A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the state can intervene in a lawsuit filed by San Juan County against the federal government over ownership of an overgrown road that runs several miles into Canyonlands National Park. Judge Bruce Jenkins last week ruled that the state could become a party in a suit in which the county is claiming the road under RS 2477, a Civil War-era federal statute that grants broad rights-of-way across unreserved federal lands. The trail in question, known as Salt Creek Road, is an unpaved, ungraded trail that crosses Salt Creek, the third-largest source of water in the park. The road leads to Angel Arch, one of the park's most popular attractions. A federal judge ordered Salt Creek closed to traffic in 1998 in response to a lawsuit brought by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which claimed damage caused by vehicles. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the court to reexamine the record, but the National Park Service closed the road last June because of damage. The day the agency made the decision final, San Juan County filed suit. The state claims in its complaint that the county maintained and improved the Salt Creek Road for decades before Canyonlands National Park was established. The state also claims the road was used from the 1920s to the mid-1960s to drive cattle and move trail supplies to cowboy camps, in addition to serving as a jeep road for visitors and uranium prospectors into the 1950s. But studies done by the Park Service showed jeep use was contaminating the stream with engine fluids and trampling vegetation. - The Salt Lake Tribune