BLM lives with legacy of ‘chaining’ By Dan D’Ambrosio, Herald Staff Writer, Durango Herald Online

From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the Bureau of Land Management was pursuing a policy of converting the high desert woodland of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument near Cortez into grass-filled pastures for grazing cows.

They called it “site conversion,” an experiment that was doomed to failure – a failure the bureau is today trying to rectify by restoring the “converted” areas to their former natural state.

Thirty-plus years ago, the bureau used a simple, but effective, technique called “chaining” to transform the dry, red-soiled landscape of the monument from piñon pines, juniper and sagebrush to pastures. Chaining involved two bulldozers and a length of anchor chain, sometimes with large chunks of iron welded onto the enormous links. The dozer operators would stretch the anchor chain between them and drag it across the ground, ripping out everything in their path.

“Often they would turn around and drag the reverse way,” said Leslie Stewart, an ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service who works on the monument. “It’s not pretty at all.”

The chained piñons and junipers were bulldozed into windrows and burned, creating a fire so intense it sterilized the soil, Stewart said. Then the bureau would seed the ground with non-native grasses, mostly crested wheatgrass.

About 9 percent of the 164,000-acre monument was chained, according to Monument Land Use Planner Steve Kandell, amounting to some 15,000 acres.

“Those days in the BLM the name of the game was more production,” Stewart said. “If you had piñons and junipers out there, knock them down and plant grass.”

Stewart said chaining was done on BLM land throughout the West. Thousands of acres of piñon and juniper country were chained in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Oregon and New Mexico, in addition to Colorado.

In the harsh environment of Canyons of the Ancients, the crested wheatgrass and other non-native grasses never established themselves. The pastures never materialized, and instead, today’s monument is left with acres of bare earth populated only by the piñons and juniper that have grown back. The native grasses, forbs and shrubs that would normally provide cover, and prevent erosion, are gone.

“You cannot do that to nature, it will always backfire on you,” said Stewart.

When the native plants were removed from the chained areas, the wildlife went with them.

“There’s almost nothing living out here in the chained areas,” said LouAnn Jacobson, the manager of Canyons of the Ancients.

Jacobson said that without the habitat, and food, provided by native plants, even the rabbits had all but disappeared from the chained areas.