The United States Army out of Fort Carson in Colorado Springs has applied for a right-of-way (ROW) grant from the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Royal Gorge Field Office (RGFO) in Cañon City to use approximately 35,000 acres of public land and establish approximately 45 helicopter landing zones (HLZs), in south central Park, southwest Teller and north Fremont counties for its High Altitude Mountain Environment Training (HAMET) program.
HAMET is designed to train helicopter pilots in flying and landing in high altitude mountainous terrain for overseas operations.
The first phase of the application process has been completed. Fort Carson has submitted a Plan of Development to the BLM. The BLM then opened up the plan for public comment, also known as the scoping period, which is now closed. The BLM will use the public comments to focus on issues in preparing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) document, the next step.
The BLM is now in the planning stages of preparing the environmental document to evaluate the potential environmental effects of HAMET on BLM lands. It can be either an environmental assessment (EA) or a more rigorous environmental impact statement (EIS) according to the BLM Instruction Memorandum (IM) regarding military use on and above public lands.
Anyone else remember South Park in the 1970's? They would have training with helicopters all the time during the summer. Low flying helicopters everywhere, camps setup on National Forest land.
I loved one day, a Huey landed on our property and a Lt. ran out with a map and asked me where he was.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
