America's Red Rock Wilderness Act would protect more than 9.5 million acres of citizen-inventoried, wilderness-quality BLM lands in Utah. Local interests, with the eager aid of Utah's elected officials, have stymied wilderness legislation time and again. They seem still to believe, against all contrary evidence, that resource extraction is the best economic use of our public lands, and that their highest recreational purpose is as an arena for the depredations of dirt bikes and other off-road vehicles.
>> Red Rock Wilderness Act introduced in 110th Congress!
One area of this bill, the greater Zion-Mojave region, is currently threatened by proposed legislation that fails to protect 70 percent of deserving wild lands in the region and authorizes the sale of up to 40 square miles of public lands in southwestern Utah to fund sprawl-inducing development projects. You can help stop this misguided proposal now.
>> More on the proposed Zion-Mojave Wilderness
America's Red Rock Wilderness Act
The wild places of southern Utah hold many secrets. There are majestic slot canyons of ochre, utterly silent until they begin to sigh with the echo of your breathing. There are cool springs, rimmed with the prints of small animals, whose waters reflect violet cliffs and the leaves of yellowed cottonwoods. There are hidden half-caverns of vermillion and rose where a man or woman can stand alone and imagine that no one has set foot there for hundreds of years. There are spaces so vast that sky and stone mingle and only wind and light seem able to traverse them.
Still Unpaved, Unmined, Undeveloped
The Bureau of Land Management oversees nearly 23 million acres of public land in Utah. These lands are concentrated in western and southeastern Utah. Approximately four-fifths of the 54-million-acre state has been farmed, mined, paved, developed, or appropriated by the military. The remaining wild lands contain remote twisting canyons, mesas topped with groves of juniper and pinyon pine, rivers, and stark mountain peaks.
The BLM not only oversees; it overlooks. And it did just that on a wholesale scale when it inventoried Utah's public domain for wilderness suitability in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To some, the effort was simply characteristically slapdash. To others it bore the insidious marks of political expediency. Whatever the reason, the BLM excluded more wild country than it included. Across the vastness of western and southern Utah, the agency identified only 3.2 million acres of land with wilderness potential and saw fit to recommend a scant 1.9 million of those for wilderness protection.
Citizens' Proposal
Utah conservationists knew better and set out to prove it. Between 1986 and 1998, hundreds of wilderness advocates and volunteers from across the country fanned out across Utah BLM lands. They covered thousands of square miles, took 50,000 photos, and amassed a mountain of documentation of the public lands. The product of that citizen inventory, unprecedented in its range and careful attention to detail, was a revised "Citizens' Proposal for Utah Wilderness." That proposal identifies, maps, and defends more than 9 million acres of wild land in Utah and demands its protection as wilderness.
Today, the citizens' proposal has become America's Red Rock Wilderness Act. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) has introduced the measure in the U.S. House of Representatives in recent Congresses, and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) has introduced a Senate version. The late Rep. Wayne Owens (D-UT) first introduced the bill in 1988, with Rep. Hinchey taking the lead in the U.S. House after Rep. Owens left Congress in 1992.
Consistent with the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Act would prohibit construction of new roads and structures, and the use of motorized vehicles in wilderness areas except in emergency situations. Among the storied places that America's Red Rock Wilderness Act would protect are:
- The Kaiparowits Plateau. This is an immense, mysterious, unforgiving land shaped by eons of nature's most powerful elements. Much of it is now within the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, though Utah politicians have sought to remove it to allow coal mining. Serpentine canyons, panoramic vistas, and wondrous silence have, so far, characterized this landscape. Pronghorn and desert bighorn sheep feed in sage-dotted valleys; thousand-year-old pinyon and juniper trees punctuate dazzling rock formations; and deer, bears, cougars, coyotes, foxes, badgers, and bobcats range.
- The Book Cliffs. North of Green River, Utah, a 2,000-foot high escarpment marks the southern perimeter of this million-acre wilderness of exceptional geographic and biological diversity. Abundant wildlife and rugged beauty have made the Book Cliffs wilderness one of Utah's most popular backcountry destinations, beloved of hunters and hikers alike. Recent oil and gas development proposals in the Book Cliffs Region threaten the remaining roadless areas that are becoming increasingly crucial for wildlife, as critical summer and winter habitat already has fallen to oil and gas development.
The Bureau of Land Management is now reviewing a proposal to drill over 400 gas wells and to bulldoze hundreds of miles of roads throughout an 80,000-acre project area that includes two proposed wilderness areas-White River and Lower Bitter Creek. If this exploration continues, roads, pipelines, drilling pads, production wells, and pumping stations will scar one of the wildest places in Utah.
- The San Rafael Swell. This area contains spectacular slot canyons, colorful rock formations, and abundant wildlife. The area supports Utah's largest population of bighorn sheep, a wide variety of migratory songbirds, pronghorns, mule deer, peregrine falcons, golden eagles, and the endangered San Rafael cactus. In addition, the Swell's vulnerable and unique watercourses are critical for survival of this diversity of native wildlife.
Over the years, the eerie beauty of the Swell has prompted a number of proposals for its protection in a variety of ways. Most recently, in late 2002, the Governor of Utah abandoned his effort to find consensus on a national monument proposal after citizens in Emery County, Utah, voted the idea down.
The Swell, as well as other parts of Utah's roadless country, continues to suffer damage from off-road vehicle (ORV) use. In early 2003 -- and after a decade of delay -- the BLM finally released a travel management plan for the Swell. It announced the closure of 468 miles of routes dirt-bikers and other off-road vehicle (ORV) users have created through use over the years. But it leaves open 677 miles of ORV trails. Added to the 1300 miles of state, county and federal roads, this means that nearly 2000 miles of road remain open through the Swell's million acres. As a practical matter, the number may, in fact, get bigger quickly: ORV operators refuse to remain on approved routes; the BLM refuses to do much of anything about it.
Wilderness designation would protect the Swell from the steady encroachment of dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles, and other ORVs.
For More Information
"There are better ways to measure and use, and none rely on what we think we know. Here is one: Find a hidden canyon twisting in the sun, walk into its coils and climb until it narrows to a slit. Rest against the rock. Put out a hand and push against the fabric of stone until it hurts. Feel it then: feel the weight of stone time." - T.H. Watkins, from Stone Time, 1994
