Near the end of a long dirt road outside the small city of Casper, Wyoming, Carolyn Griffith’s tan A-frame house sits in front of a towering mountainous ridge.

“This is the foothills of Casper Mountain,” said Griffith.

As chickadees sang in her front yard, the 65-year-old said the wide-open area is pretty tranquil, but that was all turned upside down on one February afternoon last year.

“I noticed a backhoe going onto the state land,” Griffith recalled.

Right now, that land is open for recreation, but it’s in a state trust. Griffith and her neighbors learned there was a gravel pit approved there a couple of years ago.

“So we were all pretty shocked at that,” she said.

She's worried that gravel mining could impact the fragile aquifer she relies on for drinking. Others are worried about losing their place to birdwatch or walk their dogs — things that don’t exactly make the state money.

“State trust land is not public land. It's trust land,” said Jason Crowder, who used to run the Office of State Lands and Investments, which manages the land.

Crowder explained that trust land has to be used largely to fund K-12 education, as well as some other institutions.

“Office of State Lands and investments is not the BLM. It's not the Forest Service,” he said. “We have different missions.”

Federal lands are managed for multiple uses, but on many state lands in Wyoming and beyond, recreation comes second. Some states allow day use like picnicking or fishing and sometimes camping, but overnight stays are off the table in Wyoming.

“We're here to optimize revenue,” Crowder emphasized.

In parts of the West, some conservatives think states should become the new owners of federal lands. Some Wyoming lawmakers want the state to take over all 30 million acres of federal public land there. They’re frustrated with federal management of mineral leases or ATV restrictions on roads and think states could do a better job. 

State lawmaker Bill Landen (R-Casper) said some parcels would be better managed locally.

“It just feels like to me there's an opportunity at the national level right now,” Landen said in a legislative meeting recently.

But if federal lands are turned over to states, there’s no guarantee that land would stay public. Wyoming has sold about 20% of its state land in the past two centuries.

Plus, states might also not have the capacity to take on more land. The Wyoming state trust agency has five field staff for 3.4 million surface acres, according to Crowder, and the state parks department’s budget has shrunk. The director has said it has fewer resources than it did 15 years ago,

That’s why environmentalists say land management should be left as it is.

“We understand there are issues with how federal agencies are managed, but our federal agencies have more capacity to do public outreach,” said Josh Metten, the Wyoming field manager at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a hunting and angling group.  

State lawmakers actually commissioned a study on this in 2015. They wanted to inherit federal lands but learned Wyoming couldn't afford to manage the land.

“There is no clear way to take federal public land and just transition it into a state public land,” Metten concluded.

In the foothills of Casper Mountain, Griffith gestured to her floor-to-ceiling window at the open landscape.

“We knew there were state lands,” she said. “We also knew there was a fragile water supply and certainly didn't think that digging a pit through that would be a good choice for the land.”

After a year of pushback, the gravel mine project ended up largely hitting the brakes, but Griffith knows, with state management, there could be another threat down that long dirt road.