Army Looks to Increase Intensity of Training Exercises at Pinon Canyon

Explosions, drones, and full-brigade size exercises with armored vehicles are all a part of the Army’s proposed Enhanced Readiness plan for its Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site in southeastern Colorado. The goal is to get troops trained on new gear. It’s a controversial plan that some say opens the door to expansion, a notion that’s long been a thorn in the side of many nearby residents. Nearly 100 people packed a small meeting hall at the training site for the only scheduled public forum. They came from as far away as Boulder and as close as the adjacent tiny community of Tyrone to hear about the proposal and its projected environmental impacts. Technologies and tactics are constantly evolving, according to Dan Benford, Director of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security at Fort Carson. As such, Benford added, it’s important for soldiers to be able to train on equipment they’d use while deployed. Nearly 100 people packed a small meeting hall at the training site for the only scheduled public forum. They came from as far away as Boulder and as close as the adjacent tiny community of Tyrone to hear about the proposal and its projected environmental impacts. Many are concerned through, that allowing the higher intensity activity at the site would open the door to eventual expansion. It’s a possibility that Garrison Commander Colonel Joel Hamilton downplayed in his opening remarks. “For the record,” said Colonel Hamilton, “we are not about expansion of Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site.” It’s also written into the DEIS that the proposal doesn’t require expansion. That’s a point that Jim Herrell equates to having a coyote keep watch over a chicken house. Herrell said at the meeting that continued expansion of the infrastructure at Pinon Canyon would lead to a Congressional authorization within seven years or less to acquire more land. “And don’t you think there won’t be,” said Herrell. “Then there will be a Congressman, probably from Texas, that will tack on an appropriations amendment to some crap to buy more land. And everyone in this room in uniform will be gone. And everyone in this room with a cowboy hat and boots that are pointed will be here, just a little older.”...more

Colorado ranchers’ Pinon Canyon victory earns magazine cover story

“In 2005, the entire agricultural community in Southeast Colorado faced losing their ranches to an aggressive land grab by the U.S. Army. By combining biological evidence, cultural heritage, intense document research, the political process, and when necessary, legal action, these ranchers smartly, legally, and collectively saved their land.” Thus begins, in big type over a two-page southeastern Colorado landscape, an eight-page feature in the October/November issue of American Cowboy written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Bob Welch. Reaching subscribers last week and newsstands now, Welch goes back to 1983 to tell of what’s become known among area ranching families as The Taking, when the Army created the quarter-million-acre Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS) by using eminent domain to take the land from families unwilling to sell. Welch then jumps to 2005 when a map leaked to the La Junta Tribune-Democrat revealed an almost-unimaginably huge new land grab by the Army, which had secretly developed an elaborate plan to expand PCMS to seven million acres—roughly ten percent of Colorado’s land, bound by Interstate 25 to the west, New Mexico and Oklahoma to the south, and the Arkansas River to the north. More than 17,000 people would be removed from their vacated land. “This time, though, the Army lost the element of surprise,” Welch writes. “The ranchers and their allies would fight. They formed the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition (PCEOC) and two offshoots, Grasslands Trust and Not One More Acre!, and began drawing up a battle plan.” Welch proceeds to tell the story through interviews with many of the opposition leaders, all of them longtime residents of southeastern Colorado. None had experience as political organizers. Most were ranchers, and most of their families had been on the same land for generations.