When President Joe Biden picked up the phone to congratulate certain Democrats on their victories in Tuesday’s midterm elections, he was wearing a baseball cap with the name of America’s newest protected landscape.
Last month, Biden traveled to central Colorado to create Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument, which encompasses Camp Hale, a World War II-era military training site, and the nearby Tenmile Range. The designation, his first national monument as president, brought more than 50,000 federal acres under a new set of protections that bar new mining, drilling and other development.
That Biden donned a Camp Hale hat to make congratulatory phone calls “shows that he (and the political team) understood that public lands are a winning issue,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Colorado-based conservation group Center for Western Priorities.
Asked about Tuesday’s biggest victories for public lands in the U.S., Weiss said, “Only slightly tongue-in-cheek:…
