Public Lands

The Interior Department is reopening lease sales on public lands. However, the agency announced that it was 80% less acreage than the oil and gas industry nominated for leasing. The Interior also increased royalty rates.

A housing crunch in the West has some looking to public lands as a solution… and a place to live.

Landowners in Wyoming want damages from four Missouri men who went over a corner where four pieces of land meet: two private, two public. They didn’t touch the private land, but landowners argue they still went over it and, therefore, trespassed.

A new analysis finds the Bureau of Land Management has been renewing grazing permits on millions of acres of public lands without performing environmental reviews.

The idea of selling public lands is sacrilegious in much of the West. In Southern Nevada, the affordable housing crisis may be an extenuating circumstance.

Camping on public lands in the West has skyrocketed in recent years, according to a new analysis from the conservation nonprofit Center for Western Priorities. During 2020's peak season, 57% of all reservable campsites on federal lands in the West were occupied — an almost 18 percentage point increase compared to 2014. While the pandemic drove high turnouts last year, numbers were climbing even before that.

It found that average occupancy rates at campgrounds in the West dropped by 1.3 percentage points when smoke was bad — driving concerns about public health.

Colorado is a global leader in preserving dark night skies. This year alone, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Mesa Verde National Park and four mountain towns were recognized for their stargazing potential. While these remote locations are good at preserving their starry views, residents of the Front Range would have to help out the state's largest national park.

Colorado's ski areas spend about $25 million a year in fees in exchange for being on federal land, and only a small fraction returns to those forests for management. The Denver Post reports on a bill recently introduced in Congress that would allow forests that bring in large amounts of ski fees to allocate some of that money for staffing.

A federal judge ruled in February that the National Park Service's commercial filming fees were an unconstitutional violation of free speech. Now, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso has introduced a bill that would waive those fees on all federal public lands, no matter the distribution platform.