BLM knits together federal, private interests in Ariz. plan

April Reese

In an unusual move, the Bureau of Land Management's new plan for the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness and thousands of surrounding acres extends the agency's management prescriptions to 7,800 acres owned by the Nature Conservancy and incorporates state wildlife goals in one of Arizona's most popular hunting grounds.

"The plan is meant to be comprehensive, and to resolve or address issues both within the area of contiguous public lands and in the greater Aravaipa watershed," according to the draft Aravaipa Ecosystem Management Plan, issued late last month by the Bureau of Land Management. A new federal management plan for southeast Arizona's Aravaipa Canyon Ecosystem accounts for both private and state wildlife and conservation priorities. Photo courtesy of BLM.

The 70,000-acre Aravaipa Canyon area, buttressed by 1,000-foot-high canyon walls cut by a stream that sustains seven native fish species -- including the threatened loach minnow and spikedace -- attracts hundreds of hikers and hunters annually. The area is known as Arizona's best bighorn sheep viewing and hunting area, and is also home to other popular game species, including white-tailed deer, javelina, turkey and quail.

"It has been recognized as one of the real biological gems of the state," said Tom Collazo, the Nature Conservancy's associate state director for conservation programs.

The area, about an hour's drive from Tucson and 90 minutes from Phoenix, is also becoming increasingly popular with off-highway vehicle (OHV) riders, prompting BLM to include its travel management plan for the area within the larger ecosystem management plan.

"We wanted to have a more defined vision for this whole area," said Diane Drobka, a spokeswoman for BLM's Safford, Ariz., field office. "It's trying to take a holistic approach instead of piecemealing it ... because a decision made for one resource might impact another resource."

The plan, following six years of public meetings, workshops and stakeholder negotiations, is one of only a few BLM management plans to adopt an ecosystem-wide strategy for managing a piece of the federal estate. Arizona BLM officials used a similar approach for the Muleshoe Ranch Cooperative Management Area, which, like Aravaipa, is abutted by TNC lands. And the agency has worked with the 178,000-acre Coronado National Forest on a regional fire management plan that also includes private landowners.

"When there's opportunity to blur those lines between public and private and even between agencies federal and state, that's better for the land, better for the resources," Drobka said.

Collazo agreed, adding, "I think this is the direction that public lands management is going." Sticking points

While almost all stakeholder groups agreed with BLM's overall management approach, they disagreed on some of the plan's specific provisions.

For instance, the plan's preferred alternative would leave most of the area's 225 miles of roads open to public use. But Trevor Hares, restoration program manager for the Sky Island Alliance in Tucson, said tighter restrictions should be placed on OHV access in Aravaipa, arguing that the vehicles are exacerbating erosion problems.

BLM did close routes that intruded into the wilderness area, where all motorized access is prohibited, as well as a few routes deemed to be causing erosion and other resource damage. But BLM left open several routes that the alliance wanted to see closed.

But Brian Dolan, a past president of the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society who hunts in the area, said BLM's plan strikes the right balance between resource protection and public access.

"The only roads they're closing are redundant ones," Dolan said, adding that he was glad to see BLM propose the construction of several short road segments around private inholdings to allow hunters to access federal lands that are currently blocked off.

The Sky Island Alliance also recommended that BLM include about 25,000 acres of lands with wilderness characteristics that could eventually be recommended to Congress for wilderness designation, but the agency rejected those suggestions. "We figured we could double the size of the Aravaipa wilderness and protect some of these amazing canyons that feed into the river proper," Hares said. "It's such an amazing landscape, we feel it needs to have better protection than it does now."

Dolan said he believes the wilderness area is the right size, but he took issue with BLM's decision to continue to prohibit prescribed burning in the wilderness area, which he says is crucial to clearing brush that has diminished bighorn sheep habitat. The ungulates need open areas, which allow them to see predators.

"That seems completely contrary to what we should be doing with our natural resources," he said. "In that area, there's quite a bit of brush encroachment. We're always an advocate of letting fire play its natural role in the ecosystem."

Federal managers have used controlled burns in several other wilderness areas, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota and the Scapegoat Wilderness in Montana's Lewis and Clark National Forest. But overall, prescribed burning in designated wilderness is still rare, in part because the government's hazardous fuels removal efforts have focused on higher-priority areas (Land Letter, Nov. 20, 2008).

In its comments to BLM, the Bighorn Desert Sheep Society will ask for a policy change on prescribed burning in the wilderness, Dolan said, adding that he hopes any revisions are done quickly so that the plan can be finalized as soon as possible.

"We've been waiting forever for this plan," he said. "I'm hoping it whistles through with a minimal amount of controversy."

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Source: Land Letter

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