Utah Bulldozes Land in Revolt Against U.S. Rules

Road building has a long and storied history in this small community in southern Utah, named for a Spanish missionary who tried--but failed--to blaze a route from Santa Fe to the California coast in 1776.

A century later the Mormon church dispatched 70 pioneer families from here in an epic, six-month quest to establish a settlement across the Colorado River that included 45 harrowing days blasting a wagon trail down a 2,000-foot cliff at a place they named Hole in the Rock.

Last month, the road crews from Escalante were busy again, this time as part of a broad revolt against Washington and the Clinton administration’s plans to limit development and expand wilderness protection on public lands across southern Utah.

Two months after President Clinton enraged many local residents by unilaterally designating 1.7 million acres of federal real estate a national monument--and blocking development of a huge coal mine--much of Utah is in a state of semi-rebellion.

Officials here are vigorously asserting their claims to old rights-of-way across federal land, often by the use of heavy construction equipment. They are trying to block Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s new wilderness initiative and pursuing litigation to reverse Clinton’s creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

The local weapon of choice is the road grader, which moves large chunks of earth with a snowplow-like blade. The Garfield County road crews labored not far from Hole in the Rock Road, in an area that has been protected for two decades by the federal Bureau of Land Management as a “wilderness study” area.

Vehicles have long been banned from this stretch of scenic federal land, but the county laborers used a road grader to scrape flat nearly a mile of what is known locally as “two track,” an old and rugged back-country trail formed only by the passage of four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Louise Liston, the Garfield County Commission chairman, says the road-grading in a wilderness study area was “a mistake.” But others were somehow making the same mistake. About the same time, road crews in two other southern Utah counties were also hurriedly grading hundreds of miles of remote Jeep trails across federal land.

It was, some of them readily concede, a determined effort to ensure that large areas are unsuitable for designation as possible wilderness by Babbitt, who launched a land inventory of Utah’s red rock canyon country last summer.

The opponents are making some progress. Recently a federal judge in Salt Lake City slapped an injunction on the Interior Department, bringing the wilderness inventory to an abrupt halt. Further, federal lawsuits against the three counties that have now curbed their road-grading frenzy ultimately may open the door to “some bad law” on land use, a senior Clinton administration official conceded.

The recent flare-ups suggest that it will be difficult for federal land managers and residents of southern Utah to find common ground as they begin a three-year planning process to determine how the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument should be managed. Already, cash-strapped Garfield County has pointedly rejected the government’s offer of $100,000 to help with the management plan. Nor does the recent unpleasantness offer much hope for a final resolution of Utah’s festering wilderness battle, particularly in the wake of Congress’s failure to resolve the issue last year.

It has been 20 years since Congress directed the BLM to survey its 270 million acres in the West and recommend which parcels should be included in the federal wilderness system. But even as the national wilderness system has grown to 100 million acres, Utah remains deeply divided over what to do with several million acres of federal land that encompass some of the richest geology and high desert scenery to be found anywhere in America.

To many southern Utah officials and residents, wilderness is a threat to a traditional way of life based on cattle ranching, mining, logging and unfettered access to government land. To environmentalists, as well as a newer class of residents who often make their living from tourism, such hostility is a relic of the past.

Last year, the Utah congressional delegation failed to win approval of legislation setting aside about 2 million acres of BLM’s 22 million acres in the state as wilderness, a designation that bestows permanent protection and bars most commercial uses, development and motorized transport. Millions of other acres of land not designated as wilderness would have been released for development under that legislation.

Environmentalists have long argued that the BLM seriously underestimated the acreage suitable for wilderness in Utah. Together with the Clinton administration, they have sought protection for more than 5 million acres.

Early this year, Babbitt seized an unlikely opportunity to expand BLM’s 3.2 million acres of potential wilderness when Rep. James V. Hansen (R-Utah) complained during a congressional hearing that there was not sufficient land of wilderness quality to support the administration’s position. Hansen, in a tactical blunder, invited Babbitt “to reinventory it,” and the Interior secretary promptly accepted the challenge.

“The secretary of Interior uses a conversation with a congressman to reinventory an area that has already been inventoried for 10 years,” said Kane County Commissioner Joe C. Judd. “Babbitt has gotten to the point where he thinks the Earth is his god.”

Judd and other southern Utah officials struck back quickly. Under the BLM’s wilderness-inventory guidelines, roads running through an area are enough to disqualify it from wilderness, but only if they are mechanically built and maintained. Roads that are simply the result of vehicular traffic do not render an area unsuitable for wilderness. “What we said was, if they are having trouble judging if it’s a road, we are going to brighten those roads up,” Judd said. “We went out and reestablished our roads. We smoothed them out. Then they can’t say it wasn’t graded or it wasn’t maintained. It was to help them with their judgment.”