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The Utah House on Thursday endorsed pursuing the possible creation a new state park on federal land around Hole in the Rock, a famous cleft in a cliff over the Colorado River that was traversed amid danger by early Mormon pioneers.
The House voted 68-4 to pass HB63, and sent it to the Senate for consideration.
Its sponsor, Rep. Keven Stratton, R-Orem, has said Mormon heritage groups would like to expand trekking operations here, but these efforts are thwarted by federal land agencies' 12-person limits on group sizes and a lack of camping and staging facilities.
Leasing federal land to create a new state park could solve those problems, he said, and his bill would allow state officials to pursue the possibility with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service.
"This is an opportunity for us to work with our federal counterparts in a synergistic way to look at an historically significant part of our state and enhance and improve it," Stratton told the House.
Hole in the Rock is important in Utah history because of a perilous six-month journey in 1879-80, which pioneers thought would only take six weeks. Pioneers cut a trail down a steep crevice at what they would call Hole in the Rock, and the name has stuck.
The pioneer company — which included 250 pioneers from Parowan, many of them children, as well as 1,000 head of livestock and 83 wagons — created an historic trail that led from Escalante across what are now the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments to Bluff.