Hole-in-the-Rock Road is a dirt track scratched out of the Utah desert by Mormon settlers more than 140 years ago. The 62-mile drive from the hamlet of Escalante to the western shore of Lake Powell can easily take four hours due to washboard conditions, longer if rainstorms turn the red silt to mud. Mormon families make the trip to pay homage to their forebears, while other tourists brave the drive for the magnificent slot canyons and plateaus. Less obvious from the road is what makes the area a flashpoint. Most of the route has been under federal protection since 1996, when President Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to guard the dinosaur fossils and Native artifacts buried in the ground.
Business interests and Mormon ranching families in surrounding Garfield County didn’t appreciate Washington putting protections on the area. “It was settled by the pioneers, and we put our roots here, and then all of a sudden, this big map is drawn around our communities,” says Leland Pollock, a county commissioner and rancher who favors cowboy hats and wraparound shades. While the local tourism industry is thriving, Pollock yearns to see more livestock grazing, logging and other uses. With the support of state officials, he and Garfield County have long argued that even if the land itself is owned by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a Civil War-era congressional statute gives the county a special right to control Hole-in-the-Rock Road.
That tug-of-war is now playing out in a uniquely Utah fight over whether the road should be smoothed out for travelers. Some public lands advocates see the issue as a proxy battle for the surrounding monument, one with implications that could reach far beyond Lake Powell.
Last summer a federal court sided with Garfield County in its bid for Hole-in-the-Rock Road, granting it and neighboring Kane County the right of way. Garfield County swiftly began making changes to sections of the road, evening out the surface in preparation for chip-sealing and culverts. “We’re getting a little more aggressive on how we maintain,” says Dave Dodds, the county’s public works director. Ever since, BLM has let the county carry on managing the road without objection, essentially relinquishing control of it to Utah officials. To some critics this is a textbook example of President
In a statement the Interior Department denied the Trump administration was working to shift control of federal lands to local or state governments. “While Interior routinely consults with local governments, tribes, and community partners to understand on‑the‑ground conditions, this engagement does not alter federal decision‑making authority,” a spokesperson said in an email. “The BLM’s handling of the Hole in the Rock Road proposal reflects site‑specific considerations within existing regulations, not a broader policy shift.”
Battles over control of public lands are being fought across the country, but Utah is a special case. Judges have spent years adjudicating hundreds of road claims like Garfield County’s across Utah, a state in which federal holdings account for close to two-thirds of the total land. For decades state and local officials have been pushing to unwind federal stewardship throughout Utah, arguing that Washington has failed to prioritize their communities and stifled mining and drilling. Despite overwhelming bipartisan support for protection of public lands among Utah voters, no other state in the union has been as zealous in its quest for control over the federal estate as Utah, especially since it passed a law in 2012 demanding the federal government turn over its landholdings.
Early in Trump’s second term, these efforts in Utah faced two high-profile setbacks. First, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s case that federal control of much of its land was unconstitutional. “We got our ass kicked in court,” Pollock says. A few months later, public outcry forced Utah Senator
Yet over the past year, state and local leaders have found a sympathetic partner, rather than a foe, in DC. “The state is looking at the Trump administration and seeing their interests as aligned,” says John Ruple, a law professor at the University of Utah who served on President
Utah legislators have also proposed that the state co-manage several national parks. In December state officials met privately with the Interior Department to push for rollbacks of Biden-era initiatives, such as a timed-entry reservation system at Arches National Park, a crowd-control measure the Biden administration put in place at several busy national parks across the country. Two months after the meeting, the park suspended the timed-entry program.
Utah officials say Trump’s National Park Service has also supported other ideas for Arches that were previously deemed too environmentally destructive or pricey, such as new bike trails and a shuttle system. “Were finally convincing some other local folks that maybe that’s a direction that is acceptable to everybody,” says Redge Johnson, director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, which reports to Governor Cox. But Johnson says this is business as usual, not some new strategy. “A lot of the messaging that we were doing last year was around having the state have more influence in public lands decisions, and that’s what we’re still doing,” he says. “I have calls with the Forest Service or BLM every single day, talking about different projects and solutions.”
In January, Utah brokered a co-management agreement with the US Forest Service that expands on a deal struck during the first Trump administration and allows state agencies to fund and staff logging, wildfire restoration and recreation projects in national forests for the next 20 years. Alaska, Idaho and Montana have made similar agreements in the past year. In March the Forest Service announced plans to relocate its national headquarters to Utah from Washington, DC, part of the agency’s effort to localize its operations in a “state-based model.” The agency also recently gave 116 private ski resorts, including six in Utah, greater control over the federal forests where they operate ski lifts, runs and lodges.
Although Lee’s amendment to dispose of federal lands didn’t make it into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in some ways the law’s impact on public lands policy—combined with Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce—could be more significant than a selloff would have been, says Leshy, the former Interior solicitor. The law requires BLM to sell oil and gas leases quarterly, in every state where land is available. Previously, it was up to BLM which parcels would be put up for sale to drilling companies; now, it’s required to offer up any land the companies want to drill. “These provisions give the industry, in effect, a veto over other conservation uses,” Leshy says.
As part of its nationwide push to lease as much federal land for oil as possible, BLM sold 57 parcels in Utah at its most recent lease sale, netting $56.4 million. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act also significantly reduced regulatory oversight of new mining projects. A coal mine in Carbon County, Utah, was the first in the US to receive expedited leasing under those new policies.
All of these changes, Leshy says, add up to an across-the-board attack on federal holdings by some members of Congress and the Trump administration. “Their ultimate goal is to privatize a lot of the land,” he says. While he doubts that Utah will succeed in achieving a wholesale transfer of land ownership, he argues that a transfer of influence is well under way.
Outside Utah the Trump administration said in February that it would support Alaska’s demands for control of as much as 2.1 million acres of federal land
One thing the second Trump administration hasn’t done, however, is shrink Grand Staircase-Escalante, as the president did during his first term. In 2017, Trump cut the size of the 1.9 million-acre monument by more than 50%, to under 900,000 acres. Biden restored it to its original size under the Antiquities Act, which presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt have used to unilaterally protect federal land from mining and other development. The state of Utah and Garfield County were among the parties that sued the federal government in response, arguing that the law shouldn’t be used to create large monuments. The Antiquities Act, they said, wasn’t intended to protect millions of acres at a time.
Utah lost the case in federal district court in 2023, but a decision from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on whether to affirm that ruling is due anytime. A win for Utah could embolden Trump to shrink or abolish Grand Staircase-Escalante and other monuments, such as Bears Ears, public lands advocates say. “That’s the fear that most of us in the nonprofit world have been pushing to the backs of our minds,” says Jacqualine Grant, executive director of Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, a nonprofit that provides fundraising and volunteer work for the monument. “When they come for the Antiquities Act, that is definitely a watershed moment and can change the whole game.”
At Hole-in-the-Rock Road, wilderness advocates have railed against Garfield County’s recent improvements, which they view as a step toward state and local government gaining greater control over the surrounding land. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental nonprofit, has sued the county, state and BLM for allegedly failing to “prevent unnecessary and undue degradation” to the land under federal law.
Many among the growing population of more recent arrivals to southern Utah say they can’t understand why some longtimers want to see the state’s monuments and parks altered. Caitlin Clery, a former hiking guide and co-owner of Blue Crow Gear & Gifts, an outdoor outfitter and cafe in the town of Escalante, says Southern Utah’s vast red rock expanses “got its hooks” in her when she first moved there from Virginia in 2006. She says Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument anchors the local economy and deserves to be safeguarded. “This land is amazing,” she says. “Having all of this protected—isn’t that positive for the community?”
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