The twisting rock formations of the San Rafael Swell are due south. To the northeast lies the ancient American Indian art gallery that is Nine Mile Canyon. The rugged, desolate Book Cliffs loom to the east, and behind them is the jagged knife-cut through the Tavaputs Plateau that forms Desolation Canyon. World-class wonders, all.
Yet there is more. The region also is home to some of the richest oil and gas deposits in the lower 48 states and thousands of acres have been opened up for exploration and development through the sale of 10-year leases, a process that has accelerated significantly under the Bush administration. The swell is also one the most popular off-highway vehicle (OHV) destinations in the state, luring thousands of riders annually.
Administering virtually all of this territory is the Bureau of Land Management, through its Price field office. Later this year, probably midsummer, the agency will unveil its final version of what is known as the Price Resource Management Plan, essentially a giant set of zoning regulations that will guide federal land-use policy on the district's 2.5 million acres for the next decade and beyond.
Nobody is the least bit happy about it.
The schisms that have erupted over public lands policy in the West during the last 25 years are on full display here, with environmentalists pitted against county, state, OHV and energy interests.
The BLM is caught somewhere in the void between the warring factions.
The stakes are high. The release of the Price plan will mark the first in a series of resource management plans that the bureau is putting together in nine of its 10 Utah field offices, and is part of a larger federal planning process occurring across the Intermountain region. Given the agency's vast holdings in Utah - almost 23 million acres - the BLM's new land-use plans are going to have an incalculable effect on the state.
On that much, everybody can agree.
"It's hard to overstate the importance of these plans," says Heidi McIntosh of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "They are going to affect our experience of Utah's iconic landscapes for at least the next 10 or 15 years. These are the lands that make Utah, Utah."
Carbon County Planning Director Dave Levanger agrees: "The impact will be huge. It's either going to be the best thing that's happened or the worst. It could cut either way."
That's because in some respects, elements of the plan are still up for grabs.
The release of the draft version of the Price Resource Management Plan last year elicited no fewer than 60,000 responses, which officials at the BLM's office in Price have been digesting ever since.
The interested parties: On one side, environmental groups are complaining of a BLM giveaway in gas and oil leases, some of which are located in wilderness study areas approved by Congress in 1991.
Still more are in the wilderness inventory areas established during the Clinton administration and later rescinded under the controversial "No More Wilderness" settlement between the Department of the Interior and Utah in 2003.
On the other side, state and county officials are bristling over what they consider to be a shortage of lands opened up for energy development and excessive restrictions slapped on leases located in what the BLM deems environmentally sensitive areas.
Then there are the OHV organizations, which are decrying the end of wide-open off-road areas. The BLM has closed off thousands of acres in the Price region to OHV use. The rest has been designated for trail use only.
This rampant unhappiness, from one end of the spectrum to the other, is something BLM officials have become accustomed to as the philosophical gulf over public lands policy in the West has grown wider and wider. But nowhere is it more intense than Utah.
"The level of contention is what really sets us apart," says Don Banks, the BLM's state chief of external affairs. "What you're talking about are the greatest public lands on the planet - hands-down - and the passions over what the future of those lands should be. You're talking about places like Desolation Canyon and some of the most significant oil and gas resources in the Rocky Mountains. So it is hard. You know you're walking into a buzz saw, but that's the way it is."
A difficult balance: Banks and other BLM officials contend the agency's primary task in formulating the new management plans is to strike a balance - maximizing the region's energy development potential while protecting its most sensitive lands; accommodating recreationalists of all stripes, while paying heed to the economic needs of the area's residents, many of whom depend on surrounding BLM lands to sustain themselves.
In that respect, the Price plan is a template for what will occur on all of the state's BLM lands in the coming years. The U.S. Forest Service, which oversees just over 8 million acres in Utah, is in the midst of a similar process.
Balance, however, is not the word that comes to mind when environmentalists look at the draft version of the Price Resource Management Plan. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance essentially calls it a giveaway to the oil and gas industry, a policy fully in line with the Bush administration's 2001 mandate to make energy development the BLM's "No. 1 priority" when considering future federal land-use decisions.
"There are certain areas where oil and gas development has a long history, and the BLM has traditionally been accommodating to the industry," says McIntosh, the wilderness alliance's conservation director. "What we're seeing now that's so alarming is that oil and gas development is now occurring where it hasn't happened before. There used to be a better balance between protecting the most ecologically fragile areas and the development of oil and gas where it's appropriate. Under the Bush administration, it's like no place is sacred. We're extremely disappointed."
The wilderness alliance estimates the BLM has issued 4,000 to 5,000 new drilling permits in Utah under Bush, of which McIntosh says her organization has appealed "four or five." Most disconcerting, McIntosh says, are permits issued in the wilderness study areas and wilderness inventory areas, places such as Desolation Canyon, the Tavaputs Plateau and perhaps most controversially, Nine Mile Canyon. Once developed, the argument goes, these areas will be wilderness no more.
But BLM officials contend that their hands are largely tied in many of these instances, that some oil and gas leases existed in these areas before receiving wilderness-type protections.
"In many cases you're talking about leases issued in the '50s, '60s and '70s. These are valid, existing rights we're talking about," says Floyd Johnson, assistant field manager of the BLM's Price office. "Once a lease is issued, the BLM has a certain amount of obligation to work with these valid, existing rights. They've been out there a long time."
Orders from D.C.? Agency officials also say they must heed the new, energy-friendly parameters handed down from Washington and consider the relatively recent discovery of vast coal-bed methane deposits - which they call the largest in North America - in the western part of the district. Coal-bed methane is a key component in the production of natural gas.
Johnson says what the BLM will do is to apply stipulations and restrictions to such leases to minimize the footprints of energy development. A "no surface occupancy" designation, for instance, would require an energy company to use a technique called directional drilling - drilling at an angle from outside the area in question. Further restrictions, and even closures, could be applied to lands the agency deems to be an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. The BLM also is utilizing the "wild and scenic rivers" designation to protect key stretches of the Green and San Rafael rivers.
"That won't impact current leases, but we still have tools we can use to reduce impacts," notes Johnson.
And that's a problem for county and state officials. Far from an oil and gas giveaway, they argue, the BLM is undermining the Bush edict by imposing far too many development restrictions.
The Bush executive order states that "in all cases, the BLM must look at the least restrictive condition that will achieve the protection you're trying to bring about, and it requires them to look at all productive zones in the planning area," according to Assistant Attorney General Mark Ward.
"The blanket approach the BLM has taken in these instances is overly broad. They have to at least assess these areas, and ask, 'What is it we're trying to protect?' "
Areas of critical environmental concern, Ward maintains, "is really code" for wilderness inventory areas. And the BLM's use of the "wild and scenic rivers" tag, he argues, usurps the state's water rights.
Fight over OHV access: The agency also is under assault from OHV groups, which are stewing about the loss of access on closed lands that were previously open, and trail designations on the rest - an approach best exemplified by the designated route system the BLM has established for the San Rafael Swell. Under the 2003 plan, OHV enthusiasts have access to 670 miles of trails, but large chunks of the swell formerly open to them are now off-limits.Å
"These lands need to be managed for multiple use, not like a bunch of little national parks, which is how the BLM is approaching this," says Mike Swensen, executive director of the Utah Shared Access Alliance.
"We think this is akin to the BLM putting its head in the sand and hoping this problem goes away. But the more areas they close and the more they limit us to trails, the higher the impact is going to be on these smaller areas. It's going to be a disaster."
BLM officials beg to differ. Noting that there are now more than 160,000 OHVs registered in the state, external affairs chief Banks says "a large part of this is about playing catch-up. We now have a benchmark, a [trail] network we can refine as we go along. That's a big advancement over what we've had."
Tally up this litany of complaints from various stakeholders, and it all points to one conclusion: The real battle over the Price plan - and the ones to follow - may just be starting.
jbaird@sltrib.com
