Plans recently announced by the Bush administration to sell oil- and gas-drilling leases on parcels near Utah's national parks could place drilling operations within a 45-minute hike from the state's most famous red-rock icon: Delicate Arch.

An examination of the parcels, superimposing low-resolution government graphics onto Google Earth maps, shows that in one case drilling parcels bordering Arches National Park are just 1.3 miles from the arch.

''If you're standing at Delicate Arch, like thousands of people do every year, and you're looking through the arch, you could see drill pads on the hillside behind it. That's how ridiculous this proposed lease sale is," said Franklin Seal, a spokesman for the environmental group Wildland CPR, which carried out the parcel examination with Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The planned Dec. 19 auction of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches and Canyonlands national parks as well as Dinosaur National Monument has brought criticism by environmentalists and the National Park Service.

''We find it shocking and disturbing," said Cordell Roy, the chief Park Service administrator in Utah. ''They added 51,000 acres of tracts near Arches, Dinosaur and Canyonlands without telling us about it. That's 40 tracts within 4 miles of these parks."

Federal Bureau of Land Management director for Utah Selma Sierra indicated the move is not unusual. ''There are already many parcels leased around the parks. It's not like they've never been leased," she said. ''I don't see it as something we are doing to undermine the Park Service."

Roy and conservation groups dispute that, saying never before has the bureau bunched drilling parcels on the fence lines of national parks.

''This is the fire sale, the Bush administration's last great gift to the oil and gas industry," said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the SUWA.

''The tracts of land offered here, next to Arches National Park or above Desolation Canyon, these are the crown jewels of America's lands that the BLM is offering to the highest bidder," he said.

In all, the BLM is moving to open 359,000 more acres in Utah to drilling.

Other Utah leases that are certain to draw objections from conservation groups include high cliffs along whitewater sections of Desolation Canyon, which is little changed since explorer John Wesley Powell remarked in 1896 on ''a region of wildest desolation" while boating down the Green River to the Grand Canyon.

Others extend to plateaus populated by big game atop Nine Mile Canyon, site of thousands of ancient rock art panels, Moab's famous Slick Rock Trail and a campground popular with thousands of mountain bikers.

In addition, some Moab-area residents worry about the BLM's plan to allow drilling near homes just outside town.

Sierra said the Park Service was consulted on the broad management plans that made the sale of parcels next to national parks permissible, even if it was not given notice on which specific leases were being offered. She apologized for that omission but said notice wasn't legally required.

She said national parks want to keep oil and gas wells five to 10 miles away ''but that policy doesn't exist."

Roy said the standard for an eyesore visible from a national park turns on what a ''casual" observer might see.

The drilling sale is under review by the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama. John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama's transition team, said Nov. 9 that Obama would try to use presidential power to halt oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah. It is unclear, however, whether Obama would be able to undo results of the Dec. 19 auction.

TRIBUNE STAFF contributed to this report.