Featured Image: Gabe Rovick
If there’s ever been a time for skiers to unite, it’s now. The ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ which proposes significant tax cuts while cutting government assistance programs as well as selling off millions of acres of public land, is currently up for vote in the Senate. If you are a resident of the United States, you are a public land owner and if you are a skier, this potential privatization could have huge consequences to our ski areas and backcountry access.
Many of our favorite resorts operate on and our go-to backcountry zones are accessed via public land, but language in this bill eliminates the requirement of agencies to disclose to the public when lands have actually been sold and to whom. Our ski experience as we know it could be forever changed should this bill pass and our favorite zones become privatized by the oil and gas industries.
Showing up to our local trailheads only to find “no trespassing” signs and destructive mining equipment. This also eliminates the checks and balances the National Forest Service provides to ski areas via lease agreements. According to BLM Maps, Mt. Baker, Mt. Bachelor and Mammoth all operate entirely on public land that could potentially be eligible for mineral leasing should this bill go through the Senate.
The House rejected the inclusion of selling public land in the bill due in large part to Montana’s Representative Ryan Zinke (R) and other Republican officials strongly opposing the tactic. As soon as the bill moved to the Senate, though, language around selling public lands was reintroduced by Senator Mike Lee of Utah (R) and Steve Daines of Montana (R) with substantially more land up for grabs. Lee is the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and Daines is the chairperson of the Subcommittee on National Parks. On June 11, Lee and Daines published the amendment without a committee hearing or vote mandating the sale of between 0.5-0.75-percent of all BLM and USFS land across 11 western states—excluding Daines’ home state of Montana.
According to the math done by the Wilderness Society, that could equal up to 3.3 million acres being sold off over the next five years. That number does not include the authorization of selling off much more, which is estimated to be around 250 million acres—over a third of all 640 million acres of publicly owned land in the United States.
There is a lot more to this bill that we won’t get into the weeds over, here. However, it’s important to know that the target is moving and language in this bill opens up the opportunity to revoke the protections currently put in place for land that is considered a national or historical monument. We want to put an emphasis not on the specific land that could potentially go up for sale but the dangerous precedent this sets for all of our public lands in the future. If you feel strongly about this topic, we encourage you to reach out to your state senators to share your stance. The senate plans to vote on this bill the week of June 23 and President Trump has stated that he wants to sign the bill by July 4.
Names and the Washington D.C. office numbers for the 22 senators of the 11 states included in this public land sell-off are listed below.
Alaska
(R) Lisa Murkowski – (202)-224-6665
(R) Dan Sullivan – (202) 224-3004
Arizona
(D) Mark Kelly – (202) 224-2235
(D) Ruben Gallego – (202) 224-4521
California
(D) Alex Padilla – (202) 228-3863
(D) Adam Schiff – (202) 224-3841
Colorado
(D) Michael Bennet – (202) 224-5852
(D) John Hickenlooper – (202) 224-5941
Idaho
(R) Mike Crapo – (202) 224-6142
(R) Jim Risch – (202) 224-2752
Nevada
(D) Catherine Cortez Masto – (202) 224-3542
(D) Jacky Rosen – (202) 224-6244
New Mexico
(D) Martin Heinrich – (202) 224-5521
(D) Ben Ray Lujàn – (202) 224-6621
Oregon
(D) Ron Wyden – (202) 224-5244
(D) Jeff Merkley – (202) 224-3753
Utah
(R) Mike Lee – (202) 224-5444
(R) John Curtis – (202) 225-7751
Washington
(D) Patty Murray – (202) 224-2621
(D) Maria Cantwell – (202) 224-3441
Wyoming
(R) John Barrasso – 202-224-6441
(R) Cynthia Lummis – 202-224-3424
