Political Quotes

“As my colleague from Montana said--let me back up just a moment. The folks in Raton are also very excited about what is going on at Fisher's Peak and looking at different possibilities for their community just over the divide from Trinidad. One of the places, as my colleague from Montana described them, is taking public lands that literally are held in trust for all of us, but some of them you just can't get to anymore, because of lands changing hands over the years, private land acquisitions and county road closures at times. Sometimes you can find yourself in these positions where something as large as 10,000 acres or 15,000 acres of public land can find itself cut off from any legal access to the public. In New Mexico, we actually had the country's only designated wilderness area where, simply, there was no legal public access. There was not a trail, not a road. There was no way to get there. In recent years, we were able to work with the Secretaries of the Interior, and using the Land and Water Conservation Fund, we were able to open up and expand that. Today people are able to hike, camp, and hunt. It has a little water in it, but I don't know anybody who has actually fished there. But it is a labyrinth of canyons and rim rock country similar to what most people would associate with Utah.…”