We have a new national monument out west of town, and sticking our heads in the sand won’t make it disappear.

The U.S. House of Representatives probably can’t make it go away either. What will happen instead, if Congress really does opt not to fund to Bureau of Land Management monuments recently designated by the president, is that those monuments might eventually become so degraded that they’d be worthless to everyone. Whether or not we’re comfortable admitting it, that is our problem.

The monument is in our back yards. It may seem as though the president has yanked it out of our hands, but it’s still physically present. The grazing leases are still held by local ranchers, and the carbon dioxide extraction is still responsible for a significant amount of our county tax base.

Make no mistake: the monument has come to national attention, and that means many people who are interested in the prehistory of the Southwest have taken notice. Visitation will increase, and when it does, it’s going to cost money to control it. Without funding for such a control mechanism, we’ll soon start to see adverse effects.

Ancestral Puebloan ruins are the drawing card for most of our tourism. Mesa Verde is, for all intents and purposes, full to overflowing during the summer months. Traffic is terrifying, tour lines are long, there’s no parking to be had, and ruins are crowded. Now that Canyons of the Ancients is a national monument rather than just an obscure parcel of BLM land, it’s going to attract the overflow. Whether or not we’re ready, people are going to be visiting the monument, and someone needs to protect it.

Like it or not, we do need to protect the ruins within the monument. They are economic resources for us, and allowing them to disappear, stone by stone, potsherd by potsherd, serves no purpose. Yes, it might have been better had they remained unknown, but that’s no longer an option. The visitors are on their way.

If those visitors start chasing cattle or hauling off artifacts, we can call the BLM, and a law-enforcement ranger will be sent out just as soon as one is available. That’s not likely to be soon enough, given that the number of square miles per ranger is greater than anyone, in Washington or in Montezuma and Dolores counties, is comfortable contemplating.

We can call the sheriff’s office as well. Those deputies have a lot of spare time, right? And the county governments have a lot of spare money in their budgets if we need to hire more to handle the increased demands brought about by heightened visitation, right? Hardly. There’s no slack for us to take up. We need help.

It’s only been two years since three fugitives fled into the canyon country west of Cortez and disappeared so completely that hundreds of law-enforcement officers could find no trace of them. That ought to tell us how difficult — and, ergo, how expensive —it’s likely to be to adequately police and manage Canyons of the Ancients.