Trump axes Public Lands Rule
Plus: The Hoback Report, a guest dispatch from Bob Frodeman
The Hoback Report
by Bob Frodeman
The weather has been odd this year on the southern side of the Yellowstone Plateau. And summer is setting up to be a little scary – low water, fire danger, and masses of tourists.
Hoback, Wyoming, is an unincorporated area of a few hundred people 14 miles south of the Jackson Town Square. It’s the poorest part of the wealthiest county, Teton, in the United States. The residents here stand a little apart – you see bumper stickers plastered with the message ‘Hoback Nation’. Some four million cars pass through our roundabout each year, mostly tourists, but also people driving to work from more affordable locales like Alpine and Pinedale. It’s also where the Hoback River joins the Snake just before it enters the Snake River Canyon, the site of whitewater trips offered by local outfitters.
The Hoback River runs 66 miles, starting in the slopes of the Wyoming Range around Bondurant, Wyoming. It still runs free – no dams (yet). For a western river it’s medium sized: base flows sit at 200 cubic feet per-second across the winter, with peak flows reaching perhaps 4,300 cfs around the first of June. The last 11 miles of the Hoback, from its confluence with Granite Creek, are protected, part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. My home looks up the Hoback: deer walk across the river in the winter and fishermen and kayakers come down all summer.
Waterwise, conditions were better here than across most of the West until the March warm-up. Teton County was even a bit above normal in snow water equivalent, or SWE, the typical measure of snowpack. But the snowfall was unevenly spread: lots of snow in the mountains, but dry in the valleys. For the first time since the 90s there wasn’t continuous snow cover in the valley across the winter, and we had a brown Christmas. The valleys saw five rain events this winter that melted what snow we did get at 6,000 feet. On the other hand, the warm, wet air meant more snow on the peaks. Jackson Hole Mountain Resort had the best snow in the West.
The heatwave of March was something to behold. On March 21 the temperature hit 71 degrees, 32 degrees above normal, taking a big bite out of the snowpack. The rivers grew five times from their base flows two months ahead of schedule. Daffodils appeared five weeks early.
On the good side, the winter has been easy on the wildlife. The antelope have been particularly hard hit by the winter of 2022-2023. That year the fawn mortality was nearly 100%, the result of three feet of crusty snow. Whether the antelope, deer, and elk will have enough browse this summer is an open question. Fingers are crossed for a good monsoon.
But even with a good monsoon this summer’s water situation is looking dicey. The local reservoirs, Jackson and Palisades, caught the early runoff, but Wyoming has rights to only 4% of the water in the Snake – senior water rights belong to Idaho farmers. The Bureau of Reclamation recently announced that Jackson Lake may be drained dry this summer to provide water to farmers across the Snake River Plain. We’ll learn more about Bureau of Reclamation plans at its meeting in Jackson in mid-May.
At least the ospreys were on time. The pair that inhabit the nest above our home appeared on April 1. They’ve been busy carrying sticks to replenish their nest. They spend the summer fighting with bald eagles, when they aren’t dismantling fish in the crooked dead conifer that juts out over the river.
This might sound idyllic, but there’s a wealth of political controversy in Teton County. You’d expect nothing less from a place that combines funhogs and billionaires, second homeowners and 4th generation ranchers, a county with 23,000 inhabitants hosting 3.3 million visitors a year. Teton County is a blue dot in a very red state. It creates a weird dynamic: the conservative Freedom Caucus politicians in Cheyenne are often hostile to us while also being dependent on our tourist-generated income (there is no state income tax). There’s also a jarring juxtaposition of the local and the international: the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, meets here each August, and the likes of JD Vance and Kristi Noem come to town for fundraisers. Real estate office windows are plastered with ads printed in both English and Russian. And the average price of a home here is more than six million dollars.
Bob Frodeman lives in Hoback, Wyoming. He is a co-editor of A Watershed Moment: The American West in the Age of Limits.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
The Trump administration today fully rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, a.k.a. the Public Lands Rule. The Biden-era rule was finalized in 2024 and endeavored to put conservation on a par with other uses of federal lands, such as grazing, mining, and drilling, primarily by making leases available for conservation or restoration projects. Now, before it ever even had a chance to be tested, it is being killed to better align the Bureau of Land Management’s regulations with the Trump administration’s agenda, which effectively is to return the agency to the days of the Bureau of Livestock and Mining.
This is yet another volley in the administration’s wholesale assault on public land management and environmental protections designed to benefit the extractive industries, while also sticking it to some of Trump’s many adversaries.
It’s unfortunate, sure, but the reaction from some environmental groups seems totally overblown and aimed more at triggering anger than truly considering the limited effects this will likely have on the ground. While I understand the need to rally the troops, so to speak, I’m not sure hyperbole and constant outrage is all that productive.
I’ve read, for example, that the administration is “stripping conservation” from public lands, and that this is simply a prelude to “dispose of these landscapes entirely.” It sounds a lot like the reactions from the extreme right when the rule was being developed: It would “eradicate grazing” and its framers were akin to tree-spiking eco-terrorists, that it would “lock up more land,” and then South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem called it “dangerous.”
None of this is accurate.
For the most part, the Public Lands Rule was a sort of reinforcement of the 1976 Federal Land Policy Management Act’s multiple-use mandate, which directed the BLM to manage public lands “on the basis of multiple use and sustained yield” and “in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values.”
The rule applied land health standards and codified a framework for establishing areas of critical environmental concern. Perhaps most significantly, it created a conservation lease system, which allowed entities to lease land to conduct restoration projects or conservation activities. While conservation tends to be considered a “non-use,” this flipped that to make conservation a “use” — one that could even generate revenues for the federal government. Whether this put conservation on a level-playing field with drilling, mining, and other extraction is unclear.
What is clear is that the rule could not be used to boot cows, drill rigs, mines, or any other existing use off public land. Conservation leases would only be available on land that wasn’t already leased or claimed. And it had absolutely nothing to do with public land conveyances, exchanges, transfers, or sales.
Since the rule didn’t stop extractive uses, abuses, or land transfers, revoking it won’t spark an uptick in grazing, drilling, or mining, nor will it lead to wholesale land selloffs.
What the Public Lands Rule did do was attempt to steer the agency — albeit gently — further away from its old identity as a sort of clearing house for extractive industries. It acknowledged the effects of climate change on public lands, and the landscape-health standards — if applied correctly — could have stopped the BLM from leasing out certain parcels for development. And, it seems to me, the conservation lease concept could have helped kickstart a land healing industry.
For example, a conservation group might have been able to lease out one of the vacated grazing allotments in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, and conduct restoration work on that land, such as replanting native grasses or removing noxious invasive weeds. Or perhaps using federal funds from the Biden-era Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts — which Trump and the GOP gutted — an entity could have taken over terminated leases in the mostly abandoned Horseshoe-Gallup oilfield, cleaned up the mess, and plugged and reclaimed the methane-oozing wells.
Tragically, the initiative was nipped in the bud before anyone could see how it might play out on the ground. Hopefully when this administration is over some semblance of democracy and reason will return to Washington and maybe not only revive this rule, but make it even stronger.
📸 Parting Shots 🎞️
A friend and I went down to Farmington over the weekend to check out some of the newish mountain biking trails around there. We rode the Boneyard trail, which crosses through some interesting country and, as is almost always the case when on public lands in the San Juan Basin, it wound its way around pumpjacks and other gaspatch detritus. It’s sort of like a journey through the energy-economic transition, given that the trails are part of an effort to diversify the fossil fuel economy with outdoor recreation.
The riding is good, though you might want to avoid the trails on a hot day, and sandy areas can bog down bikes with skinnier tires (I rode a gravel bike, which wasn’t a great idea). And, of course, afterwards we went to Blake’s Lotaburger for lunch. The following images are from the trail and downtown Farmington.
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Thanks. Totally agree with your take on the Public Lands Rule.