Records are made to be broken, though.

The next quarterly lease auction slated for Sept. 8 easily outpaces the June sale, with 362,665 acres spread across 223 parcels. Among the leases up for purchase, all or portions of 21 of the parcels - 19,338 acres in all - contain wilderness characteristics, according to the Bureau of Land Management, inspiring howls from conservationists both inside and outside of Utah.

"The Bush administration is once again exploiting wilderness-quality public lands for private gain," said Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-NY., lead sponsor of America's Redrock Wilderness Act, a bill aimed at designating 9.1 million acres of Utah BLM land as wilderness. "The BLM should not be sacrificing the nation's natural heritage for short-term profit when it has acknowledged that some of these lands have wilderness characteristics."

The Outdoor Industry Association, National Outdoor Leadership School and Trout Unlimited all filed protests of different aspects of the upcoming lease sale.

The BLM did defer sales on 30 parcels of wilderness-quality land, including areas near Fisher Towers, Desolation Canyon, Jack Canyon, Labyrinth Canyon and White River. At the same time, many of the leases being offered in Utah are in areas seldom explored in the past, including parts of Juab, Millard, Sanpete and Sevier counties.

"The underlying, driving force is clearly the economics of oil and gas, with oil [prices] hitting record highs and the gas demand outstripping our ability to produce," said Kent Hoffman, who directs the BLM's mineral programs in Utah.

Hoffman noted that the record amount of acreage involved in the auction is due in large part to the Forest Service playing catch-up with a backlog of Forest Service land nominated by oil and gas industry entities for exploration.

"On this particular sale, the Forest Service gave us over 100,000 acres," Hoffman said. "On prior sales, they've been probably 25 percent of that or less. Even less than that. Sometimes nothing."

Plans for auctioning leases on Forest Service land near Strawberry Reservoir raised a red flag for members of Trout Unlimited, a group dedicated to preserving and restoring fish habitat. In a protest letter to the BLM, Paul Dremann, the vice president for conservation of Utah's Trout Unlimited chapter, outlined the millions of dollars spent through the years in restoring the Strawberry Reservoir fishery and expressed concern that oil and gas exploration nearby "has a high potential of severely impacting" the fishery.

"We've been working for so darn many years on fishery restoration there that we kind of feel like we kind of have ownership in helping that restoration," Dremann said Monday. "So this has been kind of discouraging."

Also of particular concern to conservationists are available leases along the Green River and along the southern parts of eastern Utah's Book Cliffs. While BLM officials note that available tracts along the Green River have "no surface occupancy" stipulations - meaning there could be no roads or drill pads within a half-mile of the river - people like John Weisheit, co-founder of the Colorado River Plateau River Guides organization for outfitter employees, say that's not good enough.

"You can still hear it," Weisheit said, describing similar "no surface occupancy" projects, noting that on trips down Montezuma Creek, the sound of nearby drilling projects is easily heard in the middle of the night. "And if there's any lights at all, you can still see them."

Weisheit is worried that opening up areas along Utah's most scenic rivers to drilling will only provide minimal oil or gas, while adversely affecting the livelihoods of guides and outfitters forever.

"What's the point of doing a river trip if you have to hear and smell and see all this oil development?" Weisheit said. "Our point is, is nothing sacred? Do we have to drill every inch?"

The BLM's Hoffman notes that of the 18 million acres of Utah land available for oil and gas exploration, only four million are currently spoken for - a far cry from a one-time high of 16 million acres under lease. With the current drive for domestic energy production, he said, the industry will no doubt keep driving the acreage under consideration for drilling higher and higher.

"The industry is clearly in the mode of trying to increase their lease space so that they have opportunities to explore," Hoffman said. "That is the underlying, driving force for all of this stuff."

nailen@sltrib.com