Cottonwood Wash Acquisition
Dave Herrero
Preserve Manager
The Wildlands Conservancy
Gazing up from Cottonwood Wash, multi-hued sandstone walls, frozen red and white rainbow layers, patinated with desert varnish, seize your attention, drawing your eyes as they rise hundreds of feet to where they suddenly meet impossibly blue skies. Wind and water, working together with time, have sculpted dizzying heights, angular features, and sheer surfaces.
Walking along the rim of this canyon, where aridity allows for uninterrupted views of distant vistas, one steps through mysterious tumbled smooth stones, the reminders of a previous epoch when water ran here, and over the undulating white caprock of Tank and Bluff Mesas, before the earth abruptly spills to the floor below. This view from above, where one can look from canyon wall to canyon wall, and across the mesas towards the Abajo Mountains, stirs in the imagination impressions of lives once lived here. Ancestral Puebloan cultures thriving along the canyon floor, trading routes and wildlife corridors through labyrinthine passages, and streambeds and hanging gardens abundant with life.
I sat down recently with some good friends and watched the sundown from this rim. As we watched the burnt orange sun sink into the horizon, and shadows move in dream like shapes across far away cliff faces, we were all moved to silence, each of us reminded of Stegner’s words, “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
To conserve, protect, and restore this property, one more piece of the geography of hope, is a moral imperative. This private parcel controls access to tens of thousands of acres and dozens of miles of Cottonwood Wash and its tributaries within Bears Ears National Monument. It is a crucial piece of the puzzle for protecting the larger landscape, preserving the historical past of this region's First People, and forging a path towards a better collective future.
For these reasons, The Wildlands Conservancy is raising $2 million in private donations to acquire this magnificent 320-acre private property at the mouth of Cottonwood Wash. If the property is not acquired for conservation, it could be developed for private use, locking tribal members, researchers, scientists, and the public out of a critical portion of Bears Ears National Monument. Such a disastrous loss of access would prevent cultural site stewardship and ceremony, archaeological research, outdoor education, ecological restoration, and world-class recreation.
The Wildlands Conservancy is actively working with Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Bears Ears Partnership (formerly Friends of Cedar Mesa) to foster a collaborative relationship in Cottonwood Wash. In working together, we envision a preserve where respectful access, passive recreation, and educational programs coexist with the opportunity for traditional tribal ceremonies and ethical stewardship of both the natural and cultural landscape. It is our hope that these relationships will help establish a model for private land conservation in the future.
Together, with our partners and generous donors like you, we can protect this beautiful section of Cottonwood Wash, leveraging a small conservation acquisition into greater protections for and access to the third largest national monument in the lower 48 states. The protection of these heroic landscapes has always relied on the generosity of people inspired by the splendor of undiminished wilderness. Join us now to protect this land forever.