Now that agreement faces its first court test.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear challenges Wednesday to the settlement from a coalition of national and regional environmental groups, represented by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) and Washington, D.C.-based Earthjustice. Utah and Interior will defend the deal before a three-judge panel in Denver.

The settlement, worked out and signed by then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt and Interior Secretary Gale Norton on April 11, 2003, ended a lawsuit the state had brought against the federal government in 1996 over new wilderness inventories conducted by the Clinton administration. Proclaiming that only Congress had the ability to create wilderness areas, the agreement stripped 2.6 million acres of Bureau of Land Management holdings of interim wilderness status, as well as 3.3 million acres that had similar, but lesser, protections.

In their appeal, the environmental groups argue that the settlement is illegal, violates federal land management practices dating to the Reagan administration, and makes it virtually impossible for Interior to give interim wilderness protection to BLM lands throughout the West.

"The main question here is whether the BLM can protect wilderness-eligible lands, and safeguard Congress' ability to create wilderness areas," Earthjustice attorney Jim Angell said Monday. "By instead pushing oil and gas development in these areas, it makes it difficult to protect them. This settlement has robbed Congress of that discretion by essentially rendering these lands ineligible for wilderness protection."

Far from springing the settlement on the public unawares, Utah Deputy Attorney General Mark Ward argued, the agreement was the culmination of long negotiations between the state and federal government that environmental groups had every opportunity to weigh in on - and didn't.

"We presented the entire lawsuit and negotiated with the parties we needed to negotiate with," he said. "For reasons that only they know, the environmental groups chose not to get involved."

In its original lawsuit, the state argued that the BLM had overstepped its bounds by reviving a 1991 wilderness inventory process that had previously designated 3.2 million acres in Utah as Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs).

Under the new inventory, conducted under former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the BLM declared that at least 2.6 million acres fit the parameters of the 1964 Wilderness Act, while SUWA-organized volunteers inventoried another 3.3 million acres that they contended deserved wilderness designation.

The settlement eliminated the Clinton-era inventories, freezing the state's WSA holdings at 3.2 million acres.