examines the shifting political landscape and its effect on Utah's Bear Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante—an ongoing fight that an area business owner refers to as "living in limbo."
Will Trump's reelection mean déjà vu for Utah's national monuments? Those who live near them are bracing for another battle.
Wade Barney wants one gift for his 75th birthday this April: An order from new President Donald Trump reducing the national monument in his backyard—again.
For three generations, Barney's family has lived in Escalante, a small desert town in central Utah with fewer than 1,000 full-time residents, reports. His father and grandfather herded sheep on the sagebrush-covered rangelands that are today part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
"They loved it more than you do and more than I do," Barney said, referring to that land.
"It meant something to them. It was special," he continued. "They moved from cities to come out here and start with nothing."
His family spent decades grazing livestock, maintaining water holes for their animals and wildlife and thinning trees to prevent wildfires, Barney said. The former Escalante mayor considers today's environmentalists and the federal government as nearly one and the same, and believes the two groups are working together to lock up the land that he and his family have cared for and relied on.
Barney, pictured below, argues that shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante—or getting rid of it completely—would bolster local influence on how the land is managed. Doing so, he says, would result in a healthier and more balanced use of the land, both for people traveling within the monument and for commercial development like coal mining and grazing.
Communities Struggle Amid Monument Battles
That sentiment permeates the small towns that surround Grand Staircase-Escalante, which was made a 1.9 million-acre national monument by President Bill Clinton in 1996. When President Trump reduced the monument's acreage by half in 2017, Barney and many of his neighbors celebrated. And they rued the day that President Joe Biden reversed Trump's action in 2021.
Conservation groups in Utah and across the country have sounded the alarm that Trump will put more public lands at risk of development by reversing protections during his second term—like once again slashing Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments in southern Utah.
Lands currently in either monument, if removed, will return to the management of the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service—remaining under federal control.
People who live near the monuments say the back-and-forth in recent years has exhausted them, stalled economic development, and paralyzed those who make their living off the land.
"We're going on 28 years and they still can't come up with a plan" that's permanent, said Klancy Ott, a Garfield County deputy sheriff whose family has grazed cattle on what is now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for 150 years.
"It's just been back and forth and back and forth, political battle after political battle," he said. "And will Donald Trump fix it? No. Can he? I hope!"
Ott said the number of cattle he's allowed to graze has dwindled as the BLM has changed its plans or calculations.
"I don't like jumping back and forth. Do we have a monument? Cool, great. Do we not? Cool, whatever. I don't care how it goes," he continued. "But turning people's lives into a political play is not right."
Both Sides Want Respect for Locals. But Who Is a Local?
Shrinking Utah's national monuments, some locals argue, allows communities to work more closely with BLM employees in local field offices—which they say is a better approach to managing the land than sweeping, monument-level directives from Washington, D.C.
But to Angelo Baca, pictured above, a Diné and Hopi filmmaker who co-chairs the Bears Ears National Monument Advisory Committee, returning land to "local" control means something different.
"What we're doing here isn't just about a Western framework of national monuments and public lands," he said, "it's also a reconciliation of how to acknowledge, improve, and have true participation from Indigenous peoples about their lands. That's really what it represents. It's a shift in power, and that's what everyone's fighting against."
Bears Ears, located east of Grand Staircase-Escalante, is home to an estimated 100,000 cultural and archaeological sites, , including cliff dwellings, shrines, rock art, and granaries.
President Barack Obama created the monument in 2016 at the request of five Native American tribes—the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe—to safeguard the land they consider sacred and its wealth of cultural sites and artifacts.
Trump reduced Bears Ears' acreage by 85% just a year later, at the same time that he minimized Grand Staircase-Escalante. In 2021, Biden restored the monument to its original boundaries plus 11,000 new acres.
Baca has taken members of the advisory committee on field trips to Bears Ears. The group is a mix of local users, from ranchers to recreationists, who make recommendations to federal agencies. Some members who opposed the monument protections hadn't even been out on the land before, he said.
But seeing the dramatic landscape and learning about its cultural significance to tribes, Baca added, changed their minds.
"The land can teach us so much more than any human being or any political document," he said. "So, why are you making big decisions about a place that you've never even been in? You have no idea what you're talking about, with all due respect."
Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock shares that frustration in watching people from outside his community make decisions about Grand Staircase-Escalante. But to him, the plain, sage-covered flats under his grazing permits were never worth a monument designation in the first place.
"I'll take you down there on a horse, and I'll say, 'Let's go look at this thing. Do you really think this ought to be a monument?' The majority of that monument is just BLM range land that should never be in the discussion," he said.
Like Barney's grandfather, Pollock's grandfather also ran sheep on what is today Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Pollock married into a ranching family in 1984 and still grazes cattle in the area. "We're good stewards of the land. Let me make that clear," he said. "Until 1996, we had done a good job."
Under the Trump administration, Pollock said, the BLM listened to locals by developing a plan for the monument that closely aligned with the county's vision: more opportunities for recreation, range improvements, and wildlife development projects.
Biden's BLM, he said, did the opposite, ignoring locals' recommendations. The agency developed a plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante that limits grazing, target shooting, and gathering firewood, a resource Pollock said many of his poorer constituents depend on.
Clinton and Biden "locked it up both times," he continued, "to where we can't make the land healthy."
Biden's BLM announced its final plan for the monument, which a statement from the agency said involved collaboration between tribes, state and local governments, and the public. "It reflects the culmination of more than two years of shared engagement and extensive consultation," the agency said. A spokesperson for the BLM added that the plan "does not close any livestock grazing allotments currently under permit."
Britt Hornsby, pictured below, serves on the town council for Bluff, a small town just outside of Bears Ears, and supports the monument. Everyone has had chances to make their case before the federal government, he said. The anti-monument movement's objection, in his view, is that it didn't get exactly what its supporters wanted.
"They're painting compromise as being a massive victim and being colonized by outsiders," Hornsby said.
And, he asks, "what do they mean by local? What makes me a local? I've been here 17 years. What's the threshold? It's the othering of people that has been the problem with all of this."
National Politics Have Pit Community Members Against One Another
Hornsby, who worked for the BLM in San Juan County from 2011 to 2017, remembers a piece of advice his former superiors gave him: "Don't wear any government uniform going into the grocery store, because you'll be harassed. And if you get a flat tire in Blanding in a government rig, you're not getting it fixed."
That vitriol toward federal employees, he said, has intensified along with the national political divide and coalesced around the monuments.
"The powers above, out of our reach, are playing and presenting a zero-sum game," Hornsby said. "As long as they're doing that, there's not going to be any room for compromise."
Pollock said he could support a much smaller monument or national park to preserve the most unique, fragile features of Grand Staircase-Escalante. But there's also a cultural fight underway, he said, that goes beyond the monuments to the character of the place his family has called home for generations.
"The monument folks have tried to change the culture," he said. "You've got an LDS [Latter-day Saint] community that is God-fearing, very conservative, very honest, hardworking folks, family folks … but the folks that have moved in don't like that culture."
Ott doesn't view the divide as quite so severe. He said he's had some success explaining his point of view to neighbors he describes as "very, very, very environmental," one of whom asked him why he wants to herd cows at all.
"Because I was born into it and I love it," Ott remembered telling her. "I have so many memories. I can get on a horse and disappear and nobody knows me. And I enjoy watching a mother cow lick her calf off and pick it up, and I ride for four miles behind her and she coaxes this tiny calf along."
Choking up, he added, "my cows are, like, a part of me."
Hornsby and other Bluff officials said they have worked to foster positive relationships with their neighbors on the adjacent Navajo reservation. But he said it's been difficult for federal agencies, Bluff, and the nearby tribe to work together on Bears Ears, which he attributes to the painful history between the American government and Native Americans.
And he worries that those relationships would be strained should Trump move to reduce the monument once again.
"It just keeps cutting that trust in half," Hornsby said. "You can't do anything about the past, but you can start the healing process by working with each other, and this does nothing but continue to take the scab off."
A 'State of Limbo' in Bluff
Bluff relies on resort taxes from tourism to fund public services like its volunteer-based emergency response. Uncertainty over the fate of Bears Ears, said Mayor Ann Leppanen, has made it nearly impossible for local businesses in the town of 250 people to plan for the future.
"When you go to try and destroy this monument that businesses are building their business plans around, and all of our dollars come from tourism, without looking at the economic impact," Leppanen said, "it's just dead wrong to do that."
The small town's officials are also struggling to make long-term decisions for their community, which was incorporated in 2018, because of the monument's back-and-forth. One such decision is investing in the Bluff Airport.
The small airport services air tours and access to the desert backcountry—and lies within the restored boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. The town of Bluff leases the land for the airport from the BLM, and it's nearly time for the town to renew that lease. That would be worth it if the monument stays in place, the Bluff leaders said, but may not be wise if Trump slashes Bears Ears again.
Tourists have been as confused as Bluff locals, said Jennifer Davila, pictured below, who owns a boutique inn in the town called La Posada Pintada. Bears Ears doesn't have a visitor center, nor much signage indicating the monument's boundaries. She attributes that to the treatment of Bears Ears like a political pawn.
"I feel like we've just been living in a state of limbo," Davila said. "We got [Bears Ears] approved, and then it got flipped all of a sudden, and then, oh, here it is again, and now, just as we're starting to get the infrastructure in place, we're at threat of losing it again."
What's Next?
As his second inauguration day approaches, Trump hasn't revealed how he will treat Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante this time around.
But Sen. Mike Lee touched on his own hopes last week in a statement: "I look forward to working with President-elect Trump to ensure that national monuments are appropriately confined to the smallest area necessary to protect genuine antiquities, as the law requires."
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox also . But ending the debate, he said, may .
Utah's Republican state leaders have worked to undermine Biden's restoration of the two monuments since 2021 and targeting the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that authorizes the president to designate national monuments.
"The problem with the Antiquities Act is that one person can sign a proclamation and create a national monument," Rep. Celeste Maloy . "It's a way of scoring cheap political points without any input from Congress or local officials."
State officials have generally , similar to how national parks are established, arguing the lawmaking process is more collaborative.
The BLM just on Jan. 6 and for Jan. 9. Despite that, Trump can change the boundaries of any national monument through the Antiquities Act, just as he did in 2017. The president-elect could also order the Utah monuments' management plans to be redone or altered.
Utah's congressional delegation promised "to fight to return our land to local control and against future federal overreach" in response to the final plan approval.
Despite the draining back-and-forth of the last decade, people who live near the two monuments expect their battle to shape the region's land and future will continue.
"It's okay to continue the fight, even if little Escalante is caught in the middle," said AJ Martel, an accountant who has lived there for six years and opposes the monument. "The right [side] needs to prevail, and sometimes that requires a good effort to fight for what you believe is good. That may be true for the conservationist as well as for the rancher."
For Baca, the ebbing and flowing political controversy is just background noise.
Collaborating with the federal government, for him, has always been about making sure the sacred Bears Ears landscape—including the wildlife, plants, cultural sites, and artifacts within it—is protected, continuing the work of generations before him.
"For me," he said, "I'm from here. These are my people and my lands. If it's going to take my whole life to do that, I'm willing to do that."
was produced by and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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