Here's a nice piece of green propaganda, portraying the claims of local governments to established dirt roads as a threat to wilderness. The truth is that these lands shouldn't be called wilderness in the first place if regular use of motor vehicles in them is a disqualifier. What is really happening is environmental groups trying to ban motor vehicles from areas they've been using for the past 100 years by redefining "road" to eliminate dirt, or native surface roads. There are lots of those in the San Rafael Swell just to the East of me. I used to drive them when I had a 4X4. I was annoyed when I went out to visit a spot I had been to just a few months earlier and found that the BLM had dug a trench across the road I had used, because it had been listed as a Wilderness Study Area.


The local government and ranchers have tried to compromise, but the environmentalists' response has been to demand ever more public land for wilderness. I've read the claims by Heidi McIntosh repeated in this article before. Every time she mentions one case where an old road was washed out as though all these roads are ancient wagon trails. They aren't. Some should probably be abandoned, but most are used regularly, if seasonally.

The real kicker on all of this is that the local counties are expected to do search and rescue for these vast stretches when someone goes out and gets lost or injured. They aren't allowed to use motorized vehicles except helicopters, which we don't have. Yet we're going to have ever more hikers, river runners and backpackers going there. There is no way to police the use of these areas, either. There is one BLM ranger who is supposed to cover all of Southeastern Utah. Meanwhile the vast majority of the owners of these lands, will never see them, because they aren't into hiking and backpacking.