last major public lands initiative to become law — a sprawling conservation package named after former Michigan Rep. John Dingle — passed in 2019, under the first Trump administration. 

“It’s not impossible, and I think you have to play the long game,” Roush said. “We know these pieces of legislation reflect what the local communities want, they protect values and economies that are critical to Western life in Colorado. So call me an optimist, but at some point, I think they will pass.”