Today President Obama signed the "Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009" adding two-million acres to our designated wilderness system, including almost all of the backcountry of Rocky Mountain National Park. Creating the Rocky Mountain Wilderness has been a long road that started in 1974 with a recommendation for wilderness designation from the Nixon administration. In spite of numerous attempts over the past 35 years, only a little less than 3000 acres of the park has been officially designated as wilderness until now. This is a shocking fact when hiking in the park as most of the backcountry seems just like the kind of place the authors of the 1964 Wilderness Act intended to preserve.

The bill also designates more than 250,000 acres of Zion National Park as wilderness and protects the Virgin River and many of its tributaries under the Scenic and Wild designation. Of course the river has always been scenic and wild, as those lucky enough to have soaked our feet in the Zion Narrows have always known, but now the legislation is finally catching up.

The bill is enormous and contains huge victories for wilderness and public land advocates throughout the country: Owyhee canyons in Idaho, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan, Mt. Hood in Oregon, the Monongahela in West Virginia just to name a few. Of course no legislative victory would be complete without some complaints from the peanut gallery. Although it passed the house with bipartisan support (285-140 ), those who opposed the bill are referring to it as a land grab: a strange moniker considering this land was public land before the bill was signed and is still public land now. On the other side, Ken Salazar's remarks border on poetic.