"Abundance" comes to the Colorado; Lee attacks public lands again; Billionaires buy real estate
And more tidbits
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Sen. Mike Lee, the MAGAt from Utah, appears to be vying to be the most anti-public land politician in history. The Trump sycophant was, of course, behind last year’s congressional bids to sell off public land to real estate developers and various other schemes. His latest assault is the Historic Roadways Protection Act, which passed through a Senate committee yesterday. It would block the Bureau of Land Management from “closing historical roads” and implementing travel management plans across a broad swath of federal lands in Utah until a federal court rules on thousands of county RS-2477 claims.
RS-2477 is an 1866 statute that allowed highways to be constructed across federal lands to access mining claims and homesteads. It was repealed in 1976 when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, or FLPMA. But FLPMA grandfathered in existing “highways” that had been constructed under RS-2477. In 2010 and 2011, Utah and its counties filed some 12,000 RS-2477 claims on about 35,000 miles of “highways” on federal lands, many of which are no more than old livestock tracks, in hope of gaining control of the paths so they can grade them, widen them, and even pave them. Settling all of these claims could take decades, meaning Lee’s bill would essentially be banning the BLM from managing travel on these areas forever.
Albert Bacon Fall, the New Mexico Senator and disgraced Interior Secretary under President Warren G. Harding still has my vote for the most anti-public land politician. But maybe that’s because Fall was actually an colorful character. Lee’s most interesting trait is that he holds Jell-O socials in his Capitol office.
One of the things I like about Page, Arizona, are the weird and ubiquitous contrasts that characterize the place. There’s the surreality of a lakeside city in the desert and the striking juxtaposition of golf course greens against stone. But perhaps the most jarring of all is the sensation of wandering Safeway’s aisles in a distinctly American town and hearing fellow patrons speaking languages from all over the world.
The Southwest attracts visitors from across the globe and, as a result, the increasingly dominant tourism and outdoor recreation industries have come to depend on international travelers. After Trump was inaugurated and implemented his America First creed, which tends to manifest as hostility towards every other nation, international travel to the U.S. dropped. That’s in spite of the fact that Trump’s economic policies have also caused the dollar’s value to plummet, making the U.S. a cheap vacation spot for Europeans.
Over the summer of 2025, that appears to have led to a drop in visitation to most national parks in the Southwest. However, visitation tended to rebound in the fall — perhaps due to lower gas prices — bringing the annual numbers back up to close to what they were in 2024.
One exception was Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which saw a huge drop in visitors last year, probably due to a combination of low reservoir levels at Lake Powell, a massive wildfire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and the drop in international visitation. But if tax revenues are any indication, it hasn’t hurt the overall tourism industry in Page that badly. Sales tax, hotel/motel tax, and online lodging tax revenues for January through September 2025 were up significantly from the previous year, according to the City of Page’s statistics.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
You’ll all be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that the uber-wealthy had a pretty good year in 2025, at least if high-end home and land sales are any indication. Luxury real estate sales in Jackson, Wyoming, reportedly are “surging” and “closed the year with exceptional momentum.” That’s the latest from The Viehman Group’s Jackson Hole Report, something I read when I want that lovely sensation of barfing in the back of my mouth.
Thirty-seven homes sold for over $10 million in the region last year, with 25 of them netting a sale price of over $15 million. The most expensive home sale was the Bar B Bar Ranch 4, with “multiple enhanced spring creeks for fishing,” which went for a modest $43 million.
But don’t worry! Overpriced luxury homes remain for the taking! For instance, you can buy a glorified quonset hut — er, an 8,583-square-foot steel, glass, and stone mansion — for $60 million. I know that seems like a lot, but according to Zillow’s BuyAbility calculator, the monthly payments would be a mere $320,673 after a $12 million down payment.
The median earnings for full-time year-round workers in Teton County are about $70,000 per year, which, according to Zillow’s mortgage calculator, could allow one to afford a $220,000 home with a $10,000 down payment. Meanwhile, the median home sale price in Teton County is about $3.8 million. And the cheapest home on the market is a 1970s, 644 sf condo listed for $695,000 (after a $30k reduction).
So, yeah, the West’s housing affordability crisis is as bad as ever, and the gap between the uber-rich and everyone else continues to grow.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The Abundance movement has reached the Colorado River, brought by an unexpected flag-bearer. The motorized recreation organization, BlueRibbon Coalition, is proposing the Colorado River Abundance Act. The vision, writes the coalition, is simple: “The American Southwest does not have to settle for managing a dwindling resource. It can choose abundance and start building.”
Building what? You ask. The answer: “A coordinated suite of desalination plants — offshore, onshore, and binational — supported by pipelines, pumping systems, brine-management facilities, and sediment removal programs.” These plants would crank out as much as 7 million acre-feet of water per year and deliver it to the river and/or directly to Lower Basin water users. That would allow more water to stay in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, thereby buoying reservoir levels.
And that would, among other things, improve boating and other recreation on those reservoirs, which is why the BlueRibbon Coalition is pushing the concept. In addition to creating funds for building a massive amount of water desalination and transportation infrastructure, the proposed legislation would also “elevate recreation to a coequal project purpose, establishing Recreation Modernization Plans for key reservoirs,” and pushing major upgrades to marinas, launch ramps, docks, trails, and shoreline facilities, “including a top-priority requirement to rebuild mid-lake services at Lake Powell with fast-track approval.”
That’s referring to the late Dangling Rope Marina, a remote floating boat refueling and restocking station in Dangling Rope Canyon, located about halfway between the down-lake marinas and Halls Crossing in the upper section of the reservoir. But low water levels and a damaged electrical system forced the National Park Service to shutter it in 2021, and it has not been reopened or replaced.
This abundance approach could work, in theory. But consider this: the largest desalination plant in the world, Ras Al Khair in Saudi Arabia, can treat about 306,500 acre-feet of water per year. It reportedly cost about $7 billion to construct, and uses about 3,626 megawatt-hours of electricity each day — that adds up to 1,323 gigawatt-hours annually, or enough to power tens of thousands of homes (or a handful of data centers). You’d need about 20 of those leviathans and a crapload of generation capacity to reach the 7 MAF/yr target of this plan, not to mention the extensive pumping and piping infrastructure to get the water to where it needs to go.
At some point, doesn’t it seem just a little bit easier, and a hell of a lot less expensive, to live within our means?
You can read the Colorado River Abundance Act here.
I will say that the Abundance approach is a step up from a, let’s say Archimedean, proposal to raise Lake Powell’s level by, wait for it, throwing a bunch of car batteries into the reservoir. If you’re wondering if this was a serious idea or not, just consider from where it came: The Sonoran Avalanche Center.
The SAC was sincere enough to write its own song for the occasion.
The sad truth is that once upon a time, a concessionaire on Lake Powell — and a subsidiary of Del Webb — actually treated the reservoir as its own personal dumping ground. Among the crap (literal and figurative) it disposed of in the water were about 1,000 lead-acid batteries. There’s no indication of whether the batteries displaced enough water to raise the surface level, or whether cleaning them up did the opposite. Probably not, according to this Reddit post, which estimates it would take 45.8 billion car batteries to fill up Lake Powell.
The Land Desk has been talking a lot about the effects the low snowpack will have on water supplies, Lake Powell, and irrigators. But it’s also hurting the ski industry — Vail Resorts reported a 20% drop in skier visits this winter — and that’s hurting the communities and workers that rely on that industry. The news clip below reports on how a Summit County food bank is being overwhelmed by new demand this winter.
The median home price in Summit County, by the way, is about $995,000.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
The Colorado Abundance Act tops the list of bizarre news for the week. Thank you.
Snow is in the forecast next week in Cali!
How did you ever find the Sonoran Avalanche Center?