After eight years of working together with diverse partners, the Owyhee Canyonlands finally has the protections it deserves. But we aren’t through yet.
The Wilderness Society worked for eight years to get permanent protection of the Owyhee and its spectacular canyonlands. Now we’re working to ensure those safeguards stay put.
John Robison, Craig Gehrke, Bill Sedivy and Edwina Alley, Idaho Statesman
Feb 8, 2011
Excerpts:
Idahoans love the wide-open spaces of the state’s high desert lands and are poorly served by Gov. Butch Otter’s rhetoric attacking the Bureau of Land Management’s wild lands policy.
While poking the feds is always popular in some Idaho circles, the governor’s recent statements run counter to the interests of thousands of Idaho hunters, hikers and river runners who use this land and care deeply about it.
People throughout Idaho rallied to add 517,000 acres of our state’s rugged Owyhee Canyonlands to the National Wilderness Preservation System in 2010, breaking a generation-long drought of wilderness designation in Idaho. During the previous 30 years, not a single acre of wilderness had been designated in Idaho -- despite the fact that the state has more candidate wildlands than any state outside Alaska.
It took eight years of negotiations, but finally Idaho’s magnificent Owyhee Canyonlands are permanently protected as Wilderness. Explore the splendor of the magical Owyhee Canyonlands in our Wilderness Magazine piece below. And to read more great articles like this one, join The Wilderness Society today and get Wilderness Magazine as a benefit of membership.
