As a big game hunter, co-chair of the Colorado Backcountry Hunters Anglers and member of the Colorado Mountain Club, over the years I have climbed all of the fourteeners in the San Juan Mountains and hunted elk in the West Hermosa Creek area, and I’m concerned about the few remaining wild places in our state, like the proposed 51,000-acre West Hermosa Creek Wilderness.

One of the things I’ve learned from these experiences is that there are few places left in Colorado very far from a road or trail. Today in Colorado, only 8 percent of our national forest acreage lies beyond 1 mile of a road (only 4 percent for BLM lands). Nancy Berry, an employee with the San Juan National Forest says, “There are a bazillion logging roads up here.”

As of the late 1990s, across the 1.8 million acres of the San Juan National Forest, there were already 2,817 miles of roads and 1,125 miles of trails. Today, the San Juan Mountains are filled with enough dirt roads to stretch from Durango to Honolulu and back again. More than 6,400 miles of road lace San Juan public lands, and more than half of those miles are either user-created (i.e. illegal) or no longer maintained.

Clearly, there is no shortage of roads or trails in Colorado’s national forests and other public lands. Some of the most vocal opponents of protecting wilderness and roadless areas do so because they are unwilling to expend the effort required to experience them and learn from them as our forefathers did. They seek to make wilderness and roadless area travel easy by opening them up to motorized vehicles or other mechanized means.

Durango-area outfitter Mike Murphy has an answer to people who oppose preserving roadless and wilderness areas in national forests and say public land should be open to everyone driving or riding anything: Look at the satellite images of this corner of Colorado on the internet. “You take a look at that map and look at all the roads in Southwest Colorado and Northwest New Mexico, and you won’t want to see another road for a long time,” Murphy says.

Murphy knows that roadless and wilderness areas are vital to the hunting and fishing future of Colorado. “The viability of nearly every outfitter here depends on roadless areas,” Murphy said. “They are the heart and soul of our country.” From the standpoint of big game hunters and wild trout fishermen, the amount of key habitat being lost each year on public lands in Southwest Colorado and elsewhere is making the American hunter and angler an endangered species.

Places like the proposed West Hermosa Creek Wilderness Area are a shrinking oasis in a rising sea of roads, trails and drilling rigs. The state of our public lands watersheds, wildlife habitat, and the species that live there should be everyone’s primary concern. If that means letting the mountains reclaim some roads and trails, so be it. All public lands users (hikers, climbers, anglers, OHVers, mountain biker, and hunters) should be willing to sacrifice a little today to ensure future generations of outdoorsmen and women have the same backcountry opportunities we have.