protect certain areas, especially the series of small diversions along the main gully.

Given reasonable opportunity, native western wheatgrass flourishes in the swales of Cornfield Wash, alkali sacaton on the heavy soil flats, and gallets grass on the rolling hillsides. Rainfall and other climatic conditions are too erratic for successful seeding with crested wheatgrass. Where runoff is retarded, sweet clover and brome grass respond in years of favorable rainfall.

Cornfield Wash is an upper drainage of the Rio Puerco Watershed which is one of the major tributaries of the Rio Grande. The Rio Puerco drainage is reputed to be the source of over half of the sediment that obstructs the main channel of the Rio Grande, but it is reputed also to produce only one-sixth of the water flowing into the Rio Grande above Elephant Butte Reservoir. This relationship of high sediment yield to low water yield has not always been so. Grasslands once occupied a much higher portion of the Rio Puerco Watershed. Studies indicate that the present day earth canyons of the Rio Puerco have been cut within the last 100 years. Extensive irrigation farming carried on in the valley in 1890 has now been practically abandoned. Six villages have ceased to exist. Valleys once farmed and grazed are gone. Drainages are gullied to the divides and much of the range land has now eroded away. The soil that has been washed out of the valley fills and scalped from the top soil of the surrounding range areas created havoc locally and continued to do so down

stream.

There has been an extreme deficiency of water in storage in the Elephant Butte Reservoir in most years since 1941. This short supply has caused the downstream irrigationists to view with alarm any activity in the upper watershed that would reduce runoff. Accurate information regarding the effect of improved range management and the various erosion control measures on the net yield of water is imperative. The Geological Survey study referred to is the beginning of the development of such information.

The long term and the short term benefits of the ' conservation program both have a place and need to be understood in their perspective. For example, in 1956, a year of scant rainfall, the pitted areas in the Cornfield Wash yielded very little runoff. Flow from the unpitted tribuaries was about normal. In 1957, a year of more or less average precipitation, runoff from the pitted areas was reduced approximately half. A very heavy storm occurred in July, 1951. The Geological Survey estimated that this one storm would have produced a peak flow of between 6,000 and 8,000 cubic feet per second had there been no detention dams to contain the flood. Such a flow doubtless would have destroyed, in large measure, the remaining Indian farm land, would have seriously damaged the range, and would have increased sediment deposition downstream.

1

To date, it may be observed with certainty that the conservation program in Cornfield Wash has produced enthusiasm to face up to the problems that seem at times to be overwhelmingly complex and titanic. The forces of erosion are dynamic and continuous. To cope with these forces, it takes understanding, enthusiasm and cooperation on the part of the land users as well as on the part of those in the Bureau. The Cornfield Wash area will continue to serve as a successful proving ground for conservation work. End

Within the United States, 21 of the 48 States border on the seacoast, and contain more than 55 percent of the population and 65 percent of the Nation's industries.

INTENSIFIED MANAGEMENT (Continued from page 7)

tion purposes, for summer homes away from the urban areas, for hunting and fishing, for parks and public picnic grounds. Many of the facilities at present recreation areas are vastly overcrowded; in other areas lands are being used for recreation purposes where no facilities are now available.

In 1956 the National Parks played host to nearly 55 million visitors, up to 10 percent over the previous year. It has been estimated that in 1958 the National Parks will be handling three times as many visitors as in 1946. In recognition of America's park needs, the National Park Service has inaugurated a program called MISSION 66, a 10-year program to put the parks in shape to take care of the 80 million people who are expected to visit them in 1966. The Forest Service has a similar program on National Forest lands called OPERATION OUTDOORS.

In this effort, you will be interested to know that the Bureau of Land Management is cooperating with the National Park Service, State and local Governments, and private organizations to inventory needs and develop programs for recreation land use on areas of the vacant public domain and the O&C lands of western Oregon.

Other demands for land come from industries seeking locations for new plants and production facilities, sometimes far away from present towns and cities. New communities will grow up around such developments. And, as our urban centers of population expand, other people move further into the hinterlands and make their permanent homes there.

From all of these big numbers that I have been using, and from the driving forces which they represent, it is obvious that there will be increasingly important competing demands for land use, and for the natural resources which the land holds.

I should emphasize at this point that all of the things I have been talking about apply to the Nation as a whole. They will apply to both the private and the public sectors of the national economy. They will affect privately owned resources, and those that are managed publicly.

The job of planning and programming for the Nation's land and resource needs will be broadly shared by the Bureau of Land Management, other Federal agencies, State and local Governments, organizations, the industrial and business community, and individual private citizens.

As the custodian of the remaining 400 million acres of unreserved public domain lands in the United States and Alaska, the Bureau of Land Management will continue to play an increasingly important role in the development and intensification of public land and resource manage

ment.

End

MEASURING DISTANCES (Continued from page 9)

does require a lot of effort to move it over long distances. It may also be possible to devise a power supply that does not use wet batteries.

Electronic distance measuring equipment will probably have its most practical application in those areas of the unsurveyed public lands where the full benefits of its spectacular capabilities for measuring long distances can be fully realized. Where distances to be surveyed are shorter, the conventional measuring methods may still be more practical.

In Alaska, where there are needs to greatly accelerate the public land survey program to facilitate land management and development programs, and in some areas of the western States, however, electronic distance measuring systems may offer important new means of speeding up the survey program.

The adoption of this equipment is part of the Bureau's continuing program to keep abreast of scientific and technical changes in all of its responsibilities for the conservation and management of our public lands and resources.

End

ACTIVE ACRES

(Continued from page 11)

them. This statement of interest in the lease must be signed by all of the interested parties. This specific part of the regulations is a new requirement, strengthening the administration of the acreage limitations by providing for the full disclosure of parties having an interest in an oil and gas lease, and thereby preventing people from exceeding the acreage limitation by accumulating partial interest in leases which were not issued in their own names.

Another section of the regulations provides that no lease will be issued and no transfer or operating agreement will be approved by the Department until it has been shown that the people or companies are entitled to hold the acreage or obtain the operating rights involved. The Department will also have the specific authority to take any necessary action regarding excess acreage holdings even though every possible combination of circumstances leading to excess acreage may not have been specifically covered in the language of the regulations.

O & C Counties Receive Over $10.9 Million

The 18 counties of western Oregon entitled to share in receipts from timber sold during the last

fiscal year have received checks totaling more than $10.9 million from the Bureau of Land Management.

Each of the counties received a check for more money than it received a year ago. The checks. represent net payments to the counties of their share of gross timber sale receipts which amounted to over $21.9 million in fiscal year 1958.

The counties are entitled to 75 percent of gross receipts, but under an agreement with the counties, about $5.5 million has been retained by the Federal Government as the counties' contribution toward the costs of access road construction on the O&C lands.

The checks ranged in amount from about $39,512 for Lincoln County to $2,755, 952 for Douglas County.

The amount distributed to the counties is about $1.2 million more than was paid out a year ago, representing an increased timber harvest of from 624.5 million board feet in 1957 to a new high of more than 760.7 million board feet in 1958.

About $2.8 million of the total sent to the counties came from timber sold by the Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture, on the half-million acres of O&C lands which it administers.

End

The geographic center of the State of California is located in Madera County, about 35 miles northeast of Madera; Idaho's geographic center is in Custer County, about 24 miles south west of Challis.