Biden creates new national monument

President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced creation of the country’s newest national monument, protecting tens of thousands of acres in the mountains of Colorado from mining and development and delivering an election-year gift to Michael Bennet, one of the state’s two Democratic senators.

Standing on the grounds of Camp Hale, a World War II military installation that was used to train the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, Biden said he was designating 53,804 acres of rugged landscape as the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument.

“When you think about the national beauty of Colorado and the history of our nation, you find it here,” the president said moments before signing the proclamation.

Bennet has tried to make public land preservation central to his image in outdoor-obsessed Colorado. In March, Biden signed a measure by Bennet that established Camp Amache, a World War II detention center for Japanese Americans in southeastern Colorado, as a National Park Service historic site.

But Bennet is in a tougher than expected reelection race against Joe O’Dea, a first-time candidate and the head of a Denver construction company who has won the support of national Republicans.

Standing next to Biden, Bennet thanked the president for the decision to use his executive authority to designate the new monument.

This is the first time Biden has created a national monument through the 1906 Antiquities Act, which Theodore Roosevelt first used to establish the Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Since then, 18 presidents of both parties have used it to designate monuments, including the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty and Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients.