Josh Jackson | Longreads | June 12, 2025 | 5,262 words (19 minutes)
“There’s Gold in the Hills” is an adapted excerpt from the book The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands by Josh Jackson, published by Heyday and on sale June 24, 2025.
The BLM—short for the Bureau of Land Management—was established in 1946, when the Department of the Interior merged the General Land Office with the Grazing Service. Today, the BLM is one of four federal agencies that manage public land across the United States, and it manages an astonishing 245 million acres across the western states and Alaska. I was dumbfounded by this number. Two hundred and forty-five million acres? How on earth had I never heard of these lands?
Even the idea of “public lands” wasn’t a concept I fully understood. But as I learned more about them, I came to see public lands as something miraculous. When you consider our national zeal for owning private property, it is astounding we have set aside 618 million acres of federal land for the public. These are areas of land and water that are owned collectively by the citizens and managed by the federal government. The concept is worth reiterating: These lands are our common ground, a gift of seismic proportions that belongs to all of us. No matter your color, creed, or class, and even if you’ve never signed your name to a deed, you are a landowner. We are all landowners. Coming to terms with this endowment was a revelation.
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Of course, there’s a deeper story behind how these lands became part of the federal domain, and it likely won’t surprise you to learn that it’s an undeniably ugly one. It didn’t take long for me to discover that these lands were systemically stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes. Through invasions, plagues, violence, coercion, bribery, war, and lopsided deals with the United States government, Indigenous groups and their ways of life were nearly obliterated. Behind every layer of history I peeled back was a heartbreaking story of loss.
The second distinction that sets BLM lands apart lies in how these leftover lands were perceived and treated. Once they were deemed unsuitable and/or unprofitable for homesteaders, developers, and other federal land agencies, their fate seemed inconsequential. As a result of this perceived inferiority, vast areas of those lands were then severely degraded through both overgrazing and unchecked extraction of coal, gas, oil, and various minerals. Our BLM lands, while managed by a federal agency, were not always protected by it.
BLM lands continue to face threats on all sides. A reconciliation bill currently in Congress proposes firing up to 20 percent of BLM staff and cutting $532 million from the agency’s budget by 2026—devastating blows to a workforce already stretched thin. Meanwhile, efforts to sell off our shared public lands are gaining ground. Some 540,000 acres across Nevada and Utah are on the chopping block, at risk of being handed over to the highest bidder.
Learning about such land-use imbalances and the fragility of these supposedly protected areas was a sobering wake-up call for me, and it intensified my desire to experience these lands firsthand. But despite my growing knowledge, I still struggled to find certain details about BLM land within California, including how curious visitors could access them and what we might find there. The lack of personal narratives made these lands feel distant and disconnected, as though they existed only in the dry facts of government websites. Stories have a way of breathing life into places, helping us connect on a deeper level, but in my BLM research, such accounts were either absent or merely footnotes in major narratives about the West. It was no wonder I hadn’t heard of these lands before.
If these so-called leftover lands had a story to tell, I wanted to play a small part in telling it. So, with camera in hand and notepad in pocket, I hit the road.
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